The app for independent voices
Yes! The NSA did indeed sell compromised systems for decades.
WaPo thought that was really cool, "The intelligence coup of the century!"
It also would seem likely that in the relatively near future quantum computers are going to be able to break even so called "strong" encryption.
And as I have said many times, AI's are going to be used to spy on us in ways that we cannot even imagine.
Frank Church saw it all coming too. Okay, not all of it, but he saw the big picture.
"Even among US Senators, virtually nothing was known at the time about the National Security Agency. The Beltway joke was that "NSA" stood for "no such agency". Upon completing his investigation, Church was so shocked to learn what he had discovered - the massive and awesome spying capabilities constructed by the US government with no transparency or accountability - that he issued the following warning, as reported by the New York Times, using language strikingly stark for such a mainstream US politician when speaking about his own government:
"'That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide.'
"He added that if a dictator ever took over, the NSA 'could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.'"
The conditional part of Church's warning - "that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people" - is precisely what is happening, one might even say: is what has already happened. That seems well worth considering." - Glenn Greenwald