James Ball, Julian Borger and Glenn Greenwald – NSA and GCHQ unlock encryption used to protect emails, banking and medical records: “US and British intelligence agencies have successfully cracked much of the online encryption relied upon by hundreds of millions of people to protect the privacy of their personal data, online transactions and emails, according to top-secret documents revealed by former contractor Edward Snowden.  The files show that the National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have broadly compromised the guarantees thatinternet companies have given consumers to reassure them that their communications, online banking and medical records would be indecipherable to criminals or governments. The agencies, the documents reveal, have adopted a battery of methods in their systematic and ongoing assault on what they see as one of the biggest threats to their ability to access huge swathes of internet traffic – “the use of ubiquitous encryption across the internet”.