What could we do about it if 1. were true? Not much. For 2. I think it's safe to assume that they know a few tricks that we don't. Probably enough to hasten br

What could we do about it if 1. were true? Not much. For 2. I think it's safe to assume that they know a few tricks that we don't. Probably enough to hasten breaking encryption, but probably not enough to make encryption useless. For 3. Yes, isn't that obvious? Here's a recent discovery regarding FPGA's, maybe not the NSA, but it didn't get there by accident. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sps32/sec_news.html http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sps32/sec_news.html I suspect that some bugs like this one in Intel networking chips may not be bugs http://blog.krisk.org/2013/02/packets-of-death.html http://blog.krisk.org/2013/02/packets-of-death.html If it is technically feasible, then it is almost certainly being done.