The U.S. and U.K. governments are also devoting a large
amount of resources to cryptography-related programs that will enable them to break
encrypted communications collected on the Internet. Documents leaked by former
NSA contractor Edward Snowden indicate that both the NSA and its U.K. counterpart,
the GCHQ, may be able to break encryption schemes used by SSL/TLS, VPNs, and on
4G smartphones (Vaughan-Nichols, 2013).