Many here are now owed Beer and Travel Money with an apology

[DanTex]

75. I've seen that slide and I'm not clear what the implications are.

It's unsettling, but it certainly doesn't mean that they can read all VPN traffic. Particularly since different VPNs use different encryption protocols, it is doubtful that this is true. For example, I haven't seen any suggestion that the open source OpenVPN is compromised, nor have I read any security experts who think it is.

Also, VPN also refers to more than one thing (sort of). First, a VPN is a virtual private network, the way you described in your other OP -- basically a way to be securely connected to your office network while you are at home or at Starbucks.

But what this slide is talking about by "VPN startups" is most likely VPN services (for example) that let users surf the internet anonymously via proxy servers, using a VPN protocol for the connection to the proxy server. This is something the NSA would be particularly interested in, since people using VPN services in this way are trying to avoid detection.

Notice, though, that the slide doesn't say that the NSA can actually read encrypted packets. Instead, it says that if they have the "data" they can decrypt and discover the users. To me, this doesn't mean they are hacking the actual VPN encryption, but instead that they have (or want) some way to figure out who is using these VPN services. I have no idea what they have in mind exactly, but it could be any number of things, not necessarily involving breaking crypto. It could even mean hacking into the servers at the VPN startups and stealing their logs.

For a recent example of a non-codebreaking method of tracking people through supposedly secure connections, the guy who used TOR to mail bomb threats to Harvard got caught not because the police were able to crack TOR, but because they simply got hold of the logs of everyone who was connected from the Harvard network to TOR at the time the threat was sent.