NSA

Revelations made by NSA leaker Edward Snowden would have given former Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio a fighting chance to beat insider-trading charges that garnered him a 70-month jail term, says Nacchio, who was released this month after serving four and a half years.

When NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander addressed Black Hat earlier this year, he painted a rosy picture of how well the agency controls access to its phone record database, but he never brought up cases when those controls broke down, unauthorized access was made and data was shared among analysts who shouldn't have seen it. 

Reports suggest the NSA is capable of cracking many of the encryption protocols being used today. Here are tools that minimize that risk.

Although the agency has been in hot water because of who it has been spying on, snooping isn't the agency's only job. The NSA also plays an important role in helping the rest of the government secure its computers from outside attackers.