This wouldn't surprise me at all -- the NSA has a large budget, and (now that strong cryptography is widely available) wants as wide an array of tools as possible. Buying access to data, stealing it by exploiting security flaws in software, snooping on it via EM emissions, obtaining encryption keys via side channel attacks, and (with the assistance of the CIA and/or FBI) capturing passphrases using keyloggers are all techniques which the NSA is believed to have used in the past.
So is there a post somewhere with actual evidence? Or is it equally likely that the aliens in the employ of the US DoE's Paranormal Task Force have bought and backdoored Verisign?
10 bucks says this conspiracy theory finds its roots in some company owned by In-Q-Tel, the gasp CIA's gasp VC fund.
The fun part about talking about the NSA is that you don't have to exercise critical thinking; you just propose counterfactuals, citing the NSA's "huge budget". "Of course they could be monitoring Hushmail". "Of course they could be monitoring the Internet." "Of course they could be monitoring all our phones." "Of course they could have chips implanted in our brains". I mean, after all, they're the NSA!
It doesn't sound unreasonable, but they aren't providing any data. If there's really all this money changing hands they should be able to find when the companies were sold and to what entity, and possibly even try to figure out where else the purchasing entity is involved, like seeing what other properties they own and what business they conduct.
