In documents provided to the Washington Post by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency is racing to build a computer that could 'break nearly every kind of encryption used to protect banking, medical, business and government records around the world.'
The effort to build 'a cryptologically useful quantum computer' - a machine exponentially faster than classical computers - is part of a $79.7 million research program titled 'Penetrating Hard Targets.'
