I have't read about this yet, but wanted to bring it up for discussion. Think about this, if the NSA can hack pretty much anybody on the planet if they so choose, it goes a long way to explain the way all the markets have been manipulated for the past few years. NSA goes into hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds, COMEX, NYSE, etc., hacks their trading algos and information, reverse engineers a contra algo to manipulate the first algo, and bingo, they can make cows fly! Their biggest worry is probably coordinating the contra algos to not step too much on the fund algos, which maybe is why the flash crashes happen as they do.