Americans are right to have abandoned the Internet-anonymity ship, according to a new report which tips the National Security Agency's ability to break Web encryptions meant to protect users' privacy.

New documents released by NSA leaker Edward Snowden and published in partnership with nonprofit news organization ProPublica, the New York Times, and The Guardian reveal that the NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ, have cracked the codes that protect global commerce and banking systems, trade secrets, medical records, emails, Web searches, online chats, and phone calls.

The agencies' tactics date back to 2000, when the NSA invested billions in custom computers built to break codes—all part of an effort to ramp up public eavesdropping in the Digital Age. A number of U.S. and foreign technology companies were part of the scheme, ProPublica said, though none were identified in the leaked documents.

For its part, the NSA downplayed privacy concerns and claimed its years of code-cracking efforts are a legitimate part of its mission to safeguard national security.

"It should hardly be surprising that our intelligence agencies seek ways to counteract our adversaries' use of encryption," the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said in a statement. "Throughout history, nations have used encryption to protect their secrets, and today terrorists, cybercriminals, human traffickers, and others also use code to hide their activities. Our intelligence community would not be doing its job if we did not try to counter that."

But recent disclosures by former NSA contractor Snowden (below) have called those practices into question. In June, The Washington Post reported that the U.S. government is tapping directly into the servers of nine U.S. Internet firms, including Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Skype, and Apple, under the umbrella of a program called PRISM.

Without admitting to using the methods described in such reports, federal authorities have consistently asserted that their efforts are legitimate and not deserving of the media furor surrounding each new batch of revelations published in recent months.

"While the specifics of how our intelligence agencies carry out this cryptanalytic mission have been kept secret, the fact that NSA's mission includes deciphering enciphered communications is not a secret, and is not news," the ODNI said. "Indeed, NSA's public website states that its mission includes leading 'the U.S. Government in cryptology…in order to gain a decisive advantage for the Nation and our allies.'"

The ProPublica, Guardian, and Times stories published Thursday, however, "reveal specific and classified details about how we conduct the critical intelligence activity," the agency said.

According to ProPublica, more than 50,000 documents were shared with the non-profit along with the two newspapers, mostly focused on GCHQ, but with thousands of pages either from or about the NSA.

Intelligence officials requested that the articles not be published and the news sites did remove some sensitive data, but went ahead and published the stories because "it shows that the expectations of millions of Internet users regarding the privacy of their electronic communications are mistaken," ProPublica said in an editor's note.

That explanation plus a few redactions weren't enough to sooth the ODNI.

"Anything that yesterday's disclosures add to the ongoing public debate is outweighed by the road map they give to our adversaries about the specific techniques we are using to try to intercept their communications in our attempts to keep America and our allies safe and to provide our leaders with the information they need to make difficult and critical national security decisions," the agency's statement said.

Snowden's leaked documents, as well as a full explanation of the NSA's "secret campaign to crack [and] undermine Internet security" can be found online at ProPublica.

For more, see The NSA and the End of Privacy.