Gore, Freeh, and the NSA tried to recapture government control over encryption with legislation that would require encryption technology vendors to compromise security at the government's request. They did this in two ways. One was the Clipper Chip, an encryption device on an integrated circuit with a trapdoor that allowed law enforcement to get access to data being encrypted. The Clipper Chip used an encryption algorithm of the NSA's invention called Skipjack, which was supposedly as strong as RSA's. President Clinton signed the Clipper Chip legislation, but public outcry prompted his administration to take it back.
Strong encryption is now part of the daily life of everyone who does business online.
It's conceivable that the NSA's arsenal of computing power is capable of breaking RSA encryption, but no one knows for sure. It captures cryptography's movement from private to public, exposes the right amount of details, and only occasionally veers into gratuitous sensationalism. For those interested in the subject in general, as opposed to the gory details of implementation, this is the best work to date.