How the hell is the NSA breaking SSL?

In his essay 'A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering' Matthew Green, a cryptographer and research professor at Johns Hopkins University, asks "how the hell is NSA breaking SSL?" If this is news to you, following the Edward Snowden revelations in The Guardian, then you obviously haven't read the New York Times piece about the NSA 'Bullrun' briefing sheet which quite plainly states that the agency has been circumventing exactly the type of encryption protection of everyday Internet communications that we take for granted, such as SSL (Secure Sockets Layer).