Looking back at the Snowden revelations – A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering
▻https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2019/09/24/looking-back-at-the-snowden-revelations
One of the most important lessons we learned from the Snowden leaks was that the NSA very much prioritizes its surveillance mission, to the point where it is willing to actively insert vulnerabilities into encryption products and standards used on U.S. networks. And this kind of thing wasn’t just an occasional crime of opportunity — the agency spent $250 million per year on a program called the SIGINT Enabling Project. Its goal was, basically, to bypass our commercial encryption at any cost.
This kind of sabotage is, needless to say, something that not even the most paranoid security researchers would have predicted from our own intelligence agencies. Agencies that, ostensibly have a mission to protect U.S. networks.