According to an intelligence budget document leaked by Edward Snowden, N.S.A. spends more than $250 million a year to influence tech companies to insert back doors into encryption products.

New York Times discussed an encryption standard that was engineered by NSA with a fatal weakness, and which was recommended as a secure protocol by both NIST and ISO in 2006. That protocol was SHA.

Cryptographers have long suspected that the agency planted vulnerabilities in a standard adopted in 2006 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and later by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which has 163 countries as members.

Classified N.S.A. memos appear to confirm that the fatal weakness*, discovered by two Microsoft cryptographers in 2007, was* engineered by the agency*. The N.S.A. wrote the standard and aggressively pushed it on the international group, privately calling the effort “a challenge in finesse.”*

“Eventually, N.S.A. became the sole editor*,” the memo says.*

Does it make any sense?