&gt; The NSA wants to be able to easly read all traffic from everybody so they can figure out who the &#x27;bad&#x27; people are, inside and outside of the country.<p>I actually don&#x27;t think the NSA cares about reading traffic from everyone; they know who their targets are, and no amount of software can replace good old-fashioned investigation.<p>&gt; The NSA is not actually primarly protecting the people, its protecting itself first, the government second and third, maybe the people a little bit.<p>The NSA is a government agency tasked with the mission of intelligence gathering outside the US. Intelligence is far more valuable when you know something and others don&#x27;t. Any widely-applicable exploit of a crypto algorithm would also make it easier for other countries to break encryption. The NSA has a huge advantage over those other countries&#x27; spy agencies in the form of resources; so to protect their exclusive ability to break encryption with brute force, they need to make sure the algorithms are sufficiently strong.<p>It&#x27;s about maintaining an exclusive capability that other countries don&#x27;t have. A spy could leak information about how to exploit a crypto backdoor to other countries and render your advantage useless. A spy can leak your strategy (spend an epic fuck-ton of money on datacenters for brute forcing encryption) all they want, but that won&#x27;t help your enemies break arbitrary crypto.