Surprised not to see comments in here about the use of international standards to fix markets in the favor of one country's exports (versus another's) and for the associated backdooring of technology and standards.<p>"The agencies, the documents reveal, have adopted a battery of methods in their systematic and ongoing assault on what they see as one of the biggest threats to their ability to access huge swathes of internet traffic – "the use of ubiquitous encryption across the internet".<p>Those methods include covert measures to ensure NSA control over setting of international encryption standards..." - <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encryption-codes-security" rel="nofollow">http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encryp...</a><p>"Simultaneously, the N.S.A. has been deliberately weakening the international encryption standards adopted by developers. One goal in the agency’s 2013 budget request was to “influence policies, standards and specifications for commercial public key technologies,” the most common encryption method." - <a href="http://www.propublica.org/article/the-nsas-secret-campaign-to-crack-undermine-internet-encryption" rel="nofollow">http://www.propublica.org/article/the-nsas-secret-campaign-t...</a><p>The Snowden leaks themselves have the GCHQ congratulating the NSA in frank terms for controlling and exporting international standards, noting how it has driven great gains for the US.<p>Given that Germany was one of the victims (including the companies mentioned in the article) of standards-based cryptographic subvertion - the only suprise in this article was that it took Germany this long to announce their own initiative.<p>One can also surmise this as an indicator that the NSA is back to the usual and that IoT standards are being actively influenced for sabotage.