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by sadfnjksdf 4445 days ago
As soon as anyone knows, they are going to use that info however they see fit. Probably getting their own house in order before spreading the news, to not put themselves at risk.

However, even though spouting a conspiracy theory is a faux pas here, I can't help but wonder if the "he who smelt it, dealt it" rule applies here. Lets say your country were to setup a network interconnecting major research institutions, etc. After its use takes off and it is obvious that everyone is going to be communicating over this new medium in a short amount of time, you see the value in keeping tabs on people. You decide that it is in your best interest to put backdoors into encryption algorithms in enterprise communication software. So you see there are these guys that have become the place that everyone is starting to go to find what they are looking for. This is a good place to be. You eventually get your hands on this also. It's a waste of time and energy to constantly be decrypting everyone's messages, so what the hell- let's put a backdoor in that also. Everything is going well. Wait... ok, we should have thought of that. Another country now knows about this vulnerability and it hasn't been publicized, which means they will start using it to spy on contractors that work for us. We'd better leak this information so everyone fixes their hole. Let's tell Google. We're already on good terms with them.