NSA is schizophrenic in that regard. Remember that one of the things it does besides looking in everyone&#x27;s underwear drawers is it also advises US govt (3 letter agencies, military) on what crypto to use. In other words it tells Uncle Sam how to lock his underwear drawers so other agencies don&#x27;t peek in there.<p>It is always interesting to see what they say there. Because if they know, for example, one type of crypto technique or implementation is vulnerable will they still recommend it for TS classified material storage? Will they recommend for US military or diplomatic service? If they don&#x27;t, it might leave that open to attack, and they are not doing their job. If they do say &quot;don&#x27;t use this combination of AES, prime numbers, or OpenSSL implementations&quot;, that also gives something away.<p>I wonder if people people who make these recommendations even talk to people who discover, exploit, and actively penetrate systems? Because everything is very compartmentalized, they actually might not be able to.<p>That is why they are probably very interested (like we saw) in somehow subverting or weakening some algorithms and implementation so they are the only ones that have a key (Dual_EC_DRBG) , or they are the only ones that potentially have a computational capacity to exploit (DES).