A concrete example of this happening would be when the NSA's catalog of implants and general descriptions of what they could do was released, and a large flurry

A concrete example of this happening would be when the NSA's catalog of implants and general descriptions of what they could do was released, and a large flurry of public (and probably private) activity surrounding rediscovering the wheel ensued. It's a lot easier to build something when you have a loosely-constrained search space and a guarantee that it's possible, than to discover something entirely new.