>Why should the NSA receive any more scrutiny than anyone else? Because they were caught red-handed. They were effectively proven to have attempted to push a b

>Why should the NSA receive any more scrutiny than anyone else? Because they were caught red-handed. They were effectively proven to have attempted to push a backdoored random number generator as a standard. They were the only ones who possessed the key to the backdoor. They never suggested that the backdoor (or "key escrow" as they call it) was present in the algorithm. Even the Clipper chip [1], as bad as it was, wasn't this bad, since they were trying to be semi-transparent by saying "we possess the master key to this so we can help law enforcement investigate terrorism and other serious crimes". Here, the scheme was executed entirely in secret. If any private person or organization in the US tried to do something like this, they would be arrested and prosecuted under the CFAA (among other things). One could even make an argument that their DRBG backdoor is even more willfully malicious and toxic to our security than the warrantless mass surveillance. If a conman tries to sell you some phony goods that he knows to be phony, you're never going to buy anything from him again, even if the later stuff seems legit. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip