To be fair, spying on leaders and destabilizing national security threats is their job. They wouldn’t be a very good intelligence agency if they didn’t do that.

To be fair, spying on leaders and destabilizing national security threats is their job. They wouldn’t be a very good intelligence agency if they didn’t do that. The question is more about building in faults intentionally, versus exploiting accidental faults. The later is fair, but the former is very troublesome. I haven’t seen any evidence of the first one. In fact, when such attempts have been made — primarily in encryption — they’ve been routinely shutdown. See Clipper Chip, and most recently NIST coming out against against the very ecliptic curve coefficients it suggested, and then going on to say not to ever trust NIST coefficients in encryption.