It is the job of journalists to ask these controversial questions about NSA's role as a saboteur vs contributing in good faith to really improve the security of

It is the job of journalists to ask these controversial questions about NSA's role as a saboteur vs contributing in good faith to really improve the security of systems. So, nothing wrong with that. Healthy skepticism and all that. In my experience, when closed source research teams start to contribute to well-run open-source projects there can be valuable contributions. But it highly depends on having independent and technically competent maintainers with strong personalities who are not easily manipulated into accepting patches that they don't understand or violate their technical principles.