It's slightly more complicated than that: There's 3 parties at play in this story. NSA, RSA, and NIST. NIST was evaluating dual_ec_drbg for certification for g

It's slightly more complicated than that: There's 3 parties at play in this story. NSA, RSA, and NIST. NIST was evaluating dual_ec_drbg for certification for government usage, with people from NSA heavily pushing it. NIST was actively contracting out to RSA to evaluate it for weaknesses. The kicker is here: NSA then secretly paid RSA something like $10M to advocate strongly for dual_ec_drbg, behind the back of NIST. So you have one government agency spending money on a contractor, hoping for an honest expert opinion, then another government agency spending money on a contractor secretly so that the second government agency can sneak something behind the first government agency. It's insanity. Sure, RSA should not have taken the money from NSA, but given that NIST crypto certification mostly matters to government implementations (and not to the private sector), isn't the bigger problem that NSA is happy to introduce backdoors into crypto exclusively used by other government agencies? It's traitorous. Thomas Massie offered an amendment in the house to try to stop this. He gave a pretty good overview of the situation (he is an electrical and mechanical engineer from MIT) to the house when the amendment was brought to the floor. https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/114-2015/h290 https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/114-2015/h290 (strangely, the video has been sort of cut on cspan. It's supposed to be at 3:17:11 https://www.c-span.org/video/?326244-2/us-house-debate-fy-2016-spending&start=38577&transcriptSpeaker=64005 https://www.c-span.org/video/?326244-2/us-house-debate-fy-20... )