The hard part is that the NSA has two missions --- cracking foreign crypto, and protecting US crypto. When an NSA employee speaks, we will have no idea whethe

The hard part is that the NSA has two missions --- cracking foreign crypto, and protecting US crypto. When an NSA employee speaks, we will have no idea whether he or she is speaking with the "protect US crypto" hat on, or the "SIGINT enablement" hat on. I'd say the more important thing is that we not trust any one single person (or corporation). Everything needs to be open, and everything needs to be studied and verified by independent authorities. This also applies to how you implement your security. You want two person controls for everything, and separation of roles --- those people who can bypass file access controls had better not also be able to wipe log records. The NSA is relearning that lesson the hard way as they try to figure out what records Snowden might have leaked --- apparently Snowden had the ability to impersonate other users, as well as wipe the log records which were _hopefully_ being made when person A uses an "su"-like command to impersonate person B. After all, when someone stands up to give a suggestion at a standards meeting, or when someone goes through the hiring process to be one of your sysadmins, they won't be wearing a sign saying, "I do a huge amount of consultant work with the NSA and I have Top Secret/SCI/POLY clearance". Neither will job applicants have signs saying, "I'm getting paid by the Chinese MSS", or "I'm here to steal your SSL private keys".