The NSA spying on social networks is not surprising; your local cops do that. On the other hand, the NSA deliberately sabotaging the software that is widely us

The NSA spying on social networks is not surprising; your local cops do that. On the other hand, the NSA deliberately sabotaging the software that is widely used in our own government, even by the military, is pretty surprising. You can find people on sci.crypt and the cryptography mailing list who pointed to the NSA's other mission (the one they apparently ignore), "Information Assurance," as a reason to believe that AES did not have some secret back door. It is not a lie to claim that at least some of these revelations were surprising to a lot of people.