People seem to forget that NSA is not the only player in town. When you plant weaknesses into things, you need to make sure that you're not actually helping you

People seem to forget that NSA is not the only player in town. When you plant weaknesses into things, you need to make sure that you're not actually helping your adversaries. You need to carefully weigh the chance/cost of discovery by an adversary against what you get out of the weakness. The perfect case is when you're guaranteed to own the weakness, ala Dual_EC_DRBG. Consider that the NSA has already been known to burn stolen certificates for malware code signing. It's therefore not a stretch to assume they can easily MITM TLS without needing the help from bugs. If they planted this bug, they would have been effectively democratizing TLS MITM to virtually everyone. This would help their adversaries more than it would help them, so I'm not convinced. It's easier for me to buy that the Chrome Pinkie Pie bugs were planted, due to the hardness of their discovery, than this could ever be.