They brought this on themselves.
The root problem is they have two conflicting missions: one is to help USA secure itself and the other is to read all comms worldwide.
The root problem is they have two conflicting missions: one is to help USA secure itself and the other is to read all comms worldwide.
If you ever hear that somebody has a plan to have the best offense and make sure that everyone else has the second-best defense so they're the only ones who can do something bad, the first thing that should come to your mind is that they are planning to do something bad. It's not an "will they" situation. It's a "can they" situation. If they have the capability, they will do it.
That is a terrible plan. And don't tell me that they are on our side so it's okay. Secretive, crypto-state actors are on their own side. Ask yourself: if this power eventually falls under the unilateral control of the executive branch, will that always be a good thing under any conceivable future administration? Believing the justifications is extremely dangerous.
I mean it's not like division of intelligence agencies is anything new (FBI for counter-intelligence, CIA for foreign-intelligence etc).
Of course to make it work you'd need a watchdog with actual teeth and historically the NSA has regarded oversight as well something they think they don't need or want.
This is also, in large part, why these cipher suites are classified—not because declassifying them would make them easier to cryptanalyze; but because it would tip off foreign powers that the US knows how their crypto works!
(And this is, of course, just as true of other weapons-systems development projects as it is of state-run cryptosystem developments.)