It's important to remember that RSA received cash payments from the USG to backdoor this. It wasn't just an "oops, we were insufficiently vigilant". They actively participated.
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
(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-20... )
Maybe not within a US context, for arguable the US government gave them a mandate for this deception. But within an international context they should probably be held accountable and barred from doing business abroad (as they are essentially an agent/extension of a US intel agency).
Never going to happen, of course. Not with how that whole industry operates. But that only shows how little the whole lot of them and their industry should not be trusted in the first place.
Supporting those who make us less safe is a clear signal about where your priorities lie.