It’s compelling in context. If the NSA influenced NIST standards 3x in the past — DES, DSA, Dual EC — then shouldn’t we be on high alert this 4th time around?

That NSA is already recommending against hybrid, instead of waiting for the contest results, might signal they’ve once again managed to game the standardization process itself.

At the very least — given the exhaustive history in this post — you’d like to know what interactions NSA and NIST have had this time around. Thus, djb’s FOIA. And thus the lawsuit when the FOIA went unanswered. It all seems very reasonable to me.

What’s that old saying, “fool me thrice…”?