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You might be familiar with NSA as an offensive agency interested in subverting security systems, but it's actually composed of two separate and often warring divisions, the second of which is defensive in nature and is interested in securing systems. It is this second division which has a history of contributing in good faith to security projects, public and otherwise.

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Which one is responsible for their bad faith, public, defensive contributions?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG

That seems offensive.

I thought the offensive part of the NSA was the part that was capturing encrypted Internet traffic to later decrypt.

offensive, in the sense that breaking key cryptograph would allow them into (foreign) systems.

defensive in the sense that the block access into (American gov & private sector) systems via things like SELinux

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