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I wonder whether this is backdoored by NSA as well

There is a lot of cryptanalysis on it: https://eprint.iacr.org/search?q=ASCON Furthermore, it is not designed by NIST.

Yup, NIST has no business putting their names on anything cryptographic anymore.

Did I miss something recent? Or are we going back to the DES days?

While not exactly recent, I think most people have Dual_EC_DRBG in mind these days when it comes to NIST and backdoors

they really are shits arent they