> Try to put yourself in the mindset of NSA as an attacker. You have a massive budget to "covertly influence and/or overtly leverage" systems to "make the systems in question exploitable"; "to the consumer and other adversaries, however, the systems' security remains intact". One of your action items is to "influence policies, standards and specification for commercial public key technologies". Another is to "shape the worldwide commercial cryptography marketplace to make it more tractable to advanced cryptanalytic capabilities being developed by NSA/CSS".
And when you read the Snowden docs and you come across to things like this 2010 GCHQ presentation[2], stating "for the past decade, NSA has lead an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption technologies" such as "SSL" and "SSH" and "VPNs"; that "cryptanalytic capabilities are now coming on line"; and that "vast amounts of encrypted Internet data which have up till now been discarded are now exploitable."
So we have these agencies like NSA and GCHQ, with stated, funded programs to make deployed cryptography exploitable (and historical evidence of them successfully doing just that)... It's an unbelievable conflict of interest for them to hold any role where they can shape what gets deployed. Absolutely bonkers.
And on DES specifically, it was both at once, not a binary. NSA in secret pushed IBM to cut the key size, while strengthening the algo against every attack except brute force. The design criteria were classified and IBM's own research docs were literally locked up under gov classification at NSA's request meanwhile when IBM personnel publicly denied any NSA involvement (and the NSA director publicly denied any algo weakening, again, a lie). So DES came out genuinely hardened against differential cryptanalysis but at the same time breakable by brute force by organizations with budgets like NSA's, by NSA's request/order.
For the "blue team" thing.. I guess it's actually better for them tactically to not spin off, because being NSA gives you authority in those circles. Standards bodies don't seem to treat the conflict of interest as a problem (as we can see), but rather as a qualification ("people who know cryptography best").
1: https://blog.cr.yp.to/20251004-weakened.html 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20240420184725if_/https://cdn.pr...