> 1979 - Present, DES: The Data Encryption Standard was altered by the NSA to make it harder to mathematically attack but easier to attack via Brute Force methods. The original version of DES, called Lucifer, used a block and key length of 128-bits and was vulnerable to differential cryptanalysis. NSA requested that the already small DES key size of 64-bits be shrunk even more to 48-bits, IBM resisted and they compromised on 56-bits11. This key size allowed the NSA to break communications secured by DES.
http://ethanheilman.tumblr.com/post/70646748808/a-brief-hist...
This is why any known NSA employee from security standards groups (including IETF and Trusted Computing Group [1]) must be forbidden to participate in the making of that standard. Their role there can only be seen as to facilitate weakening of the standards, either by weakening the algorithms themselves, or if that's too hard and/or obvious, to convince everyone else to use a weaker version of it (which NIST kind of tried to do with SHA-3 recently, too).
As long as there's any chance of NSA being involved even remotely in a security standard, I'm going to lose faith in that whole standard and the group.
[1] - http://www.securitycurrent.com/en/writers/richard-stiennon/i...