[vlovich123]

There’s no reason to believe that the NSA doesn’t learn and evolve from past efforts.

Changing rules on the fly and improperly applying said rules could be a way to select a weak option you can break while having stronger plausible deniability than what happened with Dual_EC_DRBG (which btw wasn’t actually confirmed until the Snowden leak). So here’s someone claiming NIST is being suspicious in how the algorithm selection happened. The rules really need to be set in stone at the beginning of the competition or before the phases at least. And you can’t pick diametrically opposed rule sets between phases (as happened if you read Bernstein’s letter), only tweaks.