[anigbrowl]

But why would you ever have assumed this? I mean, I don't really care whether something was a mistake in good faith or covert sabotage; the useful question is whether something is secure or not as far as I can tell. Assessing the motivations is a complete waste of my time as an individual.

[betterunix]

It does matter if the NSA is actively sabotaging our cryptosystems. If people are making mistakes we can solve the problem as a community by improving the techniques we use to develop, document, and test cryptosystems. If we are dealing with people who are deliberately weakening our cryptosystems, it will be harder to push better techniques because our adversary will push back against them, or sabotage the techniques themselves.

[anigbrowl]

In my view this was true anyway, since any mistake could be the result of foolishness or malice - if not on the part of the NSA, on that of the Russian, Chinese, British, Israeli, (etc.) security services. Crypto is an arms race between people with conflicting interests, and always has been; I don't mean to be rude, but I think your former view of the way things operated was a bit naive.