Comment FWIW the NSA did not weaken DES (Score 2) 207
Nor are reports of intelligence agencies weakening encryption systems anything new -- concerns about NSA influence over the Data Encryption Standard (DES), reach back about four decades.
While this is true, it's a dumb example to bring up, since it turned out those concerns were misplaced. The serious concerns were that the NSA's choice of S-box values had somehow introduced a backdoor, but since the early 1990s we've known that the NSA's S-box values actualy *strengthened* DES against differential cryptanalysis (an attack which was not publicly known at the time).