Now, before you start rolling your eyes or muttering under your breath, let me just say this: we all know that the NSA has been involved in some shady stuff over the years. But when it comes to cryptography, they’ve actually done us a solid by helping to develop and promote certain technologies that have become industry standards.

Take Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), for example. The NSA was instrumental in developing this technology back in the 1980s, and it has since become one of the most widely used public key algorithms out there. In fact, according to a recent report by Gartner, ECC is expected to surpass RSA as the preferred algorithm for mobile devices within the next few years.

But that’s not all! The NSA also played a major role in developing and promoting the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), which has become the de facto standard for symmetric encryption around the world. And let’s not forget about their contributions to the Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) and its successor, Elliptic Curve DSA (ECDSA).

So why is it that we should be grateful to the NSA for all of this? Well, for starters, they have a vested interest in ensuring that our data remains secure. After all, their job is to protect national security and prevent cyber attacks from foreign adversaries. By promoting these technologies, they’re helping to ensure that our communications are protected against eavesdropping and other forms of interference.

But there’s another reason why we should be grateful: the NSA has a lot of money and resources at their disposal. And when it comes to cryptography, that can mean a big difference in terms of research and development. By working with industry partners like Intel and Microsoft, they’re able to fund projects that might not otherwise have been possible, which helps to drive innovation and improve the overall quality of our public key technologies.

Of course, there are some who would argue that the NSA’s involvement in cryptography is a bad thing. They point to cases like PRISM and Snowden as evidence that we can’t trust them with our data. But let’s be real: if you’re using public key technologies for your communications, chances are they already have access to your data anyway. So why not work with the NSA to ensure that it remains secure?