Conflicts of Interest
There's not one single internationally recognized standards governing body or one single international standard in any industry that's not weighted one way or the other by conflicts of interest and/or extreme bias. I don't care who the standards body is, none of them are balanced.
The process isn't open at all and I've always found it incredibly disingenuous that any standards group claims it is transparent. The formal process is transparent, but it's a formality. The standards are actually worked out in many, many cycles of unofficial drafts that circulate among the voting members and details are decided long before any finished proposals are presented for voting. It's just like political issues, laws and such, but on a micro scale.
It's all shady as shit. The actual functions of every standards project I've worked on was so far back in the shadows you couldn't see clearly with an aircraft landing light. It's openly corrupt and nobody cares because everyone is doing it.
Granted, the NSA having a man on the committee looks awful, but the NSA would still have people they could lean on to get their way. There is always an outsized monster on standards committees and they always get their way, even if it doesn't look like that's the case.
Now, that's all OK (I guess) because if you're aware of who is weighting the process you have options and chances to put things in that work in your favor, but you've got to know who is skewing everything. As others Commentards and GI-Joe have said: 'Knowing is half the battle'. If you bump the openly biased group off the committee you can never be sure how they'll impact things. That's doubly true with intelligence agencies. They thrive in the shadows. It's foolish in the extreme to chase dangerous things into their natural habitat. You not only lose sight of them, you increase their power. Pushing them into the shadows is like setting your kitchen on fire and hoping it will extinguish itself if you don't look at it. It's Peril Sensitive Sunglasses for real.