[ippisl]

Yes, the transparency does make sense. Maybe the NSA guy didn't tell him anything about the exploits of tor.

But the fact that it financed tor implies heavily that there are such exploits accessible to NSA. And the fact that it is known that tor is sensitive to global passive attackers is another. Even plain me can guess this.

Maybe the calculation favors tor, because if we assume you need to be a global passive attacker to exploit it, this favors large coalitions of many (currently democratic) nations collaborating over you're single repressive regime, and that seems like a reasonable compromise in thinking about a very hard ethical choice.