if you are laughing at such anti-institutional paranoia, there was an actual incident where the United States NIST was allowed to backdoor an elliptic curve based algorithm, Dual_EC_DRBG, to compromise targets of the United States. This lead to many people abandoning large swaths of NIST curves, including the very popular secp521r1. It's not totally out of left field. EC stuff is spooky and it is hard to say exactly why these institutions picked a specific curve. They employ the brightest minds in the world -- maybe they know something we don't.