I think a comparison to tech companies is quite apt - there are people at Facebook, Palantir, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc. who are quite genuine about doing some open-aource stuff to improve the world, but for each of those companies you will find plenty of people who quite earnestly believe the company's wider mission will hurt the world. Do you accept network stack acceleration patches from Facebook if they'll accelerate mining personal data? Do you applaud improved V8 performance if it drives people from local apps onto monitored and monetized webapps? etc.

I think it makes sense to be cautious about all of these. I don't think the NSA is an abnormal risk to society, compared to the other major OSS contributors out there.