The article tells us "the Pentagon tied some future contracts for Juniper specifically to the use of Dual Elliptic Curve". That's not outright coercion but it's a significant incentive. Hell, RSA allowed itself to be corrupted for a measly $10M. https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/20/5231006/nsa-paid-10-mill...

This has nothing to do with "weakening of ECC". Dual_EC_DRBG is an RNG that happens to use Elliptic Curves but its problems have nothing to do with that, they have to do with the design of the RNG itself. And those problems don't say anything about the strength of ECC used for encryption and digital signatures.

What does "ECC" mean here?

I’m guessing it’s elliptic curve cryptography.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic-curve_cryptography