NSW = Naval Special Warfare but yes somewhere within the alphabet soup that is US natsec
But, apart from that, I don't understand your point about it being a military project.
People don't understand Federal entities aren't monolithic. Even within a single agency, you'll have teams doing both offensive (Red Team), and defensive (Blue Team) work.
People think that just because the research came out of the Navy, it was busted or compromised from the start, which it wasn't. Efforts only spun up to wrangle it in from being an academic curiosity once it started being heavily noticed as being a frequent tool/vector in investigations of criminal/adversarial activity.
IIRC it was a US Navy project. But I didn't understand your point.