Despite its newfound attitude to play better with others, recent revelations about the intelligence community have significantly degraded the government's credibility in the eyes of many, and made it the target of suspicion for many more. "People now assume that if something bad happens on the Internet, it must be the NSA's fault," James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Smarting from speculation that the U.S. intelligence community hoarded knowledge about the Heartbleed bug that's placed millions of servers and devices that access the Internet at risk, the White House Tuesday gave the public some insight into how it decides to release information about vulnerabilities in computer software and hardware.

"This administration takes seriously its commitment to an open and interoperable, secure and reliable Internet, and in the majority of cases, responsibly disclosing a newly discovered vulnerability is clearly in the national interest," the President's Cybersecurity Coordinator Michael Daniel wrote in The White House blog.

"This has been and continues to be the case," he added.

Nevertheless, the decision to disclose a vulnerability can be complex, Daniel noted, because such disclosures may result in a missed opportunity to collect intelligence to thwart a terrorist attack, stop the theft of intellectual property, or discover even more dangerous vulnerabilities being used by hackers or other adversaries of the United States.

On the other hand, "building up a huge stockpile of undisclosed vulnerabilities while leaving the Internet vulnerable and the American people unprotected would not be in our national security interest," Daniel wrote. "But that is not the same as arguing that we should completely forgo this tool as a way to conduct intelligence collection, and better protect our country in the long-run."