Here is what you're talking about. Looks like Lennart accepted to deal with NSA's needs (even if he's stating the opposite, he still did it). There is also another part that bother scare me. See below

Quote:

• auditing: implemented for when your application needs to be NSA approved (that appeared to be the main reason, Lennart himself said he's not a big fan of it). Can log all system calls made to /etc/passwd etc to the audit log. Auditing is integrated with journald, audit-tools to read the logs have been improved.
  
• Linux distributions are moving to "stateless" systems, with only /usr content available/writable. If /etc/ and /var are unpopulated, the system (systemd) will do the minimal bits to boot up the system. Only your own changes would make it to /etc. systemd adds better support for these kind of setups.