This was the era of export cryptography, just after the Clipper Chip saga, "this t-shirt is a munition, and perhaps most importantly curve cryptography was barely a thing (this is back at the time where people believed the Certicom patents would preclude it from deployment). I think people just weren't paying that much attention to cryptographic standards processes at all, at least not for a couple more years (remember, the curves were generated years before they were published).

Well the thing that comes to mind for me was the US gov classing encryption as a munition and placing it under export controls