To me this is the worst sort of journalism - couched in neutral language, it's an editorial piece disguised as a 'facts' piece. Facts - DJB, largely right, at

To me this is the worst sort of journalism - couched in neutral language, it's an editorial piece disguised as a 'facts' piece. Facts - DJB, largely right, at times a decade+ early, is fighting with standards boards. He does not believe the NSA has come off their long-standing approach to keep industry cryptography protocols weaker than five eyes cryptanalysis tools. The NSA's former employees, in the chain of command at the standards board, disagree with this characterization, and offer no proof to the contrary (if such a thing were possible). Put another way, just because DJB is paranoid and coming across as strident right now does not mean he's wrong. We really benefitted globally in the late 1990s from the cypherpunk movement getting legal coverage; the anti-government hacker mentality and culture that formed when writing about cryptography was mostly illegal, when allowed to publish and deliver to industry, brought real safety to billions of humans through better cryptographic protocols. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of an area where that same ethos is alive right now - in this way DJB's a dinosaur - and people a generation younger than him don't understand where he came from, and in this case, I think, don't understand how to use his viewpoint as a way to assess the world. It's not the only viewpoint, but it's an extremely useful one. Not only that, it's a viewpoint that has asymmetric benefit - if he's wrong, well then, we just added a little useful safety. If he's right, then, thank God someone did something about it.