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All those conspiracy theories sound a lot more reasonable today than they did back in 1999.

• tptacek 13y ago
  No. This reframing of the scariness of the NSA is one of the things that drives me batty about the NSA coverage on HN. The NSAKEY conspiracy theory wasn't dismissed in the late '90s because people thought the NSA wouldn't backdoor Windows. The opposite is true; the NSA was so feared in the '90s that people didn't (and still don't) trust standards like DSA, for fear that the parameter generation algorithms they use were backdoored. No, the reason nobody takes the NSAKEY conspiracy theory seriously is because if the NSA was going to backdoor Windows, they wouldn't do it with the ASCII string "NSAKEY".