Interestingly, Schneier sounds more reasonable in 1999 than now (with relation to ECC; don't hate me). That essay was pretty good: elliptic curves were relative

Interestingly, Schneier sounds more reasonable in 1999 than now (with relation to ECC; don't hate me). That essay was pretty good: elliptic curves were relatively new on the block (but really, not even 10 years newer than RSA), and not particularly well-studied in the cryptographic setting (mathematicians were more interested in other elliptic curves, e.g., Fermat's Last Theorem). It's been almost 15 years since then. No new classes of weak curves were discovered since then (the last one was anomalous curves, around 1998), nor advances towards a general notion of smoothness in the general setting §, despite intense study. It seems unlikely that Solinas would have been able to, in 1999, slip a weak curve past everyone for so long, given the attention the problem has gotten in the last decade. All in all, I think Schneier may be doing more harm than good with those recent ECC comments. § Summation polynomial-based approaches are the exception, but they are not general. They only work over extension fields, including binary fields, and are mostly impractical attacks.