Firsthand account of NSA sabotage of Internet security standards

On the Cryptography mailing list, John Gilmore (co-founder of pioneering ISP The Little Garden and the Electronic Frontier Foundation; early Sun employee; cypherpunk; significant contributor to GNU/Linux and its crypto suite; and all-round Internet superhero) describes his interactions with the NSA and several obvious NSA stooges on the IPSEC standardization working groups at the Internet Engineering Task Force.

It’s an anatomy of how the NSA worked to undermine and sabotage important security standards. For example, “NSA employees explicitly lied to standards committees, such as that for cellphone encryption, telling them that if they merely debated an actually-secure protocol, they would be violating the export control laws unless they excluded all foreigners from the room (in an international standards committee!).”

SOURCE: boingboing.net