If you were to wave a magic wand and eliminate from the world all messages that are encodings of ASN.1-defined values, disaster would certainly strike on a scale far beyond any that the most pessimistic have described for possible effects of the Y2K computer bugs. Aircraft would collide, mobile phones would cease to work, virtually all telecoms and network switches would be unmanageable and unmaintainable and would gradually die, electric power distribution systems would cease to work, and ... smart-card-based electronic transactions would fail to complete and your washing machine might fail to work ... and your life would become a misery!
--
It's suffice to say that them security people have proven, and unfortunately are likely to keep proving him to have been right on more than one occasion.
[0] https://www.oss.com/asn1/resources/books-whitepapers-pubs/la...