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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

No. I believe I know the specific people to whom Gilmore is referring, and I believe his observations to be a straightforward result of incompetence. You have to have read the IPSEC working group list posts of the time and see how the group treated real cryptographers to understand how unnecessary it would have been for NSA to have corrupted that standard.

No, I don't think NSA tried to subvert IPSEC, and especially not in the way Gilmore describes.

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I dunno. Packing standards bodies with incompetents and then suggesting things to those incompetents that are apparently sensible but weaken security seems like a perfectly plausible way of subverting cryptographic standards to me. Also, it probably wouldn't be terribly hard to seed a culture of disdain for real cryptographers.

You follow this logic consistently and pretty soon you're blaming NSA for bad weather.

Did you just use a "slippery slope" argument to argue against "slippery slopes?" I'm gonna chalk this up to "tongue-in-cheek," though I may be wrong...

Why do you think John Gilmore is incompetent? He's very well regarded by many technologists. toad.com is probably older than many HN readers.

Edit: I may have misunderstood who was being accused of incompetence. My apologies.

He's saying that Gilmore was attributing to malice what Thomas believes more likely to be due to incompetence. He's not asserting that Gilmore is incompetent.

> Why do you think John Gilmore is incompetent?

That is not what he said.

It's not what he didn't say either. The wording was poor if that wasn't his meaning.

You misread me.

Given I received no clear meaning from your statement, and you've failed to clarify it, no, you've mis-written yourself.

Your statement was and is unclear. Your follow-up to which I'm responding doesn't change that.

Given that most people understood his post, the problem may lie in the reader, not the writer.

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