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Comment by napoleond | Hacker News Reader

Either you're insinuating that 'tptacek is a malicious actor, or that he's incompetent. That's a pretty serious allegation to make without providing any evidence whatsoever. Do you have any? I'm sure you can dig up a few examples of things that he said which were incorrect, but very few of those will not have been followed by a correction at some point, and either way your insinuations seem to go beyond "being wrong some of the time".

HN is incredibly fortunate to count members like 'tptacek as part of its community. We should be behaving in ways which encourage more comments and commenters of his ilk, not less.

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Unsurprisingly you're already being down-voted. For a community that prides itself on being rational and home to spirited debate, when it comes to the NSA, any contrarian opinions (or even alternative perspectives) tend to be quickly attacked and silenced.

If you read some of the first threads when the NSA revelations broke out, there are heated discussions with various viewpoints and arguments. Now, it appears that most of these users have become tired of being instantly downvoted, and instead avoid these subjects entirely.

I hope that tptacek continues to participate in these security policy discussions, not only for his extensive domain knowledge, but also because he is not afraid to voice beliefs that disagree with prevailing opinion. And right or wrong, its very refreshing.

> If you read some of the first threads when the NSA revelations broke out, there are heated discussions with various viewpoints and arguments.

Always mixed with a steady groan of "enough of NSA stories" and "none of this is surprising". The heated discussions were in no small part about wether this was even the problem it was made out to be and wether it should even be discussed (to this extent).

Not that I agree with downvoting instead of replying, or with bashing tptacek (Everybody loves telling experts "I told you so". Doesn't make us experts tho :P), but I don't agree with your narrative either. It's not falsifiable, anyway. People might just as well have given up on trying to downplay this, and walked away instead, which would be even worse. Why speculate. Bashing and downvoting for disagreement without argument sucks either way.

> Either you're insinuating that 'tptacek is a malicious actor, or that he's incompetent.

There is a large area missed called psychological bias. People who has close friends working in highly controversial areas has a tendency to become a bit irrational in the view of the controversy. An attack on the NSA becomes an attack of the friend. If NSA is immoral and wrong, the friends choice of occupation must be wrong, thus the friend must be wrong, thus an attack on NSA is an attack of the friend.

>Do you have any?

Don't really have a dog in this fight, but: up until today, there was no evidence "the NSA created and promulgated a flawed formula for generating random numbers to create a "back door" in encryption products".

Were people wrong to be suspicious?

There was previous evidence, it just wasn't as conclusive as a contract with RSA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG#Controversy

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