Not quite. My high level response to this thread, which opened with a subtextual claim that Microsoft removed Elephant in yet another example of a big vendor being coerced by NSA into weakening end-user crypto, is twofold:

* First, that Elephant does not provide meaningful (and certainly not provable) security improvements, and, put in the context of FDE in general, does not give/remove a Bitlocker capability that other mainstream FDE systems actually have.

* Second, that the clunky feature Elephant tries to provide (Ferguson calls it "poor man's authentication") is in fact not at all relevant to the NSA threat model; to wit: if your adversary has an (a) continuous and (b) active vantage point to hit you from, no FDE solution can help you. FDE is exclusively valuable in the case where your disk is irrevocably and totally compromised, despite the folklore that says otherwise.

Popping up a level further on the stack: I'm rebutting the claim that NSA coerced MSFT into removing Elephant. It was a marginal implementation of a marginal countermeasure that wasn't relevant to NSA.

Popping up a level further on the stack: I do not believe that NSA has within the last decade coerced Microsoft into doing anything cryptographic.