The "usual suspect" discussions about NSA are something like 10:1 against NSA. If there's an NSA sockpuppet army trying to influence HN, it's a good one, because there's no evidence of it.
The NSA doesn't influence standards by sockpuppeting "no crypto". They concern troll to add endless complexity, making implementations buggier and rarer.
In the HN NSA threads, the easiest example is encouraging argument between people who are in violent agreement that the NSA must be curtailed, but differ in approach. But instead of coding or grassroots activism, they're goaded into engaging each other on a message board!
Listen critically to "conservative" talk radio for a good general example - every segment starts off talking about problems that have grassroots concern (and that the "other side" would even sympathize with, just with lower priority). After the warm up to get listeners on board, the narrative switches to pigeonholing that anger away from systematic issues, and towards individual politicians and the "other side" that supports them.
I don't think standards groups need a lot of help concern-trolling complexity into standards. The exact same force is exerted on more benign standards; watch HTML for example.
Here's a rebuttal framework: select a NIST crypto standard and show an example of needless complexity and the discussion that led to it. I'll reply with an HTML working group thread that demonstrates the same thing. I'm pretty sure I'll win that contest, but we could try a few rounds just to see. How about we just do one?
he doesn't need to be right, he only needs to make the other guy look wrong.
If you've been on the internet for the last 10 years, this is easy to believe. If not, just visit the phoronix fourms. You'll be astounded by the batshit insane folks.
I'll own that my comment is a handywavy journey of rough assumptions, not an open and shut logical course. This is the case with any heuristic, and it's necessary navigate the unknowable (without waiting decades to get lucky for a leak to reveal specifics, at which point the method is ancient history anyway).
The way I see it, in 2014 the onus of proof is on someone who wishes to assert that discussions aren't being manipulated - if not by USG "itself", then by private companies looking out for their own interests. The only mechanism that would prevent corporate self-interest from evolving to this is individuals' morals, and given what we know about moral plasticity I don't see how that's any more than wishful thinking.
There are archived mailing lists of many of these standards groups. We should be able to find an example of a potentially NSA-sourced complexity.
Remember when John Gilmore claimed that someone from the government had persuaded the IPSEC working group to misuse CBC IVs in order to weaken the standard? We found out who was behind that, and it clearly wasn't the NSA --- not only that, but they were part of a years-running clique of people degrading crypto standards out of what appears to be vanity and ignorance.
If you're a crypto standards body, I think vanity and ignorance is a much bigger threat than NSA.
(I think NSA did subvert at least one crypto standard, for what it's worth).
unfortunately as even my own worst paranoia was not predictive enough, paranoia that has had me laughed at to my face and behind my back, given what's come out: it's very hard for me to react reasonably.
so people with a different bias to myself or others can greatly contribute to such discussions.
This is, admittedly, not 100% a reply to any of the ancestors of this post, but, well, it's definitely an opportune time. Labeling all disagreement as "sock puppetry" is already a popular rhetorical dodge and this news is only going to make that worse. If you want real free discourse, you need real diversity of viewpoints and you need to foster that diversity, not insist on conformity.
If the only place that diversity is coming from truly is sock puppets, well, I would consider that a condemnation of the community in question. (And make sure you read that sentence very carefully before replying; it doesn't say "we should trust the sock puppets" (hardly!). It means that there should be diversity in the community, before we add in any viewpoints, right or wrong, expressed by sock puppets.)
But the problem is that on the specifics, a few topics are indeed unanimous. You won't get diversity on those, and this is not a problem.
It's a very small echo chamber.