[dtx1]

The NSA being the good guys for once feels strange. Especially caring for public interest.

[aftbit]

That used to be the norm! My personal favorite story along those lines was how they proposed changes to DES S-boxes without any detailed explanation. The open community was skeptical but it later turned out that the changes they proposed protected against differential cryptanalysis[1], which was at the time not known outside the intelligence community. That said, they did cut the key size dramatically which ended up weakening DES to the point that it could be trivially brute forced by the early 2000s, which led to 3DES and AES.

1: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2004/10/the_legacy_of...

[kragen]

they did strengthen the s-boxes against differential cryptanalysis, yes, but since 02004 we have evidence that they also sabotaged it as part of a deliberate policy they'd put in place in 01968: https://blog.cr.yp.to/20220805-nsa.html

[adastra22]

Yeah they unfortunately abused the good will they got from that. Once differential cryptanalysis was known and it was clear the NSA had strengthened the DES S-boxes, people started trusting them. And they started making lots of suggestions to various standards. Only now they were inserting back doors. It wasn’t until Snowden that the pendulum of public paranoia swung back the other way.

[reaperducer]

The NSA being the good guys for once feels strange. Especially caring for public interest.

Only if everything you know about the NSA comes from the evil, cackling, mustache-twirling caricatures of it promulgated by angry people on the internet.

Once you look beyond the politics, propaganda, and axe-grinding that is endemic to the online world you find out all sorts of fascinating things about the U.S. government.

[emilamlom]

Of course the NSA (and arguably any topic) is more nuanced than internet discourse likes to admit. That said, they've done plenty to warrant people's paranoia of them and not a lot to dissuade it.

[psunavy03]

It's entertaining how many people online think government intelligence agencies actually care about them at all, considering the limited amount of time in the day and all the info that said agencies need to know about adversary countries and other important topics.

For 99 44/100 percent of the online outrage bait, I'm like "you're not that interesting, and they almost certainly don't care about you anyway."

[snapcaster]

You think the dominant propaganda in the US is _against_ the US war state and intelligence community?!

[TiredOfLife]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghidra

[HybridCurve]

With the type of work the NSA does, I can't imagine many of the didn't know who Grace Hopper was. I expect they did it out of respect for her, rather than for the benefit of the general public.