How the NSA has destroyed trust
RSA Security has denied that they took money from the NSA to use a backdoored random number generation algorithm in their products. Do you believe them?
As security guru Bruce Schneier shows, you just can't trust anyone anymore about these things. This is perhaps the most poisonous and damaging outcome of the NSA's activities in recent years (or at least of the disclosure of those activities).
As a general rule, I look on tech companies as victims in this scandal. In fact, they're far bigger victims that nearly any individual civilian for exactly this reason. A large part of what tech companies sell, particularly in the security business, is trust. As Schneier shows, trust is essential in any functioning society, but computer security is so complicated that you simply have to trust the vendors you deal with.
