Thanks for an interesting article!

Personally I think that this is a prime example of the cultural difference in intelligence work between the US and the old Soviet Union, and it’s creating trouble today.

To compress the reasoning: the US, with the success of Magic and Ultra in WWII the US went all in on electronic surveillance. The USSR, with its tradition of agent saboteurs, bet on feet on the ground.

The chiefs of NSA, CIA etc. got their start in the late Cold War era, when US electronic surveillance was at its prime, and got great results. To them, this is the way to operate and they are protecting what they feel comfortable with.

Thus I think that we’ll see more anti-crypto initiatives in the US. Of course, the profit from this isn’t going to the US security agencies but the very thing they’re supposed to protect from: cyber-warfare.