Why does NSA endorsement of an encryption scheme mean anything, after hundreds of thousands of man-hours have been spent auditing and attempting to break those systems?
Auditing is more important than origins. See also, Tor.
The days of DES S-boxes are behind us, and in fact, the NSA's meddling helped the security of that scheme, though that fact wasn't known until decades later.
I'm not an encryption expert. I didn't mean to start that argument, sorry. But personally, I would rather use encryption now that didn't originate in an NSA lab than one that did. But I believe Snowden that the NSA probably doesn't try to crack much good encryption, and they have a good time finding easier vectors to read encrypted data.
Anyhow, my main reason for making my comment above was just that if politicians really stopped to think how the surveillance can hurt them personally, instead of scoffing at us commoners who are under surveillance, they might start to change their tune. My first thought when hearing all this news was just a thought of Bush/Obama reading politicians' emails about senate/house bills before going around bargaining with them (or more realistically, some mid-level staffer getting at that info and then summarizing it so the top-level politicians' hands never get dirty).
Auditing is more important than origins. See also, Tor.
The days of DES S-boxes are behind us, and in fact, the NSA's meddling helped the security of that scheme, though that fact wasn't known until decades later.