>Those claims made by Greg are completely untrue. I ran the professional services group for that company and will happily attest to whomever asks that at no time did we insert a backdoor (or anything that could even be construed as such) into IPSEC.
Somehow I doubt if you did that you could tell us. You might even have to lie to be able to comment on that letter at all.
I'm still unclear on the government's ability to compel falsehoods (even the discussions around National Security Letters seem to indicate that they prevent disclosure, but can't require lying), but I don't think I can convince you of that.
When all the hullabaloo around the alleged IPSEC backdoor occurred, it was frustrating to not be able to be as open about it as I wanted (not because of any government/security issues, but because at the time I still worked for the company and we were advised against talking about it).
You are free to assume that even right now as I type this, a shadowy figure in an ill-fitting Brooks Brothers suit is standing over me dictating my responses, and then chastising me for spending my time on HackerNews.
The effect of all of this is mistrust and suspicion of nearly everything. Which, compared to the alternative of implicitly trusting nearly everything, may not be a bad thing.
I'm hoping open development models(open source, peer production, peer review) end up providing the correct institutional incentives for us to innovate away the mistrust.
To misquote Linus: “given enough eyeballs, all backdoors are shallow.”
Somehow I doubt if you did that you could tell us. You might even have to lie to be able to comment on that letter at all.