Tech community strikes back at the NSA

The IETF  is the Internet Engineering Task Force, the ones who work on and publish all the technical specifications for Internet communications.  It's been around forever and has enormous respect from pretty much everyone in the tech community.

A request has just been made to the IETF to remove an NSA employee as co-chair of one of the groups:

Dear IRTF Chair, IAB, and CFRG:

I'd like to request the removal of Kevin Igoe from CFRG co-chair.

The Crypto Forum Research Group is chartered to provide crypto advice
to IETF Working Groups.  As CFRG co-chair for the last 2 years, Kevin
has shaped CFRG discussion and provided CFRG opinion to WGs.

Kevin's handling of the "Dragonfly" protocol raises doubts that he is
performing these duties competently.  Additionally, Kevin's employment
with the National Security Agency raises conflict-of-interest
concerns.

...

While much is unknown about these activities, the NSA is known to have
placed a "back door" in a NIST standard for random number generation
[ECDRBG].  A recent report from the President's Review Group
recommends that the NSA:
 - "fully support and not undermine efforts to create encryption standards"
 - "not in any way subvert, undermine, weaken, or make vulnerable
generally available commercial software" [PRESIDENTS]

This suggests the NSA is currently behaving contrary to the recommendations.

The whole email is worth reading.  It presents multiple examples of NSA attempting to weaken the standard.  And the conclusion (while polite) is nuclear:

While that's of course speculation, it remains baffling that an
experienced cryptographer would champion such a shoddy protocol.  The
CFRG chairs have been silent for months, and haven't responded to
attempts to clarify this.


Conclusion
----
The position of CFRG chair (or co-chair) is a role of crucial
importance to the IETF community.  The IETF is in desperate need of
trustworthy crypto guidance from parties who are above suspicion.  I
encourage the IAB and IRTF to replace Kevin Igoe with someone who can
provide this.

The Internet community is starting to interpret the NSA as the adversary, and is starting to route around it.