The article rubs me the wrong way. I agree on principle: I wouldn't want to willingly build technologically that I know will be used solely or principally to circumvent the constitution and reduce individual liberty in a non-transparent manner. Problem is, I don't see any evidence that this is what's happening en-masse in Silicon Valley.
There is a big difference between unconstitutional spying and surveillance per recent new stories (which is abhorrent) and the principle of intelligence work (which is a legitimate government role of even the most minimal libertarian government).
Accepting In-Q-Tel/CIA funding does not imply knowledge and approval of everything that agency does. In-Q-Tel publicly and openly funding a mobile cryptography startup has three potential implications:
1) They want to make money: they have people on staff who are capable of doing the technical due diligence and they think they have a fairly good chance of a return on their investment.
2) They want good cryptography software to be available to their own spies, foreign dissidents (including foreign whistleblowers), and US citizens/corporations that are being targeted by criminals or foreign governments.
3) They hold a master key to this software and want to be able to backdoor all of its users.
Problem is that if claim #3 is true and is uncovered, they risk a great deal: loss of their investment, huge news story, and mistrust of any other software projects that NSA has invested in (including SELinux -- which ships with many popular Linux distributions)[1]. Note that this is security software: extensive third-party testing is required by law for certain applications (and is implicitly invited in most any case); even if source code is closed, the binary is readily available and can be disassembled (revealing which open source libraries and algorithms are used for actual encryption). "Security by obscurity" is not a claim anyone is willing to trust, so pretty much with any kind of security software, intense scrutiny is expected.
So given three of these potential reasons, #1 and #2 seem to be a lot more plausible than #3.
To sum it up, this "guilt by association" article reads much like the hyper-partisan hit-pieces I've read recently in defense of the NSA surveillance programes ("Greenwald once wrote something for Cato Institute, Snowden donated money to Ron Paul, both of which imply that this is clearly part of Koch Brothers/Tea Party/Michelle Bachman/whatever conspiracy.").
[1] For a demonstration, see the scandal around Checkpoint firewall software, which didn't even involve three letter agencies, but merely corporate espionage...
There is a big difference between unconstitutional spying and surveillance per recent new stories (which is abhorrent) and the principle of intelligence work (which is a legitimate government role of even the most minimal libertarian government).
Accepting In-Q-Tel/CIA funding does not imply knowledge and approval of everything that agency does. In-Q-Tel publicly and openly funding a mobile cryptography startup has three potential implications:
1) They want to make money: they have people on staff who are capable of doing the technical due diligence and they think they have a fairly good chance of a return on their investment.
2) They want good cryptography software to be available to their own spies, foreign dissidents (including foreign whistleblowers), and US citizens/corporations that are being targeted by criminals or foreign governments.
3) They hold a master key to this software and want to be able to backdoor all of its users.
Problem is that if claim #3 is true and is uncovered, they risk a great deal: loss of their investment, huge news story, and mistrust of any other software projects that NSA has invested in (including SELinux -- which ships with many popular Linux distributions)[1]. Note that this is security software: extensive third-party testing is required by law for certain applications (and is implicitly invited in most any case); even if source code is closed, the binary is readily available and can be disassembled (revealing which open source libraries and algorithms are used for actual encryption). "Security by obscurity" is not a claim anyone is willing to trust, so pretty much with any kind of security software, intense scrutiny is expected.
So given three of these potential reasons, #1 and #2 seem to be a lot more plausible than #3.
To sum it up, this "guilt by association" article reads much like the hyper-partisan hit-pieces I've read recently in defense of the NSA surveillance programes ("Greenwald once wrote something for Cato Institute, Snowden donated money to Ron Paul, both of which imply that this is clearly part of Koch Brothers/Tea Party/Michelle Bachman/whatever conspiracy.").
[1] For a demonstration, see the scandal around Checkpoint firewall software, which didn't even involve three letter agencies, but merely corporate espionage...