I honestly enjoy how Yasha equates the fact that a project received money from some tentacle of the american government (which at least for me, as an european, is perfectly understandable in a situation of prolonged cold war with Russia and China) to the more spooky hypothesis that the guys behind some of the most vetted open source privacy projects do work for the man.
His well known position (many years of pando) makes me think "yeah, right, just what we need: another conspiracy that convinces people that there's no alternative and therefore any effort to step away from silos does no good to them". Sigh.
The layperson only slightly interested in privacy does not want (or need) mathematical proofs: they operate by trust. Chains of trust in people, friends, activists, journalists or self-proclaimed "experts" that recommend tools or dissuade them from sharing too many data in the places where everybody of a certain age has to be to socialize. So this kind of gray insinuations, with big logical jumps and with zero consistent evidence (other than the US has an interest in promoting encryption and is pouring money on that horse too, probably orders of magnitude less than it pours in big monopolistic, closed source and privacy-mining tech companies) does more damage than good to the public it pretends to inform.
But hey, I guess that's the pitch from which he manages to make a living, and it must have his public, which I might not totally be getting.
Has anyone read his book by the way? Does he develop his "most of open source crypto project work for the CIA" in some interesting or novel way? Something that gets my attention is how he sells himself as unveiling the "secret" military history of the internet, when all that I read from him is public knowledge. I guess the wistleblower myth is quite attractive, even for him.