Discussion
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The export of cryptography from the United States was controlled as a munition starting from the Cold War until recategorization in 1996, with further relaxation in the late 1990s.[6] In 1995, Bernstein brought the court case Bernstein v. United States. The ruling in the case declared that software was protected speech under the First Amendment, which contributed to regulatory changes reducing controls on encryption.[7] Bernstein was originally represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.[8] He later represented himself.[9]
Nearly a decade later, #[2] disclosed mass surveillance by the National Security Agency, and researchers discovered a backdoor in the Agency's Dual_EC_DRBG algorithm. These events raised suspicions of the elliptic curve parameters proposed by NSA and standardized by NIST.[12] Many researchers feared[13] that the NSA had chosen curves that gave them a cryptanalytic advantage.[14][15] Google selected ChaCha20 along with Bernstein's Poly1305 message authentication code for use in TLS, which is widely used for Internet security.[16] Many protocols based on his works have been adopted by various standards organizations and are used in a variety of applications, such as Apple iOS,[17] the Linux kernel,[18] OpenSSH,[19][20] and Tor.[21]
That's the guy who made our worst enemy: the Ed25519 signature scheme.