Steven Levy's book goes into pretty good detail about this: http://www.amazon.com/Crypto-Rebels-Government-Privacy-Digit...

At the time the NSA was not pleased about the release of DES and was also very concerned about PGP. There were attempts at laws requiring key escrow available to the NSA among other restrictions on foreign key size etc. It wasn't really until the late nineties that this stopped. For a time they would probably have liked to ban all citizen encryption all together, but it became obvious that this couldn't be enforced (and it's necessary for things like e-commerce).

A lot of early crypto based patents and research were retroactively classified - there was a big historical legal battle to get things where they are today.

No, the actual words are just "That was a huge risk for him to teach a crypto party while he was working for the NSA." It was a risk for him, the kind of like organizing "don't drink sugar water" event while working for Coca Cola which has effectively its own police, and that at the time the employee already downloaded the secrets from the Coca Cola's secure network and he even contacted some journalists to give them those.

Link with more info?

Snowden organized a "let's use Tor" event after he apparently already downloaded some secret documents and contacted a journalist. And the top commenter disputes the claim "That was a huge risk for him to teach a crypto party while he was working for the NSA" falsely claiming that the article "keeps saying in many words that the NSA would put Snowden on a boat to gitmo if they found out he hosted a CryptoParty." It doesn't. But I also claim that it was a potential risk for him as there was some chance that somebody in charge for security starts to investigate what he does or already did.

And if I understood other sources, at that time Snowden actually worked for a private company (Booz Allen Hamilton Inc.)

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230462680...

which had the contracts with NSA. Still, apparently exactly working in that company gave him access to the secret documents he wanted to take.

These systems come into conflict a lot because it has become nearly impossible to secure domestic systems without also securing foreign systems.

For a while, NSA appeared to favor securing domestic systems when the two came into conflict. Thus events like the withdrawal of SHA-0 and its strengthening and re-release as SHA-1.

Now, it appears to have swung back in the other direction, and pretty hard. They're keeping vulnerabilities secret and even deliberately introducing weaknesses in order to make their spying mission easier.

Educating the public about computer security aligns with one of their missions, and not the one they appear to really care about now.

“If I’d known it was someone from the NSA, I’d have gone and shot myself,” [Wolf] says.

(and, ultimately, those are still the big threats today; NSA is a more interesting threat, and one where policy has some chance of working, but the ambient criminal threat is more commonly encountered.)

I think NSA probably doesn't want their people giving even pro-NSA talks in public without a lot of screening and approval, though. At most they'd have reviewed/pulled his clearance and fired him, not Gitmo'd.

I suspect how well it aligns depends on which part of the large and complex organisation that is the NSA any given individual works in.

If it is seen as subversive to a few of the many within the NSA I doubt they'd do a straw poll across the organisation as a whole to see how they address such an issue.