This is the same kind of security-minded heuristic as the advice that you should restore from a clean backup instead of assuming you can even know how to clean a compromised host of every rootkit/backdoor/etc. Once trust has been broken, you have to assume risks might exist until proven safe. This is why burning trust is often a very bad idea; regaining that trust takes a lot of time and effort.
Also, suspicion does not require an actual risk to exist.
edit:
For the record, I don't know much about Speck, good or bad. It might be fine, but that's orthogonal to the NSA earning a reputation that invites suspicion.
No, of course not. But if you are taking that position, you are basically saying "I suffer from paranoid delusions and don't confuse me with the facts."
From what I gather from skimming this discussion, the question being put to you is "Suppose I don't suffer from the same paranoid delusions. What are the actual risks here that a rational person should be genuinely concerned with? Please and thank you."
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=No-Speck...
Inability to prove or adequately articulate a risk is not the same as there being none. It's okay to take the position "What I know and what I can prove are two different things."
My life only works at all because of my willingness and ability to act on threats before they could possibly be proven, like when I got moved to another team before the guy calling me doll and babe took it over. He was fired more than two years later for sexual harassment or similar, but he wasn't a major problem for me because I never worked for him.
(Please note the "non techie" proviso and be kind if you feel the need to point out -- and explain why, using little words -- that it simply is not possible. Thank you.)
In fact, as another commenter here rightly points out, cryptography does not in fact run on trust; if anything, it runs on the opposite: verify.
This is true if and only if you can and have read the underlying math/algorithm. I haven't read Speck. My mother hasn't read the details of any type of crypto. So we don't have a basis for trusting Speck from first principles; we have to trust someone else for their expert opinion.
You're only looking at the technical details. In the real world, approximately nobody has the time and training to do that, and we must rely at least somewhat on trust. For those purposes, the NSA is no longer seen as a trustworthy expert.
(I'll point out that I haven't suggested that nobody should use Speck. Also, my opinion of it might change upon seeing some basis for trust (i.e. endorsement by other trusted experts or if I find the time to actually read the technical details myself))
If you are doing cryptography, you do exactly that.
Skepticism isn’t the same as denial, these attitudes of permanent ignorance remind me of the late nineties with Microsoft in the Linux community.
There's a lot of stuff the US government (and NSA) touches that isn't suspect - do we need to start making a list? Because if we do, just one item alone would invalidate the (not uncommon) point you appear to be drawing here.