The security improvements due to Elephant certainly are not proveable (what in crypto truly is?). I argue that there is meaningful security added by Elephant, clunky though it certainly is - because it does make block modification attacks (which could be used to thwart "Secure Boot") and in that 'poor man's authentication' is better than no man's authentication. Here the perfect very well may be the enemy of the good. Of course I would be happier with something even better.

> Popping up a level further on the stack: I'm rebutting the claim that NSA coerced MSFT into removing Elephant. It was a marginal implementation of a marginal countermeasure that wasn't relevant to NSA.

Not sure whether this is strong enough evidence to be considered a rebuttal. I do not know and will not claim that it was the NSA (or other) coercing MSFT.

> Popping up a level further on the stack: I do not believe that NSA has within the last decade coerced Microsoft into doing anything cryptographic.

Not the NSA key? Not the removal of end-to-end crypto from Skype and then onboarding of Skype to PRISM? Not the SEA hacking of FBI request documents? Not bitlocker keys automatically uploaded to OneDrive, and OneDrive onboarded to PRISM? Not TPM 2.0 support - not Germany's leak of TPM backdoors - not China's following ban of TPM 2.0 and Windows 8.1 - not Microsoft's then downport of TPM 2.0 support to Windows 8?Not the cloud key escrow patent?

"Once a request comes in from a third party (e.g. a user, a business, a legal entity or governmental entity, etc.) to access user's data, the data storage system may send..."

https://www.google.com/patents/US20120321086

"MS, working with the FBI, developed a surveillance capability to deal with the new SSL... went live Dec 2012" - Snowden docs

http://hbpub.vo.llnwd.net/o16/video/olmk/holt/greenwald/NoPl... (30)

You probably think Microsoft did these things without NSA/TLA coercion.