sazius, what I found most disturbing is the degree of hype and sensationalism WRT the mentions of SSH (e.g. see around 25:34 in http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/31c3_-_6258_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201412282030_-_reconstructing_narratives_-_jacob_-_laura_poitras.html). I didn't take an exhaustive look at the documents published along with the spiegel article but, AFAICT at the time, one would have to put some creativity into reading the references to SSH in those slides as involving something other than TAO (i.e. exploitation of one of the endpoints) or the known keypress-timing attacks. Note that TAO would have to involve exploitation of the SSH software itself, not of any other software running on the same host, in order to put into question the trustworthiness of SSH.

This might apply to IPSec as well. Consider e.g. pages 39-43 in http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35515.pdf. Exploitation to get the preshared keys, hardware implants. I see no reason why they wouldn't put any direct attacks in their "success stories" slides.

This is not to imply that SSH (the protocol or implementations) are necessarily secure. Just that the slides presented, in my incomplete reading, do not seem to justify putting PPTP and SSH in the same sentence.

In fact, there seem to be awfully asymmetric double standards here. The person making the SSH claims is associated with the tor project, for which many known and documented attacks exist (the disagreement being on how practical they are for the purposes of the NSA and associates). Suffice to say that the State of the Onion talk was appropriately hand-wavy about those. The text of the spiegel article is quite narrow in its claims:

"For surveillance experts, it becomes very difficult to trace the whereabouts of a person who visits a particular website or to attack a specific person while they are using Tor to surf the Web."

[Naturally, the known attacks focus on mass surveilance instead. Tangentially, exploiting the firefox browser of one specific user in a watering hole attack seems well withing the capabilities of the NSA or even less well funded adversaries. So I doubt that this statement stands up to scrutiny.]

The sensationalism goes on of course; we had very good reason to believe GPG and OTR to be trustworthy, since Snowden put trust in those specific tools (and, I'd argue, he had good reason to do his homework on that beforehand). So "revealing" that there's software that (in aggregate) can resist the NSA infrastructure seems out of place a few days before 2015.

Needless to say, I don't think that such presentations help with focusing attention on the most urgent problems. Then again, my priorities might significantly differ from those of the presenters.