Question about history of hash and cipher collections

[Kevin Hilton]

>From what you are saying about cipher/hashes, it sounds as an end user
of gnupg, it would be best to regularly rotate my personal cipher/hash
preferences.


And lastly, not to be a conspiracy theorist, but how certain can I be
that the NSA (who probably employs the single largest collection of
cryptographers) hasn't discovered "back-doors" or cracks in the
encryption algorithms?  I always get asked this by my brother, and I'm
not sure how best to respond.