Most plausible explanation of what happened with TrueCrypt:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7814725

The whole message on the site makes no sense and I think that’s on purpose. What likely happened is the US gov found the TC authors, then used their weight to try and get them to back door the binaries. Authors didn’t want to, but couldn’t publicize the letters without going to jail, so they made up the most ridiculous story for why they were giving up on the project, the best possible outcome so that they wouldn’t go to jail and wouldn’t subject users to the required back door.

Great comments in Schneier blog:

d. Another line of thought goes like this: If the NSA really really really wants to know WHAT Snowden had access to, and wanted to say, use a tempest solution to grab that information, one way to to that would be to spook someone known to have received those info using psy_ops to persuade that someone to decrypt the entire data from whatever air-gapped machine is on into some other machine. Which is a simply way to suggest that Bruce, Greenwald, et al. ought to review personal security and NOT be spooked into spinning up the NSA archives and trying to migrate that data. Put those laptops under lock and key and don’t use them a few days. Don’t run off an mass migrate those archives just yet.

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There is a ticket to remove truecrypt from tails dated at the latest May 19th.
https://tails.boum.org/blueprint/replace_truecrypt/
Considering Jacob Applebaum has 1) worked on the Snowden files and 2) is involved in tails and 3) tor and 4) tails seems to have had advanced warning I am putting my hands down that this is connected.

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bae24d3fff • May 29, 2014 9:06 AM
I just want to mention that this has wiped out the TrueCrypt forum too.
There were hundreds of users at the TC forum (myself included), which contained a goldmine of information, not just about TrueCrypt itself but also crypto and computer security in general.
Many people put in many hours of work in the forum, and it would seem that that repository of knowledge is gone at a stroke.