Schneier was definitely famous in the late '90s, when this decision was made; he was famous almost immediately after the publication of Applied Cryptography, which came out when I was in high school.<p>SSL 2.0 is a disaster. The handshake isn't protected. Records (the data unit of SSL/TLS) do have MACs, but the MAC is secret-prefix MD5, with a key shared by encryption. Record MACs are also inconsistently applied. All of these problems are probably worse than any of the major TLS bugs --- renegotiation, BEAST, CRIME, RC4, Lucky13 --- that followed SSL 2.0.<p>Paul Kocher is the author of SSL 3.0, but also famous as one of the first (possibly the first) researcher to publish on side channel attacks --- he released a technical paper on square-and-multiply timing against RSA in the '90s. He founded Cryptography Research, which later built the as-yet-unbroken pay TV card system and the Blu-ray BD+ DRM system, along with publishing a crapload of crypto research.