alt Hacker NewsAES is so cheap with hardware acceleration that I could see an argument that it prevents casual sniffing of the traffic. Personally I think the false sense of security would outweigh those benefits, but I'm not in their shoes.
But DES is so broken that it's more of a giant flashing beacon saying "look here there are terrible decisions being made!"
What casual sniffing? It's a pipe. If you can sniff that, you can sniff all the traffic because the very first message is the key in plaintext.