Having worked at a place which sold software to TLA's among other customers, I heard (let's say) stories of those agencies being able to pirate software at will

Having worked at a place which sold software to TLA's among other customers, I heard (let's say) stories of those agencies being able to pirate software at will. The main reason is that they are installed on secure computers, physically disconnected from the Internet at large, so there was no way to phone home in order to detect if more than one copy was using the same key.