Nice writeup, this story seems to have gotten limited exposure after being written. Incidentally, these kinds of programs continue to the present: > "In Septe

Nice writeup, this story seems to have gotten limited exposure after being written. Incidentally, these kinds of programs continue to the present: > "In September 2013, The New York Times reported that internal NSA memos leaked by Edward Snowden indicated that the NSA had worked during the standardization process to eventually become the sole editor of the Dual_EC_DRBG standard,[7] and concluded that the Dual_EC_DRBG standard did indeed contain a backdoor for the NSA.[8] As response, NIST stated that "NIST would not deliberately weaken a cryptographic standard."[9] According to the New York Times story, the NSA spends $250 million per year to insert backdoors in software and hardware as part of the Bullrun program." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG There are also notions that the British government ran a similar program after WWII, distributing Enigma machines to all its colonies/ex-colonies, which was part of the reason they kept the codebreaking work on Enigma secret for decades (until the 1970s). I've never seen a similar expose of that, though.