I remember watching as a kid a History Channel documentary on the NSA, or maybe encryption in general, with the name or theme at least "The Code Breakers and th

I remember watching as a kid a History Channel documentary on the NSA, or maybe encryption in general, with the name or theme at least "The Code Breakers and the Code Makers." Essentially, it ended with the observation that the NSA was in trouble: as advantage by the end of the 20th centry shifted from code breaker to code marker, and non-commerical and free encryption tools of higher quality than ever made government-sponsored code breaking many orders of magnitude harder than before. As a budding nerd, I was thankful for this. HC painted the NSA as being painted into a corner, and even then I wondered for a moment what this would mean for them. Little did I know a decade later how angry the result would make me, and perhaps the exposure of the Clipper Chip was just some ironic leak so they could laugh at later successes.