🚀 go-pugleaf

his machines to the United States Army. He had close ties
:   to the NSA...

Covert Action Quarterly, #59:
 
* In October 1996, after being endorsed by CIA director John Deutch,
* this method of maintaining the government's ability to spy on
* encrypted communications REPLACED KEY ESCROW as the favored
* technology. KEY RECOVERY works by locating information that is
* woven into the header of each message. This mechanism allows
* a recovery 'agent' to extract or reconstruct the message's key
* and decrypt its contents.
*
* Key recovery may have been the basis for NSA's most successful
* post-Cold War project for deciphering coded messages. Since the
* 1940's, the NSA reportedly rigged encryption systems sold by the
* Swiss firm Crypto A.G. so that the agency retained the ability
* to break the codes of anyone using the machines.
*
* Thus, Fort Meade was able to listen in on the coded military and
* diplomatic traffic of the more than 130 countries that were Crypto
* A.G. customers.


Initially, the NSA tried to say they couldn't decrypt Key Recovery
impaired traffic on the fly:

!   The New York Times, December 29, 19??, by David Burnham
!   "Vast Coding of Data is Urged to Hamper Electronic Spies"
!   
!   Because the National Security Agency is actively involved in the
!   design [of Key Recovery cryptography], the agency will have the
!   technical ability to decipher the messages.
!   
!   Walter G. Deeley, NSA deputy director for communications security
!   said, "It is technically possible for the Government to read such
!   messages, but it would be insane for it to do so. It would be an
!   extraordinarily expensive undertaking and would require a massive
!   increase in computer power."

Probably since noone believed that, they admitted it, and said why they
needed to decrypt i