One follow-upon to the tale of Crypto AG becoming owned simply by the CIA: this interview with a Washington Post reporter. The whole lot will probably be worth reading or hearing, but I had been struck by both of these quotes by the end:
…in SOUTH USA, for instance, most of the governments which were using Crypto devices were involved in assassination campaigns. A large number of people were getting disappeared, killed. And After all, they’re using Crypto devices, which suggests that america intelligence had plenty of insight into that which was happening. And it’s really hard to check back at that background now and see plenty of evidence of america likely to any real hard work to avoid it or at the very least as well as expose it.
[…]
To me, the annals of the Crypto procedure helps to describe how U.S. spy agencies grew to become familiar with, if not dependent on, global surveillance. The program proceeded to go on for a lot more than 50 yrs, monitoring the communications greater than 100 countries. After all, the United States found expect that sort of penetration, that sort of global surveillance capacity. So when Crypto became less in a position to deliver it, america turned to different ways to displace that. And the Snowden paperwork tell us a great deal about how they do that.
