-The Intelligence Coup of the Century-

pickle factory shenanigans

 For more than half a century, governments all over the world trusted a single company to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret.

The company, Crypto AG, got its first break with a contract to build code-making machines for U.S. troops during World War II. Flush with cash, it became a dominant maker of encryption devices for decades, navigating waves of technology from mechanical gears to electronic circuits and, finally, silicon chips and software.

The Swiss firm made millions of dollars selling equipment to more than 120 countries well into the 21st century. Its clients included Iran, military juntas in Latin America, nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, and even the Vatican.

But what none of its customers ever knew was that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with West German intelligence. These spy agencies rigged the company’s devices so they could easily break the codes that countries used to send encrypted messages.

If you can't beat them buy them.

LoL.
Its the American way.

Why release this now? A victory lap? A taunt?
A damaging leak?

Cia and ze germans refuse to comment but also do not deny the authenticity of these documents

“It was the intelligence coup of the century,” the CIA report concludes. “Foreign governments were paying good money to the U.S. and West Germany for the privilege of having their most secret communications read by at least two (and possibly as many as five or six) foreign countries

This is a bombshell and international incident of unprecedented scale.

Enjoy the show!

a reply to: dashen

“For more than half a century, governments all over the world trusted a single company to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret.”

What??? Hahahahahaha. That just seems sketchy. Good thing nothing bad ever came from this.

Dayum...going to read this asap...just wanted to post and make a smartass comment about Huawei first.


a reply to: dashen

we helped finance the spy tech so we could decode the spy coms, while my shocked face looks shocked as it usually does, you kind of have to ask, who else pays for the decoding keys? Or is the German company that is true to the CIA so filled with integrity that they would never sell out?

From 'Government Spies'
By Gilbert Shelton


Government spies are everywhere,
in your home and in your hair,
lurking in their secret lair,
counting dollars.

They know everyone you know,
they see everything you show,
and everywhere you go they slowly follers.

Do remember a short while ago the Gov asked Apple to unlock a cellphone.....and when Apple said no, they went nevermind...

USA! USA! USA!

too bad swine like John Walker were giving a lot of it right back to the bad guys

It's been known for a long time that Crypto AG gave backdoors to the CIA and the (UK) GCHQ. This would have fed the Five Eyes.

Anyone who trusted a private company for anything more than sending their menu plans for next weeks meals at their parliament is an idiot.

If you cannot trust the creation of the message is secure then it isn't and you'd probably be better off sending the message via a normal diplomatic channel.

The problem is that theres very few people with the skills in cryptographic algebra and related disciplines so if you don't have the required skill set on hand you will have to go to the market and hope you get lucky but even if you can write the perfect method you may still fall down due to weaknesses in the underlying arch such as abilities to generate true random numbers etc.

a reply to: dashen

Link to the same article without a paywall.

Honestly, I'd have been disappointed if this was not the case. The Cold War was about a threat to the entire planet and I'd expect that extreme measures would have been taken, measures like this one.

Huawei is China trying to do the same thing.

a reply to: Blaine91555

I clicked your link and immedietely was hooked on the Breaking News banner Prosecutor resigns in stones case, lol.

Anyways, couple of excerpts,

Even so, the Crypto operation is relevant to modern espionage. Its reach and duration helps to explain how the United States developed an insatiable appetite for global surveillance that was exposed in 2013 by Edward Snowden. There are also echoes of Crypto in the suspicions swirling around modern companies with alleged links to foreign governments, including the Russian anti-virus firm Kaspersky, a texting app tied to the United Arab Emirates and the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei.

“Do I have any qualms? Zero,” said Bobby Ray Inman, who served as director of the NSA and deputy director of the CIA in the late 1970s and early 1980s. “It was a very valuable source of communications on significantly large parts of the world important to U.S. policymakers.”

The histories, which do not address when or whether the CIA ended its involvement, carry the inevitable biases of documents written from the perspectives of the operation’s architects. They depict Rubicon as a triumph of espionage, one that helped the United States prevail in the Cold War, keep tabs on dozens of authoritarian regimes and protect the interests of the United States and its allies.

If “carefully designed by a clever crypto-mathematician,” he said, a circuit-based system could be made to appear that it was producing endless streams of randomly-generated characters, while in reality it would repeat itself at short enough intervals for NSA experts — and their powerful computers — to crack the pattern.

Just a few snippets, I am both terrified and in awe at the awesome implications of how things go down in the grey and black worlds.

This, people, is the REAL WORLD, enjoy 😘

a reply to: Arnie123

What interests me most about it, is the question of whether or not we knowingly let atrocities occur which we knew about in advance due the Crypto machines. How many times did we turn a blind eye?

a reply to: dashen

LOL @ anyone who doesn't self-produce such devices! Come ON now!

US government uses Swiss diplomatic network to communicate with Iran - Swiss Crypto network.