Good encryption does not rely on some secret algorithmic sauce, but on maths.
If these providers were really serious about encryption, they would let independent experts inspect the corresponding program code. 2 The data on your iPhone is – hopefully! – encrypted.Ĭonsequently, we put a lot of trust into the providers of the encryption technology we use – just as Crypto’s customers did. Your messages – iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal – are encrypted. Your e-mail client hopefully uses an encrypted connection to the server. The data transferred to, and from, Dropbox is encrypted. When you log into your e-banking, your communication is encrypted. We all use encryption each and every day. And I am not just talking about governments. If you think about it some more, you might ask yourself, if we are exploited and spied upon via similar schemes right now. Sell flawed equipment to your enemies, through a trustworthy looking channel, and exploit the flaws to your benefit. Now, putting political and ethical questions aside, if you think about it, technically the plan and set-up was brilliant. Read all about it in the Washington Post article. Remember when we learned that the CIA had bugged Angela Merkel’s mobile phone? So every customer that used Crypto product should ask themselves in which category they belonged, and the ones still using them should probably stop doing so. Knowing the American agencies with their insatiable hunger for data, they probably were spying even on friendly governments. All this should sound pretty familiar to everyone in the business of tax evasion. You can distance yourself one step further by creating a front, like a foundation in Liechtenstein, and have that front hold the shares. The ones that have the share certificates in their possession are shareholders. Usually, companies know who their shareholders are. You know, like, IBM, or Daimler, or… well, every big corporation. a limited company owned by its shareholders. 1 “AG” in Crypto’s name stands for “Aktiengesellschaft”, ie. Who knew about this? Who profited from the information gathered? How could the CIA “secretly” own a Swiss company? OK, that last one is easy: bearer shares. Now there’s is hemming and hawing about this “affair” or even “scandal”.
Which allowed the agencies to easily break the code and listen to all secret, “safe” messages. One for friends with strong encryption, one for frenemies with weakened encryption, and one for the foes with weak encryption. But, under the direction of their owners, Crypto made three variants of each of their products. Crypto sold their machines to friends and foes of the “West” alike. The twist: Crypto AG belonged to the CIA, until 1993 jointly with the German BND, but then the latter sold its shares to the CIA. The other week, the Washington Post published a comprehensive article about a Swiss company, Cryto AG, which until 2018 was in the business of making and selling machines to encrypt messages to dozens of governments all over the world.