The CIA Secretly Bought a Company That Sold Encryption Devices Across the World. Then Its Spies Sat Back and Listened. | Dominik Mayer – Products, Asia, Productivity

The Washington Post’s national security correspondent Greg Miller tells the story of Crypto AG, a trusted cryptography company with many countries among its clients:

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.

The CIA exited 2018. Imagine what else they might be running.