This is an epically cool blog post! - submit it to HN on its own merits.
This was of particular interest to me:
>>>"...1986 Reagan tipped off the Libyans that the US could decrypt their communications by talking about information he could only get through Libya decrypts on TV15. In 1991 the Iranians learned that the NSA could break their diplomatic communications when transcripts of Iranian diplomatic communications ended up in a French court case..."
Because, in 1986 - thats effectively when a lot of the phreaking and social engineering was at a peak - Cyberpunk was moving from imagination --> zeitgeist --> reality.
Social engineering and line-printer litter recovery were yielding the backdoors into the Telecom Switching system. BBS's were raging [0].
So when you get a gaph-guffaw look into infosec in a slipup like these ones, it reinforces in mind that the 80s were some really wild times all around as technology tsunami'd from people's minds business and reality.
> I wrote blog entry on this subject with a very similar name [0] which covers the CryptoAG story in more detail. It doesn't have the 2020 news.
[0]: A Brief History of NSA Backdoors (2013), https://www.ethanheilman.com/x/12/index.html
Wow this is super interesting I noticed this paragraph in the text.
> 2013, Enabling for Encryption Chips: In the NSA's budget request documents released by Edward Snowden, one of the goals of the NSA's SIGINT project is to fully backdoor or "enable" certain encryption chips by the end of 201311. It is not publicly known to which encryption chips they are referring.
From what I know Cavium is one of these "SIGINT enabled" chip manufactures.
>> "While working on documents in the Snowden archive the thesis author learned that an American fabless semiconductor CPU vendor named Cavium is listed as a successful SIGINT "enabled" CPU vendor. By chance this was the same CPU present in the thesis author's Internet router (UniFi USG3). The entire Snowden archive should be open for academic researchers to better understand more of the history of such behavior." (page 71, note 21)
[0]: A Brief History of NSA Backdoors (2013), https://www.ethanheilman.com/x/12/index.html