In 2020 however, the German TV station ZDF revealed that since 1970, the company was jointly owned by the German BND and the American CIA, and since 1994 exclusively by the CIA [28]. It means that for many years, Western intelligence services were able to manipulate the algorithms of Crypto AG's products and read the communications of many of its customers. Although the company also sold unreadable 1 equipment, the list of countries that had access to such secure technology became shorter every year. According to the NSA, all encryption should be readable.

➤ For further details on this topic, please refer to our follow-up story Operation RUBICON.

1. In this context, readable means that the cryptographic algorithms could be broken by the NSA. Also known as friendly. In contrast: algorithms that are not breakable by NSA, are called unfriendly or unreadable.