[bazzargh]

Yup, I used spook.el back then too. And as I said, Stoll had suspicions - he thought the NSA listened to all the traffic, and why not - it was all unencrypted telnet sessions.

But the common impression then was that the NSA knew how to crack ciphers because they had the researchers, and that their unexplained changes to standards were improvements (for example, they changed DES to resist differential cryptanalysis 20 years before that technique was "discovered"). The notion that the NSA did more than just restrict key lengths to weaken crypto is recent.