In the mid-1990s, the U.S. government refused to license some secure encryption products for export unless they included key-recovery mechanisms, while asserting that DES-protected information was not practically decryptable. The policy placed limits on strong privacy technology and gave government agencies influence over how citizens and companies could secure digital communications. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), founded in 1990 by Mitch Kapor, John Perry Barlow, and John Gilmore, challenged those assumptions through a technical demonstration rather than relying only on lobbying or litigation.
EFF coordinated and supported construction of the DES Cracker, known as Deep Crack, at a cost of approximately $250,000. On July 17, 1998, the specialized hardware and software recovered a DES-encrypted message in 56 hours; on January 19, 1999, EFF and distributed.net broke another DES challenge in under 24 hours. The results led government agencies to discourage internal use of DES and helped accelerate adoption of the Advanced Encryption Standard, standardized within four years. The episode became a lasting example of how weak or politically constrained encryption can undermine privacy claims and public security policy.
