The NSA seeks to act in its best interests. Therefore the release of the DES should come as no surprise to anyone. Though technically created by IBM, NSA was heavily involved in the creation process. At the center of the encryption are the substitution S-tables, the part where the NSA had the most involvement. Naturally this created suspicion that the NSA put a backdoor in the tables with which they were able to decode every message in seconds. However the NSA also intended the algorithm to be used for its own classified documents. Motivated by historical examples of supposedly perfectly secure ciphers, NSA knew that if it put in a logical caveat into the algorithm eventually it would be found. Therefore the only logical idea was to make it so that ONLY the NSA could break the cipher. One thing that the NSA had above every genius individual or organization was resources. Therefore it made the DES only solvable with brute force attacks, hoping that for the foreseeable future, only the NSA would have the necessary technology to conduct such an attack. Though potentially a moral grey area, the NSA did not do anything wrong technically, as a senate committee which investigated the project found. Making DES a government standard did not force any one business to use it. Interestingly, it seems that the NSA did not learn its lesson from all the backlash it received, as during 1987 it implemented the Capstone project which primarily created the SHA-1 hash function to use as a standard for password encryption. Though it has yet to be determined whether the NSA created a backdoor, SHA-1 is no longer considered secure, and just as the DES has been updated through a public competition.
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