Crypto AG

Uncommon card · No. 192667

Crypto AG was a Swiss company specialising in communications and information security founded by Boris Hagelin in 1952. The company was secretly purchased in 1970 by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and West German Federal Intelligence Service (BND), and jointly owned until about 1993, with the CIA continuing as sole owner until about 2018. The mission of breaking encrypted communication using a secretly owned company was known as Operation Rubicon. With headquarters in Steinhausen, the company was a long-established manufacturer of encryption machines and a wide variety of cipher devices. The company had about 230 employees, had offices in Abidjan, Abu Dhabi, Buenos Aires, Kuala Lumpur, Muscat, Selsdon, and Steinhausen, and did business throughout the world. The owners of Crypto AG were unknown, supposedly even to the managers of the firm, and they held their ownership through bearer shares. The company has been criticised for selling backdoored products to benefit the US, UK...

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