What claims have been made about DES?
The U.S. government has increasingly exaggerated both the strength of DES and the time and cost it would take to crack a single DES-encrypted message. For instance, at a June 26, 1997, U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on International Relations hearing on the encryption issue, both the Director of the FBI, Louis Freeh, and the Deputy Director of the NSA, William Crowell, testified that the government does not have the technology or the “brute force” capability to break into encrypted information. In fact, they cite the winners of last year’s challenge by RSA Laboratories, who cracked a message encrypted with 56-bit DES in five months using the distributed computing power of the Internet, as evidence of the impracticality of accessing information encoded with DES. In addition, they also asserted that American industry could not decrypt real-time encryption over a very minimal level of robustness. At one point, Freeh turned to Crowell and asked, “If you gave me $3 million to buy
