Declan McCullagh wrote:

Rocke Verser's announcement couldn't have come at a more embarrassing time for the White House. At 3:46 pm yesterday, after five months of painstaking work, the Colorado computer consultant fired off an excited message to the DES challenge mailing list: "WE FOUND IT!"

After the DES challenge began, didn't someone on the cypherpunks list predict that the key would be cracked at a time that was opportune for RSA, et al, and that the key would be found by "c2Nut testicles?" I can't find my printout of the post but if my memory serves me correctly then (s)he predicted more than a few of the events surrounding the DES challenge. The timing of the find is certainly opportune and there is no doubt that the company that found the key is closely connected to c2net (not to mention the spooks the company fronts for in Costa Rica and South America). Also, the Genx effort was plagued with internal and external sabotage, as predicted, and several other efforts were chilled before they ever got off the ground (by government and corporate legal consultants who all seem to have close connections to Colorado DoD agencies). I am not suggesting that RSA and their cohorts would put the fix in just because their is a tremendous amount of money and power surrounding this issue (both corporate and political) but I have certainly noticed that there doesn't seem to be any area of the crypto community where I don't find the same dark figures flitting through the shadows (and they all seem to have agendas linked to secret government labs and unelected government regulatory comittees). I was a bit skeptical of some of the rather paranoid claims I saw on the cypherpunks list at times but I can certainly vouch for the fact that there were more than a few computer admins in the New York area who were told from on high that using their company's computers in the DES challenge would not bode well for future government contracts. I am beginning to wonder if I shouldn't have majored in nuclear physics since there seems to be less political intrigue in that arena than in the crypto arena these days. Chauncey Gardner