The Register - Has the NSA broken EU encryption?

[Bill Stewart]

At 05:15 PM 03/09/2001 -0600, Jim Choate wrote:
>http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/8/17492.html


I'm puzzled by this whole thing.  Somebody's alleging that the
EU's Really Important Secrets are protected by an EU algorithm,
and that some EU employee ratted them out to the NSA,
and the NSA and EU are both denying it.

What secrets does "the EU" have?
Shouldn't they be operating mostly in public?
Why would they use a cryptosystem that was easily broken,
(other than GSM mobile phones, of course),
rather than a decently strong cryptosystem where the
main problem is theft of keys from the relevant users?

It all sounds pretty bogus.