No. John Gilmore does not, and did not at the time, think NSA had &quot;backdoored&quot; DES. He&#x27;s one of the original &quot;cypherpunks&quot; from the 90s, and to anyone paying attention to cryptography in the 90s, the story behind NSA&#x27;s involvement in DES is very well known:<p>NSA asked for (and got) a key strength reduction in DES and a set of mysterious changes to the algorithm&#x27;s substitution tables (&quot;s-boxes&quot;). For a long time, there were murmurs that those unexplained s-box changes weakened DES so that NSA could cryptanalyze it.<p>It turned out, though, that the s-box changes strengthened DES against a class of attacks that NSA knew about and few others did: the s-box changes made it much harder to employ differential cryptanalysis against the cipher.<p>The key strength reduction obviously (especially in retrospect) wasn&#x27;t a good thing, but by the 1990s any competent engineer could make a clear-eyed decision about the key strength they wanted, and, if DES&#x27;s wasn&#x27;t adequate for their application, could deploy either a different cipher, or Triple DES.