Review the excerpt from The Code Book . In 1998, a report by Wayne Madsen revealed that the Swiss cryptographic company Crypto AG had built backdoors into some of its products, and had provided the U.S. Government with details of how to exploit these backdoors. As a result, America was able to read the communications of several countries. In 1991 the assassins who killed Shahpour Bakhtiar, the exiled former Iranian prime minister, were caught thanks to the interception and backdoor decipherment of Iranian messages encrypted using Crypto AG equipment. In this paragraph, the author uses a real-life example to demonstrate how cryptography
Answer
A
can help the government.
B
is unreasonably expensive.
C
can be dangerous.
D
is a Swiss specialty.
Explanation
The example shows that access to encrypted communications helped the U.S. government read messages from several countries. In one case, deciphering Iranian messages helped authorities catch the assassins of Shahpour Bakhtiar. This demonstrates that cryptography can help a government gather information and solve a crime.
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