only nsa can listen ?

Only NSA can listen, so that's OK
Duncan Campbell 01.06.1999

Export version of Lotus Notes provides trapdoor for NSA.


Giant US software manufacturer Lotus has been lowering the profile of information about how they have installed an NSA-only trapdoor into e-mail and conference systems used by many European governments, including the German Ministry of Defence, the French Ministry of Education and Research and the Ministry of Education in Latvia.

Last week in Brussels, Lotus staged a lavish "Global Government Forum" to try and gain more government customers for its software. They succeeded in striking a new 500,000 user deal with the Russian Ministry of Higher and Professional Education for the development of a new information infrastructure for the Russian education system. Yet another conference, Lotus Eurosphere '99, will be held in Berlin in October.

Lotus claims that its systems are inherently more secure than those from its main rival, Microsoft.
However, although details of how the NSA trapdoor works can still be found in some corners of the web (see IBM Redbook, Page 80), the key technical papers and press releases which reveal how Lotus worked with NSA to build a special trapdoor into the International Edition of Lotus Notes have disappeared from the web.

Visitors to the security pages on Lotus's website are now told that the export version of Lotus Notes uses "a system approved by the US government called "Workgroup Differential" and "encrypt(s) information using 64 bit keys".

http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/2/2898/1.html