Crypto International, a successor of controversial Swiss company Crypto AG, is reportedly dismissing dozens of employees following a major spying scandal. As many as 70 employees had to quit Crypto International after Crypto AG was found to be selling backdoored products to benefit agencies such as the United States Central Intelligence Agency in February. The firm reportedly confirmed the dismissals to Switzerland-centred publication Swissinfo.ch on Friday. Representatives at Crypto International reportedly said that the dismissals were unavoidable because the government recently refused to resume the examination of export applications. Andreas Linde, co-founder of Crypto International, reportedly said that the action …

As the crypto and blockchain space investigates seemingly private solutions for payments and messaging, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA, has had the backdoor to one of the world’s major encryption systems since World War II. Beginning in WWII, Swiss company Crypto AG operated as a seemingly neutral party that developed encrypted communications solutions for over 120 different countries over much of the past century, The Washington Post revealed in a Feb. 11 exposé. Crypto AG was not what it seemed Behind the scenes of the seemingly Swiss company sat CIA and German secret service group BND, the true …

The servers Edward Snowden used to leak thousands of documents to journalists were paid for using bitcoin (BTC), the National Security Agency whistleblower revealed at the Bitcoin 2019 Conference on June 27. Snowden was working as a CIA subcontractor in 2013 when his leak revealed that telecom companies and governments were involved in “almost Orwellian” mass surveillance programs that swept up the phone records of unsuspecting Americans. Speaking via video-link from Russia, he described the ability to exchange and transact without being watched and recorded “is the foundation of all rights” — and said bitcoin was helping to deliver privacy …