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Comment by kenoph | Hacker News Reader

DES is also believed to contain a backdoor. And even if it only happened once, I still don't see how "Europe is farther down this path than the US is currently".

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So England is going to just have all this fun by itself?

http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13718768/uk-surveillance-...

They've actually had a law requiring you to decrypt on demand since 2007:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2007/10/uk-can-now-demand...

Nothing like that in the US at all. So, further down the path. France and Germany want similar laws.

http://www.reuters.com/article/europe-attacks-france-germany...

And other countries are joining in the call:

https://www.geektime.com/2016/11/26/5-eu-states-demand-bette...

Thanks for the pointers. I knew about the UK but I believe it is an exception in Europe rather than the rule, as of now. Of course I agree with you that probably most countries will try to get there, unfortunately. Then again, I can only read stuff written in my own language or English so I don't have the full view.

DES isn't widely believed to contain a backdoor. There were (a long time ago) questions about the changes the NSA made to the S-boxes, but it has since become apparent that these changes actually strengthened the cipher against differential cryptanalysis.

DES was weakened in a much more prosaic manner: the effective key size was reduced to 56 bits.

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