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I find it weird that a cryptographer was required.

I'm no cryptographer, but I know by rule-of-thumb that AES with a randomly-generated key will do the job just fine.

The answer is a few lines below: this was around 1995, when knowledge about crypto was still very smaller (or not spread as it is today).

Yeah, at the time most writing about crypto was about how it was a munition and illegal to export, and about Phil Zimmerman getting hassled at airports.

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