Here's how I looked at it -- they are 1000x smarter than me on matters of encryption. It was totally unlikely I knew something they didn't. At most, I saved them a few hours on a matter of life and death, and I had minutes to make that decision. And recall, back then, people felt differently about the NSA. If this was a total spoof - the reality is I didn't give anything up. I didn't invent the encryption ciphers. I just packaged common ciphers in a user interface people really liked.

But in response to the people here who think I was tricked. That's not the case. What I didn't put in the post was that a team from the NSA visited me in California a few months later. But again, had I been tricked, it wouldn't have mattered.