Question

Review the excerpt from The Code Book.

In 1998, a report by Wayne Madsen revealed that the Swiss cryptographic company Crypto AG had built backdoors into some of its products, and had provided the U.S. Government with details of how to exploit these backdoors. As a result, America was able to read the communications of several countries. In 1991 the assassins who killed Shahpour Bakhtiar, the exiled former Iranian prime minister, were caught thanks to the interception and backdoor decipherment of Iranian messages encrypted using Crypto AG equipment.

In this paragraph, the author uses a real-life example to demonstrate how cryptography

can help the government.
can be dangerous.
is a Swiss specialty.
is unreasonably expensive.

Answer 1

can help the government.

The example shows Crypto AG's backdoors allowed the U.S. to read encrypted communications and catch the assassins, illustrating a way cryptography (or exploited cryptographic systems) assisted government action.