"Mr. Kohn was referring to the National Security Agency, the arm of the Pentagon that develops and breaks the complex algorithms that are used to keep the most secret electronic secrets secret"

Funny how this needed explaining back then. The story was also accidentally right, the NSA was indeed breaking those "complex algorithms" already during development!

I found it funny how much of everything in this article needed explaining. Cryptography and NSA sure. But also the very concept of online retail, computer operating systems, the word "algorithm", a web browser, the web itself, etc., etc. So startling when so much of this is now so pervasive among regular people. Today's general public NYT readership might need some brief explanation of the finer points, but could be assumed to have some passing familiarity with all of it. Hell, that might have even been largely the case five years after this article.

Yeah, that comes off as extra naive today, although I'll point out that even Snowden didn't show that the NSA can crack PGP or properly-configured TLS (assuming we're only talking about on-the-wire eavesdropping and not a black bag job).

Also interesting was the mention of the Clipper key escrow debacle, and how this theme has recently popped up again.