Reign of Steel - NSA McGuffin

[cptbutton]

Adventure seed alert!

How the NSA Made Sure It Can Decrypt Your Online Communication

The agency has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world, the documents show.

As a GM I would assume that the Zoneminds haven't reinvented their entire codebase from scratch, and aren't conscious of the details of their sub-sub-systems any more than you are conscious of how your liver works.

So the Quest begins!

(Besides, a similar suggestion based on the Clipper Chip got me my playtester's copy back when.)

[RogerBW]

The approach I took in my campaigns was that a higher TL can trivially decrypt lower TL cryptography -- so for example the vidcom network of Zone London (TL8) is wide open to zonemind tapping and insertion.

And then there was the time the vidcom network started receiving network diagnostic packets saying that the Southampton node was offline... that would be the Southampton node that's in the middle of a Zone London robofac facility...