The Swiss government has filed a criminal complaint over the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s alleged involvement in spying foreign governments sensitive data using the Crypto AG platform.
Crypto AG is a company that manufactured hardware and software encryption. The company is at the heart of the saga that has given it fortunes from selling encryption devices to more than 100 countries.
The company was actually a Swiss company specializing in communications and information security. However, it was secretly owned by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and West German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) from 1970 until about 1993, with the CIA continuing as its sole owner until about 2018.
With headquarters in Steinhausen, the company was a long-established manufacturer of encryption machines and a wide variety of cipher devices.
The company first came into the spotlight when they were contracted to build code-generating devices for the U.S..
When it was owned by the CIA, the company was said to have rigged devices they were selling, and built backdoors in almost all of the encryption devices.
With the company, the CIA created Operation Rubicon, which aims to conduct espionage on various foreign governments that acquired the devices.
The State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO), the institution that is part of the Swiss Economy Ministry, tasked with clearing exports that are highly sensitive, filed a criminal complaint about this potential breach of export control law.
While the outlines of Operation Rubicon were known for years, but details about its scope and duration were only made public on February 2020 by Swiss, German and U.S. investigative journalists.
This has the potential to ruin Switzerland’s reputation as neutral grounds, especially if they had prior information but failed to act.
SECO said that it wasn't part of this scheme, and stated that the institution was actually tricked into authorizing the sales of the devices to foreign states and would not have done so if they had knowledge of the scheme.
Crypto AG has clients from dozens of governments including those in Iran, India, Pakistan, Libya, Egypt, Chile, and Argentina.
Those countries paid millions to buy the devices, but also to be allegedly spied on.
“The Office of the Attorney General confirms it has received a criminal complaint by the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) dated Feb. 2, 2020 regarding possible violations of export control law,” said the attorney general’s office said in a statement.
The attorney general’s office wants to first review the complaint before deciding whether to open criminal proceedings, the statement said.
The Swiss government has tasked former Swiss Supreme Court justice to investigate Operation Rubicon.
The filed case is set to be heard in June 2020 after the High Court assesses the case files.
