During the mid-1990s, the United States Government did not allow for international use of any cryptographic product unless the ciphertext could be decrypted by a third-party with a promise that the government could not read messages protected by the Data Encryption Standard (DES) even after it was shown as weak and broken. The EFF had made a piece of hardware called the "EFF DES Cracker" that could crack a message within 24 hours.