Clipper chip

Rarity: Common

The most frequent rarity: most Wikipedia articles become Commons.

Rarity follows how well known the article is: its views on the French and English Wikipedia over a year, and the number of languages it exists in.

At a glance

Class

Invention

Domain

Science and technology

Knowledge cost

1

In collections

Nobody has pulled it yet.

What Wikipedia says

The Clipper chip was a chipset that was developed and promoted by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) as an encryption device that secured "voice and data messages" with a built-in backdoor that was intended to "allow Federal, State, and local law enforcement officials the ability to decode intercepted voice and data transmissions." It was intended to be adopted by telecommunications companies for voice transmission.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article “Clipper chip”, under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Read the article on Wikipedia

Image: Travis Goodspeed, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.