DES is also believed to contain a backdoor. And even if it only happened once, I still don't see how "Europe is farther down this path than the US is currently".
Thanks for the pointers. I knew about the UK but I believe it is an exception in Europe rather than the rule, as of now. Of course I agree with you that probably most countries will try to get there, unfortunately. Then again, I can only read stuff written in my own language or English so I don't have the full view.
DES isn't widely believed to contain a backdoor. There were (a long time ago) questions about the changes the NSA made to the S-boxes, but it has since become apparent that these changes actually strengthened the cipher against differential cryptanalysis.
DES was weakened in a much more prosaic manner: the effective key size was reduced to 56 bits.
