In the years preceding the Korean War, the United States responded to the advancing encryption and communications technologies of the Soviets by creating the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA). And according to Mental Floss, while the agency was clunky and ineffectual against the Russians, it turned out to work quite well against the North Koreans. AFSA was able to intercept quite a bit of top-secret communications from North Korea, giving the agency a needed win after a rocky start.

AFSA team members found that once the messages had been intercepted, the hard part was over. For what they discovered was that North Korea was sending highly sensitive military information without encoding it. They didn’t need encryption specialists at all, just a Korean translator. The North Koreans did catch on to the fact that their messages were being snatched away and tried to encrypt them thereafter, but the AFSA specialists had no problem decoding them. The agency would go on to be restructured into the National Security Agency, which whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed in 2013 was pretty much watching every single thing we do on the internet.