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opers behind it suddenly announced on their website that the tech- nology could no longer be trusted. “WARNING: Using TrueCrypt is not secure as it may contain unfixed security issues,” the an- nouncement read. The encryption community flew into a frenzy of speculation and concern. Had the developers found out that the NSA had finally compromised the program, and were they alerting users to that fact without explicitly saying so? (One encryption mes- sage board community concluded that the first letters of each word in the announcement, combined and converted from Latin, spelled out the warning “Don’t use TrueCrypt because it is under the con- trol of the NSA.”) Or had they just gotten bored of fixing the program for free?

The timing of the announcement raised the possibility that Le Roux’s arrest had prompted the TrueCrypt shutdown, either be- cause he himself had been working on the software or because his disappearance had spooked those who were. “What we did think was that one of the reasons they shut down was that they might be under some sort of pressure,” Matthew Green, a computer science professor at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute, who had studied TrueCrypt, told me in 2015. “It’s possible that could connect with him being in custody.” Le Roux, for his part, would only admit in his testimony to having created E4M.

Three years later, someone in contact with Le Roux while he was in custody told me that Le Roux had boasted privately of launching TrueCrypt himself. Le Roux claimed he’d kept his in- volvement secret and then handed the software off to others, but had funded TrueCrypt’s continued development over the years. Le Roux also told this source that after his arrest he had taken advan- tage of the leeway granted by his DEA handlers to operate freely online, and signaled to TrueCrypt’s developers that he was in prison. Whether they abandoned the software because of Le Roux’s warning or because his funding dried up, the source didn’t know. “It was his baby,” this person said. “I still don’t understand why he publicly won’t take credit for it.”