This is all very interesting information on DES and John Gilmore.
But I was only wondering if choosing to put just that phrase in just that DES chip initialization code could have been a reference to the alleged backdooring of DES by NSA.
Most possibly an idle question, so please, move on!
No. John Gilmore does not, and did not at the time, think NSA had "backdoored" DES. He's one of the original "cypherpunks" from the 90s, and to anyone paying attention to cryptography in the 90s, the story behind NSA's involvement in DES is very well known:
NSA asked for (and got) a key strength reduction in DES and a set of mysterious changes to the algorithm's substitution tables ("s-boxes"). For a long time, there were murmurs that those unexplained s-box changes weakened DES so that NSA could cryptanalyze it.
It turned out, though, that the s-box changes strengthened DES against a class of attacks that NSA knew about and few others did: the s-box changes made it much harder to employ differential cryptanalysis against the cipher.
The key strength reduction obviously (especially in retrospect) wasn't a good thing, but by the 1990s any competent engineer could make a clear-eyed decision about the key strength they wanted, and, if DES's wasn't adequate for their application, could deploy either a different cipher, or Triple DES.
This is all very interesting information on DES and John Gilmore.
But I was only wondering if choosing to put just that phrase in just that DES chip initialization code could have been a reference to the alleged backdooring of DES by NSA.
Most possibly an idle question, so please, move on!