Skipjack tuna commercial tunas, and its population is considered sustainable against its current consumption. Its fishing is still controversial due to the methodology, with rod and reel or fishery options being promoted as ecologically preferable. Purse seine methods are considered unsustainable by some authorities due to excess bycatch, although bycatch is said to be much reduced if fish aggregation devices are not used. These considerations have led to the availability of canned skipjack marked with the fishing method used to catch it. Skipjack is considered to have "moderate" mercury contamination. As a result, pregnant women are advised against eating large quantities. In
Skipjack (cipher) cipher was published in 2002, but a more recent paper with attack designer as a co-author clarifies that no attack on the full 32 round cipher is known to date. An algorithm named Skipjack forms part of the back-story to Dan Brown's 1998 novel "Digital Fortress". In Brown's novel, Skipjack is proposed as the new public-key encryption standard, along with a back door secretly inserted by the NSA ("a few lines of cunning programming") which would have allowed them to decrypt Skipjack using a secret password and thereby "read the world's email". When details of the cipher are publicly released,