In the mid-1990s, RSA and Bidzos led a "fierce" public campaign against the Clipper Chip, an encryption chip with a backdoor that would allow the U.S. government to decrypt communications. The Clinton administration pressed telecommunications companies to use the chip in their devices, and relaxed export restrictions on products that used it. (Such restrictions had prevented RSA Security from selling its software abroad.) RSA joined civil libertarians and others in opposing the Clipper Chip by, among other things, distributing posters with a foundering sailing ship and the words "Sink Clipper!" RSA Security also created the DES Challenges to show that the widely used DES encryption was breakable by well-funded entities like the NSA.