“Capstone is the U.S. government's long-term project to develop a set of standards for publicly-available cryptography, as authorized by the Computer Security Act of 1987. The primary agencies responsible for Capstone are NIST and the NSA (see above). The plan calls for the elements of Capstone to become official U.S. government standards, in which case both the government itself and all private companies doing business with the government would be required to use Capstone.” (http://www.qualix.com/html/cstone.html)