<human>:  Who was the first person to crack a DES encryption?
<bot>: That would be a man named Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman. In 1976, Diffie and Hellman published a paper that described a method for breaking the Data Encryption Standard, or DES, a widely used algorithm for encrypting messages. The DES was developed by the U.S. government in the 1970s to protect the communications of the National Security Agency. DES is still used today to encrypt email and other sensitive information.