“…the output of drand48() seeded with the time, which was indeed in 1997–98.”
Twenty-eight years of NSA backdoor theories, and the answer is a cheap random number generator seeded with the clock. Not a hidden sentence. Not a trapdoor. An Anthropic team cracked it and gave the $36,864 to Let’s Encrypt. The real scandal is that a federal standard shipped with unexplained seeds and nobody wrote down where they came from.