Back in the NES days Tengen called the United States Copyright Office and told them they needed the technical details of the NES lockout chip to defend themselves in a copyright lawsuit. The Copyright Office faxed over the requested information. Except it was social engineering, there was no copyright lawsuit. Tengen used that proprietary information to build their own cartridges without paying the NES licences costs.

Ah yeah, because fake subpoenas didn’t work before the internet existed?

> I do not believe that those channels for government no longer exist. If they choose to make themselves impossible to locate offline, this is on them.

Who says they ever existed? Back in the pre-internet days the situation was just worse.

Even the federal government can’t manage this, just look at misissuances of .gov domain names.