https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Rachel_Hoffman

The end result is "Work for us or go to prison."

Slavery's perfectly legal. The 13th Amendment:

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat...

I think under the right conditions, a good many state intelligence services would not let the letter of the law get in their way. I just don't think the particular scenario above makes sense.

What makes sense:

-devs discovered some vulnerability but were persuaded that disclosing it would endanger important operations in progress. They were not coerced but reached a compromise with (agency).

-Devs were told, in no uncertain terms, that they need to discourage use of Truecrypt. Seems kind of low-impact, so probably not the case.

- Truecrypt was an (agency) project all along, and the faction arguing for universal access to strong cryptography finally lost out. The cat being out of the bag, and given the difficulty of introducing new vulnerabilities into an open-source tool used by the professionally paranoid, the best option was to try to discredit Truecrypt to the extent possible.

That may be your personal opinion, but legally speaking, it is not true in any sense.