That's not true, dear V. Parrotta. FIPS is the Federal Information Processing Standard, which includes several publicly promulgated standards of the United States. These were established by the US federal government and are used by all civilian government organisations in the United States and by their contract suppliers. In short, these are requirements that the US government places on its suppliers, who in turn must have their products certified to these standards before they can be used by US government agencies.

The term FIPS is a benchmark for validating the effectiveness of cryptographic hardware. This means that the article with FIPS has overall level 2, physical security level 3.