Security → Begun the Crypto Wars Has

Or round two anyway.

I found the referenced .pdf a fascinating review of the first battles. Some of you may be too young to remember the awesome "Clipper-Chip" brain-fart.

»www.newamerica.org/oti/d ··· e-1990s/
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“Any claim that the root of a problem is simple should be treated the same as a claim that the root of a problem is Bigfoot. Simplicity and Bigfoot are found in the real world with about the same frequency.” – David Wong

Encryption is protection against intrusion into private communications, and to "free citizens", potential intruders include the government itself. The right of and ability of those who dissent to organize opposition to the actions of those holding power can be and has been quenched repeatedly by those possessing political power in government at various times, some of the more noteworthy examples occurring under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. But the ancestry of such attempts to quench opposition extends to well before the nation's founding, and was part of the core abuses leading to the American Revolution. Because all national governments have the power of the gun, they also have an inherent ability thereby to "cow" their citizens. Preservation of the rights of the citizenry to protect the privacy of their communications is crucial to the free exercise of dissent and opposition against those controlling the reins of governmental power at any given moment.

Anyone in government who believes it makes sense to entrust private encryption keys to the tender mercies of any government agency utterly fails to grasp the reality that, to many citizens, government intrusion is one of the major concerns those citizens will forever have. And no promises or supposed provisions made by government to "trust us" will ever overcome the portion of innate, instinctive suspicion ordinary citizens justifiably have about the ultimate integrity of those placed in power over them. A reality of human nature is that power corrupts, and the more the power, the more the corruption.
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The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money. -- A. de Tocqueville

Yep. And the idea that Government should be able to listen to all communication is no more modern than the computer age. The German Enigma machine, the one about which numerous books have been written and movies made about, was an adaptation of a commercial encryption system. The desire of people to be able to communicate without being eavesdropped on by whoever, including Governments, is not a new thing.
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“Any claim that the root of a problem is simple should be treated the same as a claim that the root of a problem is Bigfoot. Simplicity and Bigfoot are found in the real world with about the same frequency.” – David Wong