Ham radio was explicitly never meant to be private - if you're trying to communicate and don't want someone snooping on your conversation, you can pick up a pho

Ham radio was explicitly never meant to be private - if you're trying to communicate and don't want someone snooping on your conversation, you can pick up a phone or find some other channel instead. It should be possible for all stations to receive messages on the ham bands, and encryption is entirely orthogonal to that goal. Also, it's worth noting that some cryptography is allowed, just nothing that obscures the message - say you have a device which can be remotely controlled via radio and want to send it a control message ("turn on relay 1" for example), you're allowed to cryptographically sign your message to authenticate that it came from you - just not encrypt the message body.