The product we built (1984) was for team collaboration & business apps, and we placed a strong bet on crypto for end to end encryption rather than just the illu

The product we built (1984) was for team collaboration & business apps, and we placed a strong bet on crypto for end to end encryption rather than just the illusion of security via access control. It hadn’t been done before. Crypto based products in that era were classified as munitions. They didn’t know what to do with our request; initially they suggested granting us 20 bits for symmetric keys. We got them up to 32. Within a couple years they went to 40. But we used 64 in our US products and wanted to deliver that level globally. The principled thing to do would be to have never tried to ship our product outside the US, knowing the export regime. But we had customers who wanted to communicate and collaborate with teams globally. Their alternative was to send everything in the clear, and I wanted to deliver a secure comms system for my global customers. Ultimately I felt that they were better off with something to protect them - even a compromise - rather than nothing. The bet was that we could get rid of the compromise over time. (Thankfully, the hack was only necessary for a few short years.) While “working the issue” in DC, I personally came to the viewpoint that most of the policy makers were not inherently evil or stupid; they truly didn’t fully grasp the myriad implications of this new technology. The issues are complex, the pressures great, and it is difficult for them to know how to balance equities. And so, right or wrong, I felt my best bet to change the system was to use methods that I suppose Bruce Lee would call “fighting without fighting”, as opposed to purely principled extremism.