This was the keynote talk at the annual Stanford Computer Forum in 2018: http://forum.stanford.edu/events/2018/2018plenary.php http://forum.stanford.edu/events

This was the keynote talk at the annual Stanford Computer Forum in 2018: http://forum.stanford.edu/events/2018/2018plenary.php http://forum.stanford.edu/events/2018/2018plenary.php I submit it now because it seems we're entering a new phase of the crypto wars with some Republicans in Congress pushing a bill to add backdoors to all cryptography. This talk covers the history of those attempts from the early days, and how academia was able to initiate a dialog with the NSA and eventually convince them that America's security interests were better served by strong cryptography than by backdoored cryptography. I hope a similar outcome may be possible this time too.