The history of crypto in the US is actually much more interesting than that and for a time exporting any crypto tools was a felony (exporting munitions). Steve

The history of crypto in the US is actually much more interesting than that and for a time exporting any crypto tools was a felony (exporting munitions). Steven Levy's book goes into pretty good detail about this: http://www.amazon.com/Crypto-Rebels-Government-Privacy-Digital/dp/0140244328 http://www.amazon.com/Crypto-Rebels-Government-Privacy-Digit... At the time the NSA was not pleased about the release of DES and was also very concerned about PGP. There were attempts at laws requiring key escrow available to the NSA among other restrictions on foreign key size etc. It wasn't really until the late nineties that this stopped. For a time they would probably have liked to ban all citizen encryption all together, but it became obvious that this couldn't be enforced (and it's necessary for things like e-commerce). A lot of early crypto based patents and research were retroactively classified - there was a big historical legal battle to get things where they are today.