Internet and Society 1999 . . Conversations much more secure than the ubiquitous cold war movie Presidential secure line are now within the grasp of anyone with a couple of hundred dollars to spend.
Governments are scared and reacting.
The English inventors of public key cryptography are almost unknown because their invention was kept secret. In the United States, the government has floated several key escrow proposals to mandate that it have a back door to any conversation and has restricted the export of strong cryptography as munitions. Opposition to government schemes has proven once again that politics makes strange bedfellows. Criminals are aligned with big business. Moral conservatives link up with isolationists.