I did not know about the Newt Gingrich incident! That really adds some interest. There was definitely a lot of public attention to the issue at the time, and in some ways rightly so, but of course the resulting efforts were misdirected at a legislative fix. A point that I wanted to make in the article but I'm not sure I completely articulated was basically "this is what happens when Congress writes technical regulations," but of course this is far from the most egregious example of that.

The parallels to what we see today with pervasive surveillance and anti-encryption policy are significant, and it's frustrating to see how much less atwitter congress is about these issues today, when it's their own government doing the eavesdropping. As I make a jab towards in the article, I think that the people of today (and even the people of then) have given up on the privacy of their personal communications in some ways. I can't blame them, but it's clearly a problem that needs to be solved. Perhaps one way to look at it is this: in many ways, our communications on the internet have fewer privacy protections than our communications on landline phones. How did it get to be this way? History and policy, combined in an ugly way.