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Bit of mudslinging going on about a "clipper chip." I was much too young to really know what was going on with this (can read up on it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip), but it's interesting to see that there were security concerns in 1996 similar to the ones we have in 2012. http://www.dolekemp96.org/agenda/issues/internet.htm

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That's a good thing for today's hackers and activists to review. It shows the long-term agenda of the government in wanting to have ubiquitous surveillance powers. And it shows you can win some of these battles.

Can you imagine a web without SSL? Today people openly call for all sites to do https all the time, but in the 90s, a web server (or even a web browser) that could do https in a non-broken fashion was officially a dangerous munition. To do this basic thing you had to cobble some open source software together, kind of like how people do it with ffmpeg and implementations of closed-source codecs today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_in_the_U...

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