> The whole US government tried to ban encryption wholesale in the 1990s
This simply isn't true.
I'm not sure if you're attempting to absolve Biden of his dreadful part in banning encryption, but if the entire government wanted something to happen, it would have happened.
Yes, PGP was out in the open, however, the government obviously could still have required it, still could have mandated the Clipper Chip, etc.
Also several members of the government notably spoke out against it, including Senators John Ashcroft & John Kerry.
Biden never banned encryption; the only statute I can find that bears his name says the opposite.
I'm interested in the Ashcroft and Kerry references you're thinking of. Were they contemporaneous, or from the late '90s? In the late 1990s, there was a sharp shift towards liberalizing crypto, with competing bills introduced in the House and Senate by both parties. The argument shifted from "will we mandate key escrow for the general public" to "is it OK for us to provide a facility to mandate key escrow for systems sold to the federal government should we want to do so in the future".
You're right to call me out on one thing: "the entire government" was imprecise wording. I should have said "the Democratic administration, the preceding Republican administration, and prominent members of both the Senate and the House on both sides of the aisle".
This simply isn't true.
I'm not sure if you're attempting to absolve Biden of his dreadful part in banning encryption, but if the entire government wanted something to happen, it would have happened.
Yes, PGP was out in the open, however, the government obviously could still have required it, still could have mandated the Clipper Chip, etc.
Also several members of the government notably spoke out against it, including Senators John Ashcroft & John Kerry.