The breaking of encryption was essential to the war effort.
England would probably have fallen if they'd not been able to read the Enigma messages,
because every time the Germans sent bombers, the RAF knew where they were sending them,
and could mask the planes there to defend.
If any significant fraction of those attacks had gotten through, England would have been much more helpless,
may well have fallen and the course of World War II may have changed.
And that is the origin of the regulations that said, "This is ammunition, this is an item of war."
And the problem was, they didn't really take freedom of speech,
freedom of inquiry, academic freedom, into account in that.
But on the matter of encryption, terrorists are going to have greater access.
Coming up: the story of the U.S. Government's long battle to keep strong encryption out of the hands of its citizens,
and how First Amendment activists fought back.
Here's part three in a four-part series about how the cypherpunk movement of the 1990s
anticipated the promise and the peril that lay ahead, when the internet upended the world.
In 1977, researchers at MIT made an astonishing discovery, a mathematical system for encrypting
secret messages so powerful that it had the potential to make government spying effectively impossible.
But before these mathematicians could publish their research,
the NSA made it clear that doing so could land them in Federal prison.
The U.S. Government considered these mathematical systems modern weapons technologies
and distributing them was a crime under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations.
MIT halted plans to distribute the paper.
I decided quite literally, they are going to classify this over my dead body.
Mark Miller was a 20 year old student at Yale, who had read about this discovery in Scientific American.
So I traveled to MIT, managed to get my hand on a paper copy of this thing.
I went to a variety of different copy shops so I wasn't making lots of copies in any one place.
I sent them to home and hobbyist computer organizations and magazines all across the country.
And I gave copies of the paper to some select friends of mine.
And I told them if I disappear, make sure this gets out.
Early in 1978, the U.S. federal government backed off and decided to allow the publication.
And the world has been on a different course ever since it got published.
But the Crypto Wars were just getting started.
In the late 70s, the National Security Agency declared the unrestrained public discussion
of cryptographic research threatened our national security.
The private cryptography community and the government have been sparring over the issue ever since.
Marshall McLuhan said that one day we would all live in a global village.
Well, the global village has arrived and it's main street is called the internet.
The internet also created an electronic surveillance apparatus that was like nothing the world had ever seen,
which meant that the cryptography breakthroughs of the 1970s were no longer a rarified topic.
They were privacy salvation.
Internet users could shield their online activities from spying,
and that sent the intelligence community once again scrambling to stop the dissemination of this powerful tool.
In 1991, a software developer named Phil Zimmermann
released the first relatively easy to use secret messaging system built with strong encryption, which was called PGP.
Somehow it got overseas. Now that it's over there, people are using it and I'm delighted to hear good stories
about how it's used in places where there are oppressive governments.
So the U.S. justice department launched a three year criminal investigation of Zimmermann
on the grounds that by making his software accessible outside the country,
he could be guilty of exporting weapons under the Arms Control Act.
Meanwhile, the National Security Agency argued that Zimmermann software
would be used by child molesters and criminals.
"PGP, they say is out there to protect freedom fighters in Latvia" said the NSA's general counsel.
But the fact is the only use that has come to the attention of law enforcement agencies
is a guy who was using PGP so the police could not tell what little boys he had seduced over the net.
Child pornographers, terrorists, money launderers, take your pick.
These are the people who will be invoked as the bringers of death and destruction.
Well, it's true. It's true.
It's true.
So they're right? Yes.
But all technologies have had bad effects, the telephone, extortion, death threats, bomb threats,
kidnapping cases, uncontrolled publishing of books could allow satanic books to appear.
The cypherpunks argued that PGP was like any other published material because under the hood,
it was just a series of instructions to be carried out by a machine.
"Restraint on freedom of expression of software writers is anathema in a free society,
and a violation of the First Amendment" wrote the economist and entrepreneur Phil Salin
in 1991 essay titled Freedom of Speech in Software.
Encryption can't be controlled whether or not it's powerful or has impacts on the government,
because it's free speech.
In the early 90s, John Gilmore, who was a co-founder of the cypherpunk movement risked going to jail
in his campaign to force the government to acknowledge that regulating encryption violated the First Amendment.
We basically had a community of a thousand people scattered around who were all trying different ideas
on how to get around the government to get encryption to the masses.
What we're afraid of several years from now is the terrorists both hit their encryption button on the telephone.
And even though we have access, we can't understand what they're saying on a real-time basis.
The Clinton administration told Congress that Americans have no constitutional right to choose their own method of encryption
and push for legislation that would require companies to build in a mechanism for law enforcement agencies to break in.
We're in favor of strong encryption, robust encryption.
We just want to make sure we have a trap door and a key under some judge's authority
where we can get there if somebody is planning a crime.
The cypherpunks looked for ways to undercut the government's case by pointing out the similarities
between encryption software and other forms of protected speech.
With Phil Zimmermann under federal investigation for making his software available for download outside the U.S.
To prove a point he convinced MIT press to mirror his action in the analog world,
by printing out the PGP source code, adding a binding, and shipping it to European bookstores.
The government knew if they went to court to suppress the publication of a book
from a university, that they would lose and they would lose in a hurry.
There were people who actually got encryption code tattooed on their bodies and then started asking,
"Can I go to a foreign country?"
We printed up T-shirts that had encryption code on them and submitted them to the government Office of Munitions Control.
Can we publish this T-shirt?
Ultimately, they never answered that query because they realized to say no would be
to invite a lawsuit they would lose and so the best answer was no answer at all.
Tell us a little bit more about encryption technology?
No, no.
Thank you.
I hesitated even to make, use the word, but I'm not using it anymore, right?
In 1996, the justice department announced that it wouldn't pursue criminal charges against Phil Zimmermann,
and major court victories came when two federal judges found that encryption is protected by the First Amendment.
The Crypto Wars are still ongoing.
What we won in the first rounds was the right to publish it and the right to put it in mass market software
but what we didn't actually do is deploy it in mass market software.
Now there are major companies building serious encryption into their products,
and we're getting a lot of pushback from the government about this.
We're about the rule of law, but we don't want to create spaces that are beyond the breach of the law in the United States, right?
It's not just the reprehensible behavior of sexual predation on children,
but myriad additional forms of serious crime enabled by end to end encryption.
I'm not optimistic that privacy will prevail in the Crypto Wars.
It's an ongoing struggle.
In the early 90s, at the same time that Gilmore was fighting his legal battle for freedom of speech in software,
the cypherpunks were exploring cryptography's potential in the context of collapsing political borders
and the rise of liberal democracy.
Part four in this series, we'll look at how those dreams turn to disillusionment, the death of the cypherpunk movement,
and its rebirth following the invention of Bitcoin.