The “crypto wars” is the name given to a recurring political fight over who gets to use strong encryption. In the United States it came to a head in the 1990s, when the government treated cryptography much like a weapon, restricting its export under arms-control rules, while a new generation of technologists and privacy advocates argued that ordinary people had a right to keep their communications private. Phil Zimmermann set out the privacy side bluntly in his 1991 essay on PGP: “If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy” (https://philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/WhyIWrotePGP.html).
Three episodes defined the era. The Clipper chip, proposed by the Clinton administration in 1993, would have built a government key-escrow back door into encryption hardware; it collapsed after technical flaws and public backlash (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/clipper-chips-birthday-looking-back-22-years-key-escrow-failures). Zimmermann’s release of PGP drew a multi-year US criminal investigation over whether distributing strong crypto amounted to exporting munitions. And a mathematician named Daniel Bernstein sued the government over its rules.
The Bernstein case proved pivotal. As a graduate student he wanted to publish an encryption algorithm called “Snuffle” along with its source code and academic papers, but export regulations required prior government approval. With the Electronic Frontier Foundation backing him, “the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that software source code was speech protected by the First Amendment and that the government’s regulations preventing its publication were unconstitutional” (https://www.eff.org/cases/bernstein-v-us-dept-justice). That ruling, together with the Clipper collapse and the relaxation of export controls by the end of the 1990s, marked a broad win for strong civilian cryptography.
The wars never fully ended. The same arguments, that mandated back doors or key escrow would protect public safety, return whenever a government proposes weakening encryption, and the technical community’s answer remains what it was in the 1990s: a back door for the good guys is a back door for everyone.