And? Cryptography is much easier to build, test, ship, and even export after 9/11 than it was before it. I shipped commercial security products before 9/11 and it was a nightmare. A huge portion of all desktops ran insecure crypto simply because it was too logistically challenging to ensure that they had good crypto and were easy to sell in Europe and Japan.
There is simply nothing to this analysis. The crypto policy fight happened in the late '90s, and crypto won.
Yes, the crypto fight was fought and seems to have been won by the people. But crypto is only one facet of a broader communications security policy.
It should be clear from recent controversies about "how private is your cellphone"; warrantless wiretapping and retro-active legalization of the same; various proposals for granting government authorities over the Internet (including a "kill switch" and a rumored upcoming Executive Order since he can't get it through Congress); that in the broader context, the US government is very much interested in monitoring communications.
We're talking about crypto on this thread. I see the controversies over government access to communications differently than you do, but I'm not particularly interested in litigating the issue. The federal government has not subverted cryptography in any meaningful way; industry does a perfectly great job of doing that job for them.
You have a lot more to fear from the Linux devs "cleaning up" OpenSSL's CSPRNG than you do from the NSA.
But this is not true. David Wagner and Ian Goldberg (the cryptographers who cracked GSM) have documented that the encryption used was purposefully weakened to enable realtime software decryption of voice calls.
That happened in the 1990s. At the same time, the US Government tried to directly criminalize unregulated sales of encryption. They lost both fights: in 2012, it is easier than it has ever been to encrypt phone calls in a manner that prevents LEOs from eavesdropping on them.
That's true for phone calls for people that know how to do this. However:
1. Most people are unable to do this technically.
2. The fact that you do it may constitute prima facie evidence of being a person of interest.
3. The government is trying very hard to get the means to wiretap VoIP.
4. It doesn't address traffic analysis at all. I know you said you aren't concerned about this, but there are plenty of people who are, and the government is going like gangbusters (literally, I guess) toward this.
What does "prima facie evidence of being a person of interest" even mean? You can be a person of interest simply by virtue of build and hair color.
The US Government hasn't restricted traffic analysis, and indeed nothing they have ever proposed W.R.T. encryption could have controlled traffic analysis.
Just correcting the parent, they said 2011 not 2001.
As to pure software crypto it's not really that important vs securing the endpoints. Consider WoW uses encryption when logging in, but a significant % of accounts are hacked before they add an authentication either as a key-chain or on your cellphone. I suspect if it ever became mainstream pure client side bitcoins would be DOA for more or less the same reasons.
There is simply nothing to this analysis. The crypto policy fight happened in the late '90s, and crypto won.