Published by The Lawfare Institute 
                  in Cooperation With
                                 For the past 50 years,

End-to-End Encryption Is a Critical National Security Tool

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2024-11-22 15:30:04

Published by The Lawfare Institute in Cooperation With

For the past 50 years, governments have carried out a campaign against end-to-end encryption (E2EE), a technology that secures communications so that only the message endpoints (the sender and receiver of the message) can see the unencrypted communication. From the 1970s to the late 1990s, the fight against widespread use of E2EE was carried out largely by the National Security Agency (NSA), with the FBI joining the battle in the early 1990s. By the late 1990s, strong encryption was increasingly being adopted by nations around the world. At the same time, export controls were becoming increasingly bothersome to the computer industry. Members of Congress began introducing bills to liberalize the cryptographic export regime.

Two changes occurred in response. With increasing use of strong encryption by foreign governments, NSA increased efforts in computer network exploitation, extracting information from computer networks. The executive branch offered an olive branch to the computer industry by loosening export controls on encryption. Though not all controls ended, the ones that mattered most to the industry were lifted. The latter enabled U.S. products with strong encryption to be exported—and also made it much simpler for such products to be sold domestically.

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