From wikipedia:

The Crypto Wars is an unofficial name for the U.S. and allied governments’ attempts to limit the public’s and foreign nations’ access to cryptography strong enough to resist decryption by national intelligence agencies (especially USA’s NSA).

Phil Zimmermann was a key player in this period. The PGP software he authored was considered as munitions by the US government and subject to export licenses. The US government at this time was keen to avoid strong crypto falling into the hands of civilians and foreign governments. At this time the US government was also pushing for specialised key-escrowed chips that would perform encryption, but make the plaintext readable to NSA if necessary. This was rightly considered a gross violation of privacy, rights, and a huge security hole by the cypherpunks.

Since Public Key encryption was considered a munition, t-shirts like this (containing the RSA sourcecode) were created as a form of civil disobedience using Adam Back’s three-line Perl implementation of RSA:

Links

• Phil Zimmermann’s page on this site
• Phil Zimmermann on Wikipedia
• Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) on Wikipedia
• 01-Jan-1993 Wired Magazine - Crypto Rebels by Steven Levy
• 12-Jun-1994 The New York Times - Battle of the Clipper Chip by Stephen Levy
• Crypto Wars on Wikipedia

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Please note that the information presented on this site was composed from publicly available materials in mainly 2017 and 2018 and has not been significantly updated since.

The information presented here may be significantly out of date or even inaccurate. In the case of inaccuracy, please file an Issue in the GitHub repo. The site should not be used as a source of truth.