A reminder for those who sit on the fence regarding whether “code is speech” — global access to strong cryptography would not be where it is today without a 1997 project to publish — as a book — the entire source code of PGP 5.0i in an OCR-friendly format, in such a way as to emphatically subvert the US Government export controls on cryptography by the power of the 1st Amendment:
Interesting history is documented in the links below; I’m particularly taken with an observation from Ian Grigg in the first link:
The story has a sad ending. In the last months of 1999, the US government released the controls on exporting free and open cryptography. Hailed by all as a defeat, it was really a tactical withdrawal from ground that wasn’t sustainable. The cypherpunks lost more: with the departure of their clear enemy, they dispersed over time, and emerging security and financial cryptography entrepreneurs lost our coolness factor and ready supply of cryptoplumbers. Lots of crypto projects migrated back to the US, where control was found by other means. The industry drifted back to insecure-practice-by-fiat. Buyers stopped being aware of security, and they were setup for the next failure and the next and the next… Strategic victory went to the US government, which still maintains a policy of keeping the Internet insecure by suppressing crypto where and when it can. […]