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@chaskin.eth
TIL in 1977 the NSA tried to block MIT's public key cryptography research, calling it a modern weapon. 20 yr old Mark Miller secretly copied the paper, shared it nationwide, and told friends: "If I disappear, share this." In 1978, the gov backed down, and encryption went public
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Thomas
@aviationdoctor.eth
The US government's enacting of export controls for cryptographic keys in excess of a certain size in the 1990s is what got me interested in cryptography in the first place. Imagine how much societal and technological progress we would have wasted if if public-key cryptography had been kept secret or banned for years
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Garrett
@garrett
based
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