Frank Wijnans

In the 90s, governments seriously tried to make encryption illegal. Not a conspiracy theory. It's documented. In the US, strong cryptography was classified as a weapon. Same category as missiles. Exporting it without a license was, legally, arms trafficking. In 1991, Phil Zimmermann released PGP, software that let anyone encrypt their emails. His reward: three years under federal criminal investigation. His crime? Putting math on the internet. In 1993, the White House rolled out the Clipper Chip. The idea: an encryption chip in every phone, with a copy of the key held by the government. "You can have encryption, but we keep the key." A year later, a researcher named Matt Blaze found a flaw in the system. The project slowly died. Meanwhile, the cypherpunks fought back with whatever they had. PGP's source code was printed as a book, because a book is protected by free speech and software wasn't. People got the RSA algorithm tattooed on their arms. T-shirts with a few lines of code on them were legally "munitions." And France? Worse. Encryption was treated as military equipment there too. You needed government authorization to use anything stronger than weak encryption. It took until 1999 for the government to loosen up, and 2004 for its use to become truly free. The arguments back then? Terrorists, pedophiles, mafias, drug dealers. The "Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse," as the cypherpunks called them. And then encryption won. Not because governments were convinced. Because the economy needed it. No encryption, no card payments online, no Amazon, no online banking, no modern internet. That little padlock in your address bar is exactly that. What was sold as a weapon for criminals became the infrastructure of the entire global economy. Now, 2026. The EU just extended to 2028 the framework allowing private messages to be scanned, months after Parliament had rejected it. And Chat Control 2.0 keeps pushing to go further. In France, lawmakers tried to slip a backdoor into encrypted messaging through an anti-drug-trafficking bill. In the UK, Apple chose to pull an encryption feature rather than build a backdoor. And it's not just encryption. Open-source AI models. Bitcoin and stablecoins. Social networks that governments want to rein in because they bypass traditional media. The stated reasons aren't the same as in 1995. Back then it was the Cold War and arms exports. Today it's child protection, drug trafficking, disinformation, "AI safety." But look closely and it all comes down to one thing. The state losing control. Every time a technology lets individuals do on their own what used to go through the state, the same reaction follows. Communicating without being listened to. Exchanging value without a central bank. Producing intelligence without permission. Getting informed without going through official channels. The state doesn't react to the threat. It reacts to the loss of control. The threat is the story they wrap around it. The 90s taught us one thing: code won. Not in the courts, not through lobbying. Because once math is public, you can't un-invent it. It'll be the same this time.