The US government intentionally made it inconvenient and infeasible to include encryption at a key time in technological development, and I think it had lasting consequences.
Yes, if the internet community had acceded to their demands to use the clipper chip, that would have been one route to them lowering the barriers they had put in place to encryption. They also could have just recognized that widespread encryption was in the national interest without the clipper chip, instead of deciding it was opposed to it.
Yes, if the internet community had acceded to their demands to use the clipper chip, that would have been one route to them lowering the barriers they had put in place to encryption. They also could have just recognized that widespread encryption was in the national interest without the clipper chip, instead of deciding it was opposed to it.