Not everything that happens in every single software company, university, and so on, all across the land, is because the government has “allowed” it. For one thing, a lot of cryptography research and software development happens outside of “the” country, far from anywhere that “the” governments would be able to allow it or not.
Actually, the US government in the 90s actually did make a really substantial effort to make it illegal to use cryptography that they couldn’t crack. Their efforts did not meet with universal success even before they abandoned them. That was the whole impetus behind T-shirts with the PGP source code (And tattoos! Seriously, one of my friends met somebody with a PGP source code tattoo, back when it was questionably legal to have one.) There are quotes by many many people about the limits of what the government is able to dictate to people that they are and are not able to do, even in very strict totalitarian societies.
You seem very confident in your opinion so I won’t try to dissuade you from it any further. Just taking a little time to try to shed some light. There actually are ways you can find out about how this stuff works in reality, though, to at least a little bit of an extent. Like I said, the Snowden leaks are a really good and fascinating way.
Best of luck! Starting from a standpoint of total skepticism and suspicion of everything online-related and government-related probably isn’t a bad place to start from, all things considered.
Not everything that happens in every single software company, university, and so on, all across the land, is because the government has “allowed” it. For one thing, a lot of cryptography research and software development happens outside of “the” country, far from anywhere that “the” governments would be able to allow it or not.
Actually, the US government in the 90s actually did make a really substantial effort to make it illegal to use cryptography that they couldn’t crack. Their efforts did not meet with universal success even before they abandoned them. That was the whole impetus behind T-shirts with the PGP source code (And tattoos! Seriously, one of my friends met somebody with a PGP source code tattoo, back when it was questionably legal to have one.) There are quotes by many many people about the limits of what the government is able to dictate to people that they are and are not able to do, even in very strict totalitarian societies.
You seem very confident in your opinion so I won’t try to dissuade you from it any further. Just taking a little time to try to shed some light. There actually are ways you can find out about how this stuff works in reality, though, to at least a little bit of an extent. Like I said, the Snowden leaks are a really good and fascinating way.
Best of luck! Starting from a standpoint of total skepticism and suspicion of everything online-related and government-related probably isn’t a bad place to start from, all things considered.