Joe Biden tried to ban email encryption back in 1991
The <i>whole US government tried to ban encryption wholesale</i> in the 1990s; they even attempted to standardize a bespoke algorithm (Skipjack) that provided key escrow for law enforcement. During the same period, they religiously enforced export controls that classified any encryption code, including simple hash functions, as munitions. I remember buying a "this t-shirt is a munition" shirt in '95 by giving a website the numbers off the bottom of a check(!).<p>The government lost (although export controls still create annoyances today). Nobody in government seriously thinks industry is ever going to adopt a government-controlled encryption algorithm. Also, this isn't part of some secret history of the Internet; the entire cipherpunk movement was a reaction to the attempt to ban crypto.<p>If you want to keep perspective, it's important to remember that the world of 1993 looked very different from that of 2012. Very few people believed that every teenager in America would be using the Internet as their first line of communication, or that the Internet would steadily consume retail, finance, media, and even industrial controls. Commercial cryptography itself was merely nascent; "cryptography 2.0", a trend of the <i>late</i> 90s, <i>introduced</i> authenticated cryptography to the mainstream (prior to that people just encrypted and added checksums) --- look at SSHv1 and PGP for representative designs. Nobody understood anything in 1993.<p>Also:<p><i>Sense of Congress resolutions don't create law</i>. They're literally just statements of opinion. So the idea that this amendment would have "outlawed SSH" is directly mistaken.<p>And, the targeting of cryptography in this language is incidental. It was not only the "sense of Congress" but actual law that telco providers create facilities to enable (warranted) wiretaps --- that's CALEA, which passed in 1994. Biden's sense-of-Congress resolution is essentially just a capsule summary of CALEA made to sound slightly smarter with the word "plaintext".