The Crypto Wars
The 1990s fight over whether ordinary people were allowed strong encryption — won by the cryptographers, and restarted roughly every decade since.
Until the mid-1990s the United States classified encryption with long keys as munitions. Software for export was limited to 40-bit keys, the Clipper chip was to give authorities a spare key, and both Phil Zimmermann and Daniel Bernstein ended up in legal proceedings. The opposition came from cypherpunks, academics and eventually industry, which could not sell secure e-commerce with crippled keys.
The rules were relaxed between 1996 and 2000. But the weakened ciphers stayed in the code: in 2015 FREAK and Logjam showed that servers and browsers could still be tricked down to export grade, twenty years later. The debate returns under new names — exceptional access, client-side scanning — with essentially unchanged technical arguments.