Digital encryption in the US

Doghouse – Encryption

Article from Issue 301/2025
Author(s):

Privacy, commerce, and even politics have influenced, and been influenced by, the issue of data encryption.

At Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the mid 1980s, I was directly involved with an issue of Unix systems having encryption code embedded in the operating system.

This was threatening to block the second release of our operating system, Ultrix, to many foreign countries, including (believe it or not) Great Britain. After all, we did have a couple of skirmishes with England, one in 1776 and another in 1812 – but I thought we had kissed and made up by 1986.

DEC's export department asked the question "Does Ultrix have encryption?" and our engineering group truthfully answered "yes." So our export department told us we couldn't ship to a wide variety of countries. Of course, we didn't mention that all of AT&T's Unix System V and Berkeley's BSD Unix also shipped encryption, all over the world.

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