What are crypto wars

Crypto Wars is an unofficial term for attempts by the US and allied governments to restrict public and foreign access to strong cryptography in order to avoid decoding by national intelligence agencies.

The goal of these acts is clear: no one or nation can rely on encryption methods that are unbreakable by national spy agencies. As a result, no one would be safe from snooping by agencies like the NSA, the CIA, or the FBI. This condition stems from a difficult period in history, the Cold War. On the one hand, the Western block aimed to safeguard its communications and prevent the Eastern block from obtaining robust encryption technology. They, on the other hand, desired to do the same. Both camps sought to spy on each other at the same time, seeking for methods to break their systems. A circumstance that prompted some unusual responses.

During the first crypto war, in the 1990s, privacy campaigners and security experts fought against broad US cryptography export controls and purposeful encryption weakening. The outcome of the conflict is primarily to blame for the growing usage and availability of encryption techniques, as well as the global expansion of e-commerce. Steven Levy, a former Newsweek chief technology correspondent who literally wrote the book on the first crypto war in 2001, summed up the outcome in five words: "public crypto was our friend," implying that the US government's position shifted away from viewing cryptography solely as a threat to national security.

With the Snowden revelations in 2013, the world was engulfed in a second crypto war, which continues to this day. The current topic of disagreement is whether government agencies should have unrestricted access to communications data and the ability to unlock personal electronic devices.

To some kind of a crypto war, we can put governments efforts to make applications such as WhatsApp and Telegram decrypted, so they could access the conversations. WhatsApp for example has end to end encryption, which means that no third-party (even government) can not read or access it.