> the first amendment

It took great effort to get crypto even recognized under the first amendment -- the USGov kept insisting that source code was not speech. In the 1990s it was against the law to let foreign nationals have access to the source code to DES. If you had folks from overseas in your organization, technically you couldn't let them see the source for crypto in your product (e.g., you had to wall off pieces of your repositories, and many companies did).

We could see a return to this. Don't take it for granted.

This can be partially fixed by printing the code on a tshirt.

https://www.wired.com/2000/08/court-to-address-decss-t-shirt...

Or by printing it in a book. There's LOTS of reluctance to ban actual, physical books in the US (and plenty of reasons that any ban would be struck down).

That said, up to the mid 90s it was theoretically against the law to show a foreign national a printed-out copy of DES. Crazy. I think it was published in magazines . . .

I don't believe enough people would care enough about it to start a civil war. I think what needs to happen is, instead of going into IT management at 40, where we do more harm than good anyway, we start running for office until the government is full of experienced tech people.

This! And talk to your representative / MP / whatever and tell them how important this is. Often they just don't know and they hear <SCARY THINGS> from people who have control+profit based agendas.

They'll get around it on a technicality. Just like NSA did with the 4th Amendment. "Yeah, sure we capture US citizens' data, but we don't do it on US soil and use another moniker (GCHQ) so its ok. Not our fault AT&T routed your call outside of constitutional jurisdiction!".

I'm expecting something like, "Yeah, sure you can have your 1st amendment, you just have to give us the keys if we ask or you get charged with destroying evidence/obstruction of justice which together carry more time than almost whatever possible illegal activity your encrypted traffic could have been concealing.

An we will arrest you for obstructing arrest.

The first amendment itself won't be overturned, but they very well may try to exclude cryptography as a form of protected speech. The federal government never wanted to allow it in the first place, they just realized how difficult it would be to put the genie back in the bottle. A Trump-chosen Supreme Court could very well make rulings that weaken or even entirely do away with this protection.