There was the Clipper Chip [2] and the super-weak 40-bit 'export strength' cryptography [3] and the investigation of PGP author Phil Zimmerman for 'munitions export without a license' [4].

So there was a substantial effort to weaken cryptography, decades before 9/11.

On the dragnet surveillance front, there have long been rumours of things like ECHELON [1] being used for mass surveillance and industrial espionage. And the simple fact US spies were interested in weakening export SSL rather implied, to a lot of people, they had easy access to the ciphertext.

Of course, this was before so much stuff had moved online, so it was a different world.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Criminal_i...