[gabcoh]

Small nitpick: it isn’t entirely true that cryptography is “all or nothing”. With things like time lock crypto and proof of work you can effectively have a scheme where large scale snooping is impossible (would take too much compute), but any individual transaction can be decrypted with a bit of work.

[nine_k]

Ah, I remember the times when the US only allowed to export 40-bit RSA in order to be able to do just this. As a result, non-US versions of e.g. SSL were not as secure, and quickly became laughably inadequate.

Frankly, I think that was mostly silly: you can either keep some math completely secret, or deal with the situation when the adversary knows the math a perfectly as you do, and can implement relevant computation. Unlike building actual rockets, implementing relatively simple math is not rocket science.