Yeah, I was raised in the Catholic School system, denied sex, and taught that God will win out in the end.....all we must do is endure the idiots until then. :-)

The war on terrorist groups makes the government less friendly to things like widespread adoption of strong encryption. They don't want the terrorists to have secret communications in plain view.

Oh come on, the terrorists have the knowledge already, and it is just wishful thinking on the part of our current leaders that they can someone keep the genie in the bottle.

I admit, I'm guilty of that type of erroneous thinking too. I was raised on movies showing the "rest of the non-Anglo world" as ignorant primitives, running around barefoot, trying to feed themselves. But have our illustrious leaders watched the news lately? Chinese cities make the US look like a third world wannabe. Having a Phd is almost a pre-requisite for getting into the Russian mob.

It dosn't take much training to use a computer, and I'll bet most terrorists have better computer skills than John McCain.

The real reason the government opposes encryption is that most of them can't/don't want to learn it. And they figure if they stick their heads in the sand, it won't bite them on the a*s.

Hey, I never said they had reasoned out their desire. I just said they don't want it. In quite recent years it was illegal to export any kind of cryptographic information from the US at all in a way in which anyone from certain countries might find it. See encryption golf (one time pad) for a brief discussion of how useful that was.