The RIAA Succeeds Where the Cypherpunks Failed
http://www.shirky.com/writings/riaa_encryption.html

For years, the US Government has been terrified of losing surveillance
powers over digital communications generally, and one of their biggest
fears has been broad public adoption of encryption. If the average
user were to routinely encrypt their email, files, and instant
messages, whole swaths of public communication currently available to
law enforcement with a simple subpoena (at most) would become either
unreadable, or readable only at huge expense. [...]

The Government's failure to get the Clipper implemented came at a
heady time for advocates of digital privacy -- the NSA was losing
control of cryptographic products, Phil Zimmerman had launched his
Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) email program, and the Cypherpunks, a merry
band of crypto-loving civil libertarians, were on the cover of
[http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.02/crypto.rebels.html] the
second issue of Wired. The floodgates were opening, leading to...

...pretty much nothing. Even after the death of Clipper and the launch
of PGP, the Government discovered that for the most part, users didn't
_want_ to encrypt their communications. The single biggest barrier to
the spread of encryption has turned out to be not control but apathy.
Though business users encrypt sensitive data to hide it from one
another, the use of encryption to hide private communications from the
Government has been limited mainly to techno-libertarians and a small
criminal class.