We should never forget that the U.S. government tried to limit export of cryptography:
EFF's landmark legal victory in Bernstein v. Department of State greatly reduced the burdens and barriers to exporting open source encryption software, including export through publication on the Internet.Beginning in 1995, EFF represented Daniel J. Bernstein, a Berkeley mathematics Ph.D. student, who wished to publish an encryption algorithm he developed in the form of source code and a paper describing and explaining the algorithm, called Snuffle.Under the applicable laws at the time — the United States Munitions List of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), and later the U.S. Export Administration Regulations (EAR) — encryption was considered a military technology whose export was strictly regulated in order to preserve a competitive security advantage for the U.S.As a result, the law prohibited publication without prior approval of the government, and that prior approval was generally refused except for extremely weak encryption. Not only did these regulations chill the speech of individuals like Daniel Bernstein, they hampered American business by limiting the export of encryption technologies and methods. Then, as now, EFF saw clearly the importance of protecting speech online and the necessity of encryption to building a web with privacy and security protections.
and encryption to DES by pretending it's secure enough until they couldn't anymore because the EFF built a DES Cracker for less than $250,000 which could crack DES encryption in less than 3 days:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today raised the level of honesty in crypto politics by revealing that the Data Encryption Standard (DES) is insecure. The U.S. government has long pressed industry to limit encryption to DES (and even weaker forms), without revealing how easy it is to crack. Continued adherence to this policy would put critical infrastructures at risk; society should choose a different course.To prove the insecurity of DES, EFF built the first unclassified hardware for cracking messages encoded with it. On Wednesday of this week the EFF DES Cracker, which was built for less than $250,000, easily won RSA Laboratory's "DES Challenge II" contest and a $10,000 cash prize. It took the machine less than 3 days to complete the challenge, shattering the previous record of 39 days set by a massive network of tens of thousands of computers.
Btw, DJB's work is still very relevant. We're still in the migration from AES to ChaCha20 in various areas. One of the biggest advantages of ChaCha20 is that it's faster in software than AES without compromising on security (it's even more secure). For example, NIP44 (merged just a few days ago) uses ChaCha20.