Register: The NSA acted as a barrier to the rollout of encryption as standard from the very inception of the internet back in the mid 1970s.
Engineers had wanted to add a network encryption layer as part of the original specifications for TCP/IP. Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman had published a paper on public key cryptography systems, so the kernel of a technology to make the internet secure was already there. However the algorithms that would have made the idea a practical reality had to wait until Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman published the RSA algorithm in 1977.
