Review of Crypto Wars—The Fight for Privacy in the Digital Age: A Political History of Digital Encryption.

I Crypto Wars - The Fight for Privacy in the Digital Age: A Political History of Digital Encryption i is the first scholarly history of the sixty-year political debate over perceived promises and perils of widely-available cryptography in the Anglophone west, especially the United States. Jarvis rejects the dominant approach to periodizing the crypto wars, which labels the debates of the 1990s "Crypto War 1.0" and the post-Snowden debates "Crypto War 2.0." Jarvis claims to be establishing fact and dispensing with fictions, but the only places in the text where this applied is in Jarvis' defense of the NSA and FBI against their critics. Because Jarvis framed the book so narrowly, he missed the opportunity to write a truly dynamic history of the crypto wars.[6] On the other hand, because Jarvis axiomatically assumes the existence of the NSA, he overlooks another possible beginning to the crypt wars. [Extracted from the article]