“I wonder how different things would be if we had not eliminated the encryption export rules a few years ago.”
Do you seriously believe that only US can produce encryption technology? Most of the recent improvements in encryption algorithms and technology have come from outside of US (Western Europe, now increasingly Eastern Europe and Russia and even China). Even in the US, the people who actually implement and invent the new stuff are increasingly immigrants. The company I work for is a major player in this field and most of the people who work with security algoritms are non-US citizens. More than half are also located outside of US.
I thought aLgore invented encryption.