Not a whit. Any competent programmer who can master a little number theory and doesn't care about US patents can implement RSA encryption, El Gamal encryption or the Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol, and any competent programmer even without a knowledge of number theory can implement any of the various strong private-key systems (or variants thereof).
“Any competent programmer who can master a little number theory and doesn’t care about US patents can implement RSA encryption, El Gamal “
Actually, this is not true. Implementing a security algorithm is extremely difficult and patents are more or less irrelevant here. They give introduction to topic (better intro can be found in textbooks) and some specific claims for some limited parts of algorithm. US government can crack any code using these patents in a nanosecond.
Actually, IIRC the basic RSA patents have expired, so that one at least is freely available (though some of the later refinements might still be under patent).