In 1998, 15 years ago, I was discussing encryption with a friend and we thought we’d try encrypted emails out.
We both downloaded a Swedish copy of PGP and installed it on our respective systems.
We exchanged public keys and then exchanged our very first encrypted emails, mins just said “Cool” and my friends said “Yeah, it is cool.”
Within 16 hours we each got messages from the FBI stating that using encryption not approved by the government was a felony and that we should immediately remove the encryption from our systems or we’d be prosecuted.
For reasons of WTF, we removed the encryption systems and never installed them again.
That’s curious.
I was using PGP-encrypted e-mail fairly commonly back in that era, and never got any such warning.