RSA munitions T-shirt

96 · John Cook · June 13, 2026, 8:23 p.m.
Summary
In 1995, Adam Back protested against the US government's classification of strong encryption as 'munitions' by creating a two-line obfuscated implementation of RSA in Perl code, which he used as an email signature and printed on T-shirts. This post discusses the historical significance of that protest.