http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10024163-38.html CALEA represented one step in the FBI and NSA's attempts to restrict encryption without backdoors. In a top-secret memo to members of President George H.W. Bush's administration including Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and CIA director Robert Gates, one White House official wrote: "Justice should go ahead now to seek a legislative fix to the digital telephony problem, and all parties should prepare to follow through on the encryption problem in about a year. Success with digital telephony will lock in one major objective; we will have a beachhead we can exploit for the encryption fix; and the encryption access options can be developed more thoroughly in the meantime."

Again, I know this sounds pedantic, but it's not an academic distinction. There was definitely a pervasive sentiment that technology was moving faster than law enforcement could keep up with, and that some fix was required. We're talking about a point in time where many phone exchanges still weren't digitally switched! At issue wasn't simply that criminals could evade wiretaps, but that some exchanges might transition to equipment that would preclude wiretapping altogether.

It's intellectually risky to take that sentiment and focus it on cryptography, as if any one player in 1993 had established themselves as an opponent of general-purpose cryptography. This whole thread discusses one word ("plaintext") in a meaningless sense-of-the-Senate resolution that had much more to do with digital switching than it did with cryptography.