The 'big deal' with encryption (and some could argue the beginning of the weaponization of ITAR against Americans...) was with the PGP Algorithm in the mind-1990's. They sent the PGP creator to jail... or tried to. PGP was "Pretty Good Privacy" and was a publically-available encryption technology that would let people encode e-mails and simple Internet Communications (this was right as the Web was coming online... ) Was a massive legal morass and helpe cement organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others...
The idea that encryption was a weapon was hotly-debated. But at the time, PGP was considered unbreakable. Now you could break it with the computing power on your Apple Watch. But at the time...
I was using PGP at that time (as in compiling it from source code on 386 CPU computers), so I was pretty familiar with the saga, this was back in the days before the internets were really a thing and what you were all talking over was BBS systems running off phone lines.
In the end all the stupid blowhard government jerks did was lose their legal challenges and threats and help spur an international community of people to start open source encryption as the defacto standard for encryption.
Pretty much every encryption scheme or hardware that has come out of the USA was backdoored by the NSA in one way or another before it ever got off the ground. (Elliptical Curve encryption anyone?)
And then when that wasn't enough the NSA bought up foreign companies making "high end encryption" devices and backdoored them too.
It would be an interesting bet that the NSA has a way in to even the latest and greatest classified encryption stuff when it actually gets out in the field.