It's been a cold civil war for many years. Encryption - and communication technology in general - is a power usable by anybody, not just established institutions.
As Dan Geer explains:
In other words, [c]onvergence is an inevitable consequence of the
very power of cyberspace in and of itself. [I]ncreasingly powerful,
location independent technology in the hands of the many will tend
to force changes in the distribution of power. In fact, that is
the central theme of this essay -- that the power that is growing
in the net, per se, will soon surpass the ability of our existing
institutions to modify it in any meaningful way, so either the net
must be broken up into governable chunks or the net becomes government.
It seems to me that the leverage here favors cyberspace whenever
and wherever we give cyberspace a monopoly position, which we are
doing that blindly and often. In the last couple of years, I've
found that institutions that I more or less must use [...] no longer
accept paper letter instructions, they each only accept digital
delivery of such instructions. This means that each of them has
created a critical dependence on an Internet swarming with men in
the middle and, which is more, they have doubtlessly given up their
own ability to fall back to what worked for a century before.
It is that giving up of alternative means that really defines what
convergence is and does. It is said that all civil wars are about
on whose terms re-unification will occur. I would argue that we
are in, to coin a phrase, a Cold Civil War to determine on whose
terms convergence occurs.
