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In 815, the Caliph of Ma'mun established in Baghdad the Bait al-Hikmah ('House of Wisdom'), a library and centre for translation.” They endeavoured to acquire knowledge of previous civilizations by obtaining Egyptian, Babylonian, Indian, Chinese, Farsi, Syriac, Armenian, Hebrew and Roman texts and translating them into Arabic. Every Muslim is obliged to pursue knowledge in all its forms, and the economic success of the Abbasid caliphate meant that scholars had the time, money, and materials required to fulfil their duty. The Muslim civilization provided an ideal cradle for cryptanalysis, because Islam demands justice in all spheres of human activity, and achieving this requires knowledge, or ilm. “Cryptanalysis could not be invented until a civilization had reached a sufficiently sophisticated level of scholarship in several disciplines, including mathematics, statistics, and linguistics. ― Simon Singh, quote from The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

In fact, you can download good cryptographic software from the Internet for less than the price of a good pair of gloves.”

Cryptography and gloves are both dirt-cheap and widely available. The former can frustrate FBI wiretapping, and the latter can thwart FBI fingerprint analysis.

Cryptography protects data from hackers, corporate spies, and con artists, whereas gloves protect hands from cuts, scrapes, heat, cold, and infection. Cryptography is a data-protection technology, just as gloves are a hand-protection technology. citizen can freely buy a pair of gloves, even though a burglar might use them to ransack a house without leaving fingerprints.

“Ron Rivest, one of the inventors of RSA, thinks that restricting cryptography would be foolhardy: It is poor policy to clamp down indiscriminately on a technology just because some criminals might be able to use it to their advantage.