Amateur radio (I'm W6OCT) is for experimenting with technology ("advancing the radio art") and teaching people how to use the technology. I'd argue encryption is now a fundamental enough technology that banning it hinders advancements to the radio art, and fails to teach people key skills.
There was a practical reason to prevent coded transmissions during the cold war -- by doing so, it allowed cross-border communications which countries otherwise would have banned. Bilateral communications between individuals made war less likely and peace more possible. It wasn't to keep the radio spectrum safe from commercial use (since commercial users didn't use crypto, either, at the time).
There are other whole classes of amateur radio use which are precluded or seriously hindered by lack of encryption -- disaster work which communicates PII in a medical context, certain police or security backup use.
I'd like to see encryption permitted on certain bands; some where the keys are required to be exchanged in the clear (for protocol development), and some where people can use real keys but still tag the communications with their callsign and be aware of and responsive to any interference.
ISM is inadequate due to frequency bands; if the proposal is to open up dramatically larger parts of the spectrum to ISM-type use, then I could be fine with that too.
I'd like to see encryption permitted on certain bands; some where the keys are required to be exchanged in the clear (for protocol development), and some where people can use real keys but still tag the communications with their callsign and be aware of and responsive to any interference.
That would make sense if it was clearly on the band plan.
There was a practical reason to prevent coded transmissions during the cold war -- by doing so, it allowed cross-border communications which countries otherwise would have banned. Bilateral communications between individuals made war less likely and peace more possible. It wasn't to keep the radio spectrum safe from commercial use (since commercial users didn't use crypto, either, at the time).
There are other whole classes of amateur radio use which are precluded or seriously hindered by lack of encryption -- disaster work which communicates PII in a medical context, certain police or security backup use.
I'd like to see encryption permitted on certain bands; some where the keys are required to be exchanged in the clear (for protocol development), and some where people can use real keys but still tag the communications with their callsign and be aware of and responsive to any interference.
ISM is inadequate due to frequency bands; if the proposal is to open up dramatically larger parts of the spectrum to ISM-type use, then I could be fine with that too.