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Then lawmakers began swinging the opposite direction, talking about repealing Cold War-era export regulations that classified strong encryption as a “munitions” generally prohibited from export. The regulations were forcing technology companies to keep strong crypto out of key Internet software, weakening online security; meanwhile, overseas companies weren’t bound by the laws and were in position to overtake America in the encryption market.

The feds responded with a draconian counterproposal that would have made it a five-year felony to sell any encryption software in America that lacked a back door for law enforcement and government spies. In testimony to a House subcommittee in 1997, a Justice Department lawyer warned that hackers would be a prime customer of legal encryption and used the Carlos Salgado bust to illustrate his point. Salgado had encrypted the CD-ROM containing the eighty thousand stolen credit card numbers. The FBI had only been able to access it because the hacker gave his supposed buyer the key.

“We were lucky in this case, because Salgado’s purchaser was cooperating with the FBI,” the official testified. “But if we had discovered this case another way, law enforcement could not have penetrated the information on Salgado’s CD-ROM. Crimes like this one have serious implications for law enforcement’s ability to protect commercial data as well as personal privacy.”

But the feds lost the crypto wars, and by 2005 unbreakable crypto was widely available to anyone who wanted it. The predictions of doom had largely failed to materialize; most criminals weren’t tech-savvy enough to adopt encryption.

Max, though, was. If all his tradecraft failed and the feds crashed through his safe house door, they’d find everything he accumulated in his crimes, from credit card numbers to hacking code, scrambled with an Israeli-made encryption program called DriveCrypt—1,344-bit military-grade crypto he’d purchased for about $60.

The government would arrest him anyway, he expected, and demand