The Unknown Story of Phil Zimmermann

Alas, it is doomed to stay unknown hidden behind this link.

Cloudflare DDOS protection?

It's just free advertisement for CloudFlare. They offer "free" DDoS protection to sites, and use this as a form of advertising too by showing this to any visitor that browses a "cloudflare protected" site that use some kind of improved privacy settings or privacy oriented browser extension on their browser. (They are the equivalent of the old "your xxx antivirus is protecting" you popups). The better the privacy settings, the more it will make you go through what is now infamous as the "Captcha hell".

(Ofcourse, they kindly offer you a "solution" to avoid this nagging - the Cloudflare Privacy Pass. Install the browser extension and sacrifice your privacy, and CloudFlare will not nag you).

I am from India, where many unsecure computers are often infected with malware, and often part of large bot networks. Thus, many indian IPs are already in blacklists or treated suspiciously. So I see this a lot. So much, that I just despise CloudFlare now (recently even recommended Netlify over Cloudflare to a client to have my petty revenge over them).

Seems likely that some of the details are wrong, too. I think it would have been a 1st amendment issue, not 5th. Also, I doubt the government backed off because they were worried he would become a martyr. Seems more likely that they knew they would lose.

The author probably meant 1st Amendment, but Zimmerman and the EFF also relied on 5th Amendment arguments. See, e.g., https://readingroom.law.gsu.edu/gsulr/vol13/iss2/14/. While the 1995 press release from the EFF (https://www.eff.org/press/archives/2008/04/21-42) specifically mentions only the First Amendment directly, if you look at the list of arguments under "More specifically, the current export control process:", about half of them are Fifth Amendment or Fifth Amendment-adjacent defenses.