There's a full page equivalent article on encyption in today's San Jose Mercury News (12E-11E). The article concentrates on public key cryptography, and mixes some good stuff with some silly mistakes. The first page has about 4/5th of the article devoted to a big diagram showing how someone using public key encryption to cover a whole message, and sent it over the internet to someone in Argentina. All this without a mention of using symmetric cyphers, and without even mentioning ITAR.
I don't think ITAR is very relevant here. After all, there are dozens of RSA implementations available from outside the US, and they are not patent-restricted like in the US. It is really much easier to use and get RSA *outside* the US than inside. (For some pointers, see "http://www.cs.hut.fi/crypto/".) Besides, as far as I understand, one of the RSA inventors wasn't even a US citizen... Tatu