The US Senate Judiciary Committee's hearings on encryption policy opened today. They may be a precursor to US Federal legislative action. At issue is the extent to which strong, end-to-end encryption enables criminal activity. Law enforcement agencies, especially the FBI, have for several years pushed for requiring companies who provide encryption for their users to also have ways of breaking that encryption should law enforcement present them with a duly executed warrant. (Intelligence services have been noticeably less exercised on the matter, which suggests that they either have a more realistic appreciation of the general security benefits confered by strong encryption, or perhaps that they quietly believe they have other means available to read the traffic they collect.)
Thomas Rid, Professor of Strategic Studies at the Johns Hopkins University, regards the hearings as very important, tweeting that encryption is "the most pivotal tech policy question of our time." It's worth noting that this question is an issue for the West, principally for the US and the UK (where Westminster is engaged in its own front in the Crypto Wars).
For Russia and China in particular the answer to this and many other questions is Internet sovereignty, and they're not finding it difficult to enlist companies into the service of state policy. The Nikkei Asian Review reports that Arm China, the local subsidiary of the British chip company Arm Holdings now owned by Tokyo-based SoftBank, will henceforth manufacture chips that run Beijing-approved cryptographic algorithms.
Iranian policy is also moving in the direction of Internet sovereignty, replacing the Internet with what CNET calls a "state-controlled intranet."
Homeland Preparedness News reports that the US Senate Armed Services Committee, in the person of Senator King (Independent of Maine), is asking the Department of Defense to present a strategy for deterrence in cyberspace. Defense doesn't have one, yet, but neither does anyone else. In the US, the Cyber Solarium Commission (of which Senator King is a member) is still deliberating the matter. Lawfare points out that a deterrent strategy will emerge as the US Defense Department exercises the roles and missions in cyberspace last year's Defense Authorization Act gave it.