I mean, amateur radio was illegal to encrypt

Was? I’m not familiar with a jurisdiction that presently allows licensed amateur radio operators to send encrypted or even obfuscated messages, with the unique exception of control-and-command instructions for amateur radio satellites. The whole exercise of ham radio is to openly communicate, with other frequencies and services available for encrypted comms and whatever else.

To be abundantly clear, I very much support encryption because it keeps good people honest and frustrates bad people. But it’s hard to see how, for ham radio, encryption could be reconciled with the open and inviting spirit that has steered the radio community for over a century. In a lot of ways, hams were doing FOSS well before the acronym came into existence.

I have great admiration for the radio operators, precisely because when all the major infrastructure falters, it takes only a battery and a wire up a tree to recover some semblance of connectivity.