[43390] in Cypherpunks
Re: NSA, ITAR, NCSA and plug-in hooks.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Rich Salz)
Tue Nov 14 17:32:42 1995
From: Rich Salz <rsalz@osf.org>
Date: Tue, 14 Nov 1995 17:20:13 -0500
To: rsalz@osf.org, ses@tipper.oit.unc.edu
Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com, owner-cypherpunks@toad.com,
s1113645@tesla.cc.uottawa.ca
>are specifically designed for the insertion of cryptographic materials,
>or is it the fact that they could be used to support cryptographic
>enhancements?
Everything is decided on a case-by-case basis. I was in a meeting
with some NSA export-control people (Dept Z03) and asked a few questions
on this topic trying to nail down the angle of this slipper slope.
Basically, generic buffer-manipulation is okay. "Keyed compression"
where you explicitly passed something called a key to a DLL routine
would be looked on suspiciously. An abstract set of open/modify/close
routines (where open returned a pointer to opaque state, say a session
key :) would be fine. The technical guy quickly grasped that I was
talking about anonymous remailers, but they "conceded" there's nothing
they can do about it.
I say "concede" because that implies more political/control-issues
then were really present at the meeting.
/r$
