[47878] in Cypherpunks
Re: Crippled Notes export encryption
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Frantz)
Wed Jan 24 14:33:41 1996
Date: Wed, 24 Jan 1996 11:20:44 -0800
To: shamrock@netcom.com (Lucky Green), cypherpunks@toad.com
From: frantz@netcom.com (Bill Frantz)
At 10:28 1/24/96 -0800, Lucky Green wrote:
>I agree. The reason for enforcing ITAR is to keep good crypto of the
>*domestic* market. If ITAR no longer accomplishes that, new laws will be
>passed.
I think this is likely to be an oversimplification. While there are
probably a number of people in e.g. FBI, DEA, DOJ who want to restrict
domestic crypto, I suspect there are also a number of people in e.g. NSA
who are sincerly interested in using SIGINT to protect the US from foreign
threats and want strong domestic crypto as part of that protection.
As always, public policy is a compromise between competing interests
(INSIDE the beltway). However, the current policy is a holdover from the
days when strong crypto was a closely held trade secret. Since this
assumption is no longer true, the policy becomes more and more
disfunctional every day.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Frantz Periwinkle -- Computer Consulting
(408)356-8506 16345 Englewood Ave.
frantz@netcom.com Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA
