[14366] in Cypherpunks
v2.6 for the rest of us
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Eric Hughes)
Sat May 28 11:47:23 1994
Date: Sat, 28 May 94 08:36:58 -0700
From: hughes@ah.com (Eric Hughes)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
In-Reply-To: Eli Brandt's message of Fri, 27 May 94 22:28:17 PDT <9405280528.AA01159@toad.com>
The issue is whether mere use of USA-illegally exported crypto is
itself illegal.
AFAIK (anybody OCRed it?), it
contains no clause that would cover the use of software or
rocket launchers that have already been exported.
The text of the ITAR is available at one or both of eff.org or
cpsr.org.
I purposefully elided over this point in my first post in order to
more clearly talk about jurisdiction. (This may not have been best.)
I don't know if such use is illegal; for the purpose of discussion
above, I assumed it was. It may be otherwise, however. Suppose it's
not explicitly illegal. Does that mean you can't get prosecuted for
it, or convicted? Whatever the answer is, it's not "clearly no".
Inside every prosecutor's office is a legal hacker try to push the
boundaries of criminal law, trying to make more things _illegal_.
(Not exactly what you want to hear, I'm sure.) What creative
arguments might an agressive prosecutor use? Conspiracy is a good
one. The argument could be that there's so much publicity about PGP
that any user must know that 2.6 was USA-illegally exported, and,
therefore, was blindly conspiring with the original exporter. This is
an apparently ludicrous argument, but could it fly? Ever heard of the
twinkie defense?
Eric
