Messages in this thread | | | From | "Alan Olsen" <> | Date | Mon, 30 Nov 1998 11:27:30 -0800 | Subject | Re: [WAY OFFTOPIC] kerneli blowfish/twofish compromised? |
| |
On Nov 27, 8:46am, Chris Wedgwood wrote: > Subject: [OFFTOPIC] kerneli blowfish/twofish compromised? > On Wed, Nov 25, 1998 at 07:25:08PM +0000, Alan Cox wrote: > > > Here's a question. Is it legal to fax it with checksums to an OCR > > reader automatically ? > > No -- it's machine readable. Machine readable is evil and bad. > > Of course, plenty of other people will now say that because X is > legal, then Y must be too -- but that's not how the system works. > Besides, depending on whom you ask, X isn't necessarily legal either. > > By all means try this -- but please consider the following when it > comes to US law: > > "How much justice can you afford?"
Believe it or not, the rules used to be worse. You would have to submit your code to the "powers that be" and bargain your way to an export permit. Negotiation was done in secret with little or no solid rules about what was legit and what was not. Entirely up to the arbitrary discression of someone in the state department and/or the NSA/CIA/TLA.
The current situation is a bit better, but not much. (I suspect that the reason that the oversight was moved to the Commerce Department was so that the "Interstate Commerce" loophole in the constitution could be made to apply.)
You can apply for exemptions and/or approval, but it all depends on who you are and what you want that makes the difference. Much of the time they will just sit on your application as long as they can if you want to export something vaguely secure, but in the grey area.
<rant> When I want to illustrate to someone how silly the law (Actually it is not even a law. Just a rule.) is, I use the IDEA algorythm as an example. IDEA is illegal to export, even though the patent for the algorythm is held by a Swiss company and available for download from any number of servers outside of the United States. And since the Swiss are supposedly neutral, they will sell the usage rights to almost anyone...
But you have to remember that hte rules are not there to make sense. Nor are they there to prevent crypto from falling into the hands of the Lybians, Iraq, Cuba, or any other forighn power. The rules are there to prevent widespread use of strong crypto by _US Citizens_. Those in the various security agencies in the US want to be able to keep a close eye on the general public, lest they might make them get real work. Currently the FBI is trying to get the domestic wiretapping restrictions relaxed to the point of non-existance. Widely available crypto would obstruct their voyeuristic fetishes, thus it's use must be prevented, no matter how irrational the rules required.
So much for the "Land of the Free". (That would make for an interesting false advertising suit... ]:> ) </rant>
-- Alan Olsen
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |