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SubjectRe: [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

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