Three newspapers have pieces today on the new WTO telecom agreement. A Page 1 NYP report examines the administration's favoring of the once-moribund WTO over the UN as a principal means for "exporting US free-market values through global commercial agreements." The telecom agreement, for the first time, allows the WTO to go inside the signatory countries and check compliance, and if warranted, impose sanctions, a role once reserved to the UN. While encryption is not mentioned, it's worth watching the WTO globally unite its privacy-invasive predecessors: the national tele-tappers. The spin is that now all governments can have access to the global (wiretap) network under guise of enhanced commercial competition. (And that's why Commerce was given EI for CCL.) ----- WTO_tap ---------- For related background, there's informative discussion on the encryption switchover from State to Commerce in the Defense Trade News, archived at the Dept of State Web site. We've put the five issues in which the shift of encryption items from the USML to the CCL is formulated by the Technical Working Group at: January/April 1993: http://jya.com/dtn0193.htm (76K) January 1994: http://jya.com/dtn0194.htm (99K) April 1994: http://jya.com/dtn0494.htm (66K) July/October, 1994: http://jya.com/dtn0794.htm (67K) October 1995: http://jya.com/dtn1095.htm (35K)