At 5:51 AM 7/18/96, snow wrote:
On Tue, 16 Jul 1996, David Sternlight wrote:
At 04:18 PM 7/15/96 -0700, sameer wrote:
Not like that's tough to figure out. Congrats. It's cool to actually be able to connect to my webserver using real encryption. Glad the lawyers don't think Barksdale is going to jail anymore. I'm glad too. So how many minutes did it take to leak overseas? It doesn't "leak overseas" as if there were some regrettable lapse in the
At 3:36 AM -0700 7/16/96, Duncan Frissell wrote: plumbing. Someone has to commit a felony violation of Federal law.
No they don't. If they are French, Russian, English, Greek, etc. They _may_ be violating their countries laws, but they are not necessarily violating ours.
This is a terribly important point: if a citizen of Foobaria succeeds in connecting to the Netscape site--perhaps by experimenting with various combinations of domain names and submitted address/zipcode combinations--and Netscape sends him the file, he has not committed a crime in his own country. (Unless they have their own laws....) Ironically, under the ITARs, as I understand them, a citizen of Foobaria who "exports" (= retrieves from Netscape's site) such materials actually *has* violated our ITARs. (It is possible for persons outside the U.S. to violate U.S. laws, of course. You can all imagine examples.) Prosecuting a person in Foobaria for violating U.S. ITAR regs would of course be problematic, and unlikely. Likewise, much "export-controlled" software is freely purchasable without any form of identification or proof of citizenship/residency in any of thousands of U.S. software stores. (I don't know if the copies of Netscape Navigator on the shelves in U.S. stores are now the "U.S." version, as opposed to be a somwhat-crippled version, but I sure do know that a *lot* of nominally-export-controlled software _is_ freely purchasable.) Much of this software goes out of the country in luggage. In my various flights out of the U.S. over the years, never have my bags been so much as glanced at, except presumably for bombs with sniffers, scanners, etc. Further, I have mailed optical disks out of the country--a single one of these can store a whole lot of stuff. (As I said in a 1992 interview, a DAT is like a shoulder-fired Stinger missile.) On a trip to France and Monaco last year, I deliberately carried several optical cartridges and couple of DATs, all crammed with software, PGP, RSADSI's MailSafe, Mathematica, etc. To make a point, and as props for my talk on crypto anarchy. Certainly there was no checking on the way out at SFO, and no checking whatsoever at Charles de Gaulle in Paris. (On my return trip, the bored inspector in San Francisco asked what my purpose in being overseas has been. Had I said "tourism" I would've been waved through. Instead, for interest, I said "Meeting with Russian cryptographers in Monte Carlo," just to see what would happen. He asked me what "cryptographers" are or do... "They make secret codes." He then waved me through. Sigh.) None of this is surprising, of course. Borders _are_ transparent. There are so _many_ degrees of freedom for getting stuff across borders. The hope that a bunch of *bits* can be stopped in ludicrous. _This_ is why I expect the Netscape beta to arrive overseas pretty soon. --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."