I am not familiar with american laws and have two questions: 1. If the bill becomes law, how can someone who violates it be punished? 2. Does someone who publishes software which encodes or encrypts (ASCII is a code, isn't it?) have to prove that he has provided the universal decoder to the state or does the state have to prove that he didn't do? In the former case, does he get any receipt from the department of justice and what does the receipt say (1.3MByte of software received...)? In the latter case, how do they want to prove he didn't? If he gave just a big for(i=0;;i++) try_key(i); how do they want to prove this doesn't work? There is a certain problem in theory. I don't know the english name, but in german it is called the 'halt problem'. It is not a simple task to prove that a certain turing machine program doesn't stop or doesn't find a solution of a given problem. How do they want to prove that the program provided to the department of justice doesn't find the key just within the next 10 seconds? Hadmut