Greg Broiles wrote:
In early March, I filed a FOIA request with the Arms Control & Disarmament Agency, a division of the Department of State, for a copy of the Wassenaar Arrangement, a multinational agreement which is intended to regulate and coordinate the regulation of military and "dual-use" items. (Cryptographic software and hardware is often considered a "dual-use" item.)
I received a copy of the Arrangement last week, and have converted it to HTML. It is available on the web at
http://www.parrhesia.com/wassenaar/, or https://www.parrhesia.com/wassenaar/ for the security-conscious.
The document itself does not refer to cryptography or cryptographic software/hardware. The last page of the document - the "Munitions List" was blank; but the document was marked "released in full". I'm going to compare what I've got with the various pieces of the Arrangement which have been released through other sources to see if I need to make a supplemental request for more information.
The disparity between various informational 'releases' of information surrounding the Wassenaar Agreement points to the real intentions of those involved, which is to regulate the availability to strong crypto not so much through legislation, as through uncertainty surrounding legal issues which can result in severe penalties to those who might chance to cross ill-defined legal lines. In a previous post, I mentioned a law enforcement official who responded to my question about one of the finer points of the law with the reply, "I'm not paid to 'know' the law, I'm paid to 'enforce' it." i.e. No matter what action you perform, the interpretation that the government uses to fuck you in the ass will take an opposite position on the matter. I have seen back-to-back cases in the same courtroom, with the same judge, where government prosecutors argued diametrically opposed positions in order to convict the accused. The result? Two convictions. -- Toto "The Xenix Chainsaw Massacre" http://bureau42.base.org/public/xenix/xenbody.html