In article <9707071618.AA63188@public.uni-hamburg.de> Ulf Mueller writes:
The National Security Agency has asked Sun Microsystems Inc. and Elvis+, the Russian networking company in which Sun has a 10 percent stake, to turn over the source code of its SunScreen SKIP E+.
Why should the US government get access to the source code of foreign product being imported to the US?
To me the announcement implied that the NSA wanted to compare Sun's and Elvis+'s implementations, to verify that they are actually different. To check that Sun didn't simply smuggle the code out and launder it through Elvis+. They're not looking at imports (why would Elvis+'s code be imported? It's already available domestically from Sun), they're looking at Sun's well-publicised end-run around the crypto chilling effect, to see if Sun perhaps cut any corners. But it's more fun to rant about the paranoid thrashings of a government bogeyman than it is to attempt to understand the actions of the NSA, which is not staffed by stupid people.