I think there's been ample evidence that the ITARs are often used to harass U.S. companies that "won't play ball," that refuse to go along with certain governmental policies. (Part of the think we libertarians hate about Big Government and Lots of Laws is that government can use selective enforcement an another lever of power. As a felon, I am acutely aware of this power.) Something Black Unicorn/Uni/Dirsec/whatever said reminded me of something interesting: At 8:45 PM 3/25/96, Black Unicorn wrote:
Further, a entirely foreign production, say for chip manufacture, would probably make things easier. I had specifically contemplated hardware applications. Indeed, there are problems with both, but they don't stem from ITAR.
Now when I was with Intel, we made many of our chips in plants in Ireland, Israel, and other locales outside the U.S. Some of these chips were forbidden for export by the ITARs. And certainly the knowledge of the engineers sent overseas was comparable to the knowledge of RSA programmers.... (Before anyone points out that Intel presumably was not skirting the ITARs by drop-shipping chips from Ireland directly to non-U.S. countries. This is indeed the case. My point is a slightly different one. Read on.) So, did Intel have to apply to the State Department's office on munitions exports in order to send engineers to Malaysia, Israel, Germany, Ireland, etc., to do development work? Not that I ever heard. Engineers simply hopped on planes and that was that. (I suspect the same is the case with programmers at RSADSI, Microsoft, etc. That is, people ignore the Munitions Act laws which--it is argued by some--forbid the export of "expertise.") Where am I going with this? It seems to me that crypto companies could point out to the ITARs/Munitions Office/etc. folks that vast amounts of "sensitive technologies" are being developed and built by U.S. companies in offshore locations without so much as a ripple of publicity or concern. (I should note that in several examples I can think of, the engineers I mentioned who were relocated to these offshore locales for chip development later left the companies that moved them offshore and started or joined competing companies. Sounds like an exact parallel to the dreaded "RSA moves development to Switzerland" scenario that so many of us have urged.) And yet mention that a crypto company is considering a move of its key development folks to Switzerland or Austria or Zambia and watch the sparks fly. Sounds like a double standard to me, meant to exert pressure on the crypto companies (whom the U.S. government, it is clear now, would just as soon see put out of business or strictly controlled). --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, Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."