Most of the recent cypherpunks traffic from Vladimir has been a reiteration of the position that discussing ITAR is bad because it discourages cypherpunks from releasing good crypto software. Well, here's one cypherpunks who recently released some software, and futhermore did so making significant (some might say extreme) concessions to the ITAR rules. I made the software available only on an export-restricted Web server, and asked explicitly several times for it not to be exported. If my timezone math works out right, it took about half an hour for it to be available on utopia. The ITAR did _nothing_ to stop, or even slow down, the reease of my software. Why is it, then, that we still don't have usable strong crypto tools? I'd say the reason is complex, much more so than could be explained by a simple conspiracy theory or even too much discussion of ITAR. The main reason is that it is very damned hard to write good crypto-enabled applications. Trust me, I know. I have done the best I could with the software I released, but I'm still quite frustrated with its limitations, especially with respect to nontechnical users. Ultimately, to create really good crypto-enabled applications, it's going to take money. And there's where ITAR is most effective. If the powers that be disapprove of your software, then there goes your foreign market. There go your government sales. There go those "strategic alliances" with the other companies in the market, because the pressure can be applied transitively too. ITAR is actually only a small part of the process. Still, free software has a lot of vitality left in it. It's still strong at blazing new trails in software design. Where it's weak (and this is what really counts now), is being usable, easy to learn, and easy to install. I think if we explicitly work towards these goals, there's hope for great free crypto-enabled applications. Hell, PGP came pretty close, and it's saddled with all kinds of lousy design decisions. But back to Vladimir: instead of whining at us about how our fear of the law is hurting the acievement of our goals, why don't _you_ write that killer crypto-app and distribute it to the world? Who's stopping you? Raph