At 10:57 PM -0800 12/28/96, Lucky Green wrote:
IMHO, this closes the door on the foreign contracting loophole used by C2 and others. It is now illegal for US persons to finance or contract out overseas crypto development, since doing so will obviously assist in proliferation. While not unexpected (I offered a bet on Cypherpunks that this would happen. Nobody took the bet.), this provision sets a dangerous precedence. The technical assistance prohibitions of the past have been transformed into general prohibitions against "financing, contracting, service, support, transportation, freight forwarding, or employment".
Again, IANAL.
Nor am I, but I have a "prediction" to make in the spirit of Lucky's types of predictions of doom.
I predict that we will see within two years a law making it illegal to "structure communications" with the intent to avoid traceability, accountability, etc.
This would be along the lines of the laws making it illegal to "structure" financial transactions with the (apparent) intent to avoid or evade certain laws about reporting of income, reporting of transactions, etc.
[snip]
How long before the U.S. Code declares "attempting to obscure or hide the origin of a communication" to be a felony? That would rule out orninary mail without return adresses, but I think there are ample signs we're already moving toward this situation (packages that could be bombs putatively require ID, talk of the Postal Service handling the citizen-unit authentication/signature system, etc.).
[snip]
You heard it here.
--Tim May
Tim, I think that this is highly unlikely. The SC has ruled repeatedly that anonymous speech is a foundation of American politics (e.g., the Federalist Papers). Care to make this prediction a bet? -- Steve