Hal writes:
In the same way, it is not easy to draw a line between a book which is protected by the first amendment and a program which a person can sit down and run to get military grade cryptography. But that does not lead to a strong legal argument that all cryptographic software is export- able, IMO.
Though I agree that the feather/pillow/stick/club scenario is unrealistic, I disagree that it applies in this case. The ITAR regulations are being enforced around a situation that's essentially a technological accident. The difference between an exportable piece of software printed with ink on a page and one in human-readable ASCII on a diskette is defined solely by the state of technology. If, tomorrow, some company began selling a $99.95 scanner with built-in OCR translation software, then there would really be no difference whatsoever. To return to the original analogy, it would put the "court" in a position of having to declare an assault with an oaken bat illegal, but one with a hickory bat OK. There is a similar lack of distinction between source code and machine code. If I introduce a computer system whose primary interface includes a C interpreter, then in some ways the source code *is* machine code. -- | GOOD TIME FOR MOVIE - GOING ||| Mike McNally <m5@tivoli.com> | | TAKE TWA TO CAIRO. ||| Tivoli Systems, Austin, TX: | | (actual fortune cookie) ||| "Like A Little Bit of Semi-Heaven" |