At 02:22 PM 5/2/96 -0700, Martin Minow wrote:

...

... the State Department is taking an increasingly hard line on PGP. Where once the State had restricted itself to warning developers against exporting source code with PGP file-encryption routines, it is now arguing that application programming interfaces (API) allowing PGP program insertion should be subject to control under arms-trading statutes.

It would seem that any computer system that permits the use of an externally-supplied computer program (i.e., Windows, DOS, MacOS, Unix, Java, Microsoft Word macro languange) would fall under this restriction.

I wonder how much thought went into this decision.

Not much. I seem to recall a quote from Dorothy Denning a couple of months ago where she actually held out API's as a way to get around the ITAR restrictions. It sounds to me like even that was too much for them! In any case, this position is very desperate. Those of us who recall old Altair computers remember a time where even a "file" was a foreign concept. Files are, arguably, a standardized format on which encryption programs work. Are they going to stop the export of MSDOS? Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.comJim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com