At 01:03 PM 7/11/96 -0400, Mark M. wrote:

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What is to prevent a U.S company to licence a foreign company to sublicence and distribute a Crypto product abroad, if that foreign company obtains that product on the pirate market?

Just because the company didn't break any laws doesn't mean that they aren't going to be harassed by the government. This is similar to the Philip Zimmermann case. A grand jury investigation could be carried on for as long as the statute of limitations dictates and then the prosecutor of the case decided at the last minute not to indict. This is the reason that Netscape has not yet made a browser with 128-bit encryption available on the Internet.

I think the government's ability to "harass" writers of good crypto software has been severely limited by their failure to indict Zimmermann. Remember, today they pretty much have to accept the fact that anybody can write any software, DOMESTICALLY, without any sort of legal impediment by the laws including ITAR. This is particularly true of a company like Netscape, which presumably has the bucks and/or the political clout to make it a difficult target. Any case against Netscape would probably take years if not decades to resolve, and long before this happened the world would have adopted good encryption regardless. Look what happened when MIT put PGP on the Web: "Nothing." Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com