At 05:46 PM 5/6/96 -0400, Declan B. McCullagh wrote:

I just came back from the Online Services Industry conference held today in Washington, DC at the Georgetown Four Seasons. It was very much a DC thing, organized by Congressmen Jack Fields and Rick White (of the Internet Caucus).

The fourth panel was "Law Enforcement and Encryption in Cyberspace," with this set of characters:

* Edward Allen, supervisory special agent/section chief, FBI * Clinton Brooks, advisor to the director, NSA * Dorothy Denning, professor, Georgetown University * Bruce Heiman, attorney, Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds * Jim Lucier, director of economic research, Americans for Tax Reform * Marc Rotenberg, director, EPIC

The FBI's Allen said: "We have talked to our foreign law enforcement counterparts who are concerned with exporting strong crypto. Crime is increasing internationally... There is not an international free market for crypto. To a great degree, other nations have been relying on U.S. export controls to maintain stasis. What bothers me about efforts being proposed legally is that we're moving forward without understanding what we're getting into... The efforts can go to order or chaos. We're in a period where it could go to chaos."

Maybe there's a sort of backhanded solution to this. I recall the story that, in the early 1970's, it was sport in MIT's AI Labs to try to crash the Unix computer. More and more protections were added, which eventually were worked around with more failures. Eventually, they found a beautiful solution: Add a command to the operating system, "Crash the computer!" which did exactly this. Suddenly, this goal became devalued, and nobody wanted to crash the computer anymore. Okay, what if a foreign distributor (very tiny, perhaps) was set up that loudly proclaimed that it would sell any crypto only legally available in the US, but had been smuggled out by people unknown and sent to it anonymously. (It would verify the genuineness by sending it back into the US, for verification, etc.) It announces that it is pleased to sell to everybody ESPECIALLY "terrorists, child-pornographers, drug smugglers, and other criminals." To keep from angering the software writers themselves, it would pay appropriate royalties to those whose works they had sold, but obviously they wouldn't ask permission to do this. At that point, any argument against the export of such software will fail, because the software already has a willing supplier overseas. Yes, this is the way it already it, sorta, but the difference is that there is nobody who enthusiastically claims that this is exactly what they're doing. Representatives of such a distributor can be called upon to appear at any debates, hearings, or other activities in order to spoil the arguments of Denning et al. Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com