-- At 06:20 PM 3/6/98 -0800, Tim May wrote:

How could any "outlawing of unescrowed crypto" conceivably deal with this vast amount of distributed software? Will a user of RSA's MailSafe program face jail time for using a program he legally bought in 1991 (as I did)?

More questions than answers. Can anybody help me to understand the legal issues?

You are getting out of date. As the rule of law dissolves, legal issues become insignificant, and will in due course vanish altogether. For example nobody knows what are the "legal issues" with putting strong crypto on a web site, as I have done. According to what the legislation says, what I have done is completely in accord with legislation. Indeed, it is completely in accord with US legislation simply to post the stuff. on any server inside the US, the foreigner doing the download is violating the legislation, not the person who put it up. I have gone considerably further than is required by legislation, though not nearly as far as some others have gone. But mere legislation counts for less and less these days. If you read the business press, you will frequently read them complain of cases where the distinctions between executive, legal, and judicial powers are effectively dissolved, and penalties are in effect adminstratively applied for undefined offences, or retrospectively and administratively defined offences, often in ways that appear to personally enrich those administering these quasi judicial powers. Generally this sort of thing is only applied to people who are unpleasant and unpopular. Tobacco companies, junk bond merchants whose businesses have been more profitable for themselves than for many of their investors, and the like. Of course this creates a large vested interest in demonizing more and more people, so that more and more people can be dealt with in this fashion. Similar measures are applied not only to alleged recreational drug distributors, but to lawyers who defend alleged recreational drug distributors, but the business press tends to report such cases less. Meanwhile formerly totalitarian countries, such as China and Cuba, where there used to be no such things as laws, merely some people having the power to harm other people, power exercised in accordance with rules that those subject to this power were forbidden to know, are moving towards the rule of law. It used to be that if someone imprisoned in Cuba were to discover the actual reason for his imprisonment, he might possibly suffer some draconian additional punishment for improper possession of state secrets. In a fully totalitarian state, the regime does not have rules for most people, merely goals and desires. If some desire is not fulfilled, the masters will go around killing people more or less at random until somebody fulfills that desire, or until they have killed so many people that they suspect that what they desire is not readily achievable, or sometimes until they simply run out of people who might be able to assist in fulfilling that desire. For example all people possessing certain skills and experience were wiped out by Stalin, and in Cambodia everyone connected to the jute industry in any way. Such rules as exist only apply to the privileged, to those administering the terror, not to those terrorized. Crypto legislation is likely to resemble the announcement of a desire, rather than the announcement of rules and restrictions likely to fulfill that desire. Indeed, the proposals we have so far seen are desires, not rules. As you point out, that desire cannot be fulfilled, except by means that further radically undermine the rule of law. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG KheXnmd1kekBNA4gB1wyUeQgjPT7Y26FWeajCBIR 43jg9sJBVPllkPf+Yt2ByoAf/sIdt9xbXwh/wMV+Z