At 10:11 PM 9/25/96, Igor Chudov @ home wrote:

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Soon I am going to be going overseas to Japan, and I want to take my notebook with me so I can keep up with everything, however, I have encrypted my hard drive and usually encrypt my mail. Is this in violation of the ITAR to keep everything the same when I go over?

Gentlemen, us customs does not give shit about what you take out on your diskettes.

When I went to Russia recenty, I took PGP for DOS, and no one gave me any problem.

I initially responded to the first questioner with a simple "No." (Sent privately.) This answer, because of several points: - encrypted data, his hypo, is not illegal to export under _any_ circumstances - the "personal use" exemption - the Matt Blaze example, where it was obvious U.S. Customs was basically neither interested in nor set up to process "crypto export" situations - the basic fact that U.S. Customs _rarely_ does inspections of outgoing stuff As I've said before, on a trip to Monte Carlo in early '95, I carried out a bunch of magneto-optical disks, containing more than a gigabyte of stuff, including a bunch of crypto products, etc. Needless to say, I boarded my Air France flight without a single glance from U.S. Customs. They were nowhere in sight, in fact, on the outgoing side. I could have had suitcases full of cash, briefcases full of stock certificates, and 100 gigabytes of software. (A college friend of mine is married to a Brooklyn DA. One of the cases she described to me involved prosecuting a guy for smuggling U.S. currency out of the country. She hinted that the only reason he was searched as he left the country was because of a related case.) --Tim May We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."