How about this as a political compromise ... 1. Allow any export of crypto. 2. Tax crypto exports heavily, say 25% or something like that, unless key recovery (or some other GAK-ish feature) is part of the product. For instance, structuring the taxes so that ... GAK-only products get taxed 0% GAK-optional products get taxed 20% non-GAK products get taxed 25% 3. Give this revenue upside to the FBI/CIA/NSA/NRO. Internet commerce products alone would bring in shit loads of revenue for these agencies. And, as a side-benefit for these agencies, many companies will opted for GAK just for export tax reasons. This, of course, will not please the crypto-purists, but crypto is just one of many areas where the government is feeling like it is losing control. And while that attitude is just infantile, we have to be realistic about those very human people and very human organizations who have a tough job to do. As much as I hate ITAR, I feel really bad for the NSA. ---- 1. Fundamentally, I only oppose ITAR on First Amendment grounds: I should be able to write any program I can type, and I should be able to give that program out. This is computer speech, but it sure is speech. Therefore, my personal interest is to perserve that freedom. (If I happen to write a book about dangerous chemicals or explosives [write crypto code], why should I be held criminally liable if a terrorist buys my book [downloads my source code] or steals it from a library [intercepts an E-Mail containing the sources].) 2. My guess is that the NSA has NOT really advanced the state of the art of crypto much. I suspect they have capabilities that are maybe one or two orders of magnitude (in terms of art, not pure bruteforce resources) ahead of us common folks, but we can crank up the computational complexity without a wink, and then, they are just helpless. One particular rumoroid/factoid worth keeping in mind is that they have succeeded in the past, not just by being smarter, but also by dumbing-down everyone else. Sooner or later, that part of the strategy will no longer work. 3. There is something to be said for controlling export and import of products when the rest of the world is not using a economic system quite like ours. There is also something to be said for controlling export of products that might reduce our national strategic advantage (whatever that means). Of course, there is also self-delusion, and, if I were to assume the FBI/NSA is being completely honest, self-delusion is what they seem to be falling back on. I mean, REALLY now, if you can't control huge cabinets of supercomputers (oops ... I guess they are just desktop pizza boxes now, aren't they?), how are you going to control bits? Ern