At 6:30 AM 10/26/95, Jeff Weinstein wrote:

Should they also reject the same content (RSA-PERL) delivered in any of the following ways:

Printed on paper Printed on paper in OCR font Printed on paper in barcode Printed on paper with magnetic ink (like checks)

The lines being drawn here seem very arbitrary.

I'll try to think like a bureaucrat responsible for actually trying to limit the export of weapons, munitions, cluster bombs, nerve gases, secure communications gear, crypto tools, etc. My test would be this: "Is the product actually usable by an adversary or helpful to them in any major way as a tangible product?" (I have no idea of what their review criteria are, just suggesting some plausible considerations.) How different products get evaluated by these criteria: * cruise missiles -- Yes. * designs for cruise missiles -- Yes. Blueprints, especially. Books are more problematic, as the U.S. has no tendency to screen books for publication, and no border checks for books. (Not that outgoing luggage ever gets checked anyway.) * functional crypto systems, such as RSA products or PGP -- Yes, thinking as a bureaucrat. (I won't argue the effectiveness of such steps, or the ultimate futility of trying to control software export.) * "RSA in Perl," even in machine-readable form. I would not block export of it, as it is not a "usable system" (no key management, unwieldy to use). The proof of the pudding: how many people are using "RSA in Perl" to actually communicate? How many Pablo Escobars or Saddam Husseins are likely to ever use it? (If the argument that the few lines of RSA in Perl "give away" the secret of RSA, this is bogus. The core steps are widely, widely (did I say "widely") known, and are standard programming examples. One of the first things I did in Mathematica, several years ago, was to code up "RSA in Mathematica"...took about 15 lines, without much effort to compact it.) * "RSA in Perl" on an unreadable t-shirt. Yes. Yes, thinking as a bureaucrat I would certainly approve it. Or try to lose it, return it unopened, etc., knowing full well the CJR was being done as a publicity stunt (well, isn't it?) and that reporters were waiting to make the State Department look foolish by reporting: "State Department Rules "Munitions T-Shirt" May Be Exported!" (Or to look just as foolish by rejecting it.) --Tim May Views here are not the views of my Internet Service Provider or Government. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."