Recently, Senator Burns introduced that bill, S.1726, "ProCode." Part of it had to do with changes in the export laws to allow export of things that are currently not allowed. It occurs to me that this bill should be amended to say, explicitly, that any object or software which has ever been imported into the US can be legally exported. (Including multiple copies of software.) It is particularly important that we do this now that the NTT encryption chip set has been announced. Why? Well, first, we CAN easily justify this. The claim for export controls is that they restrict the access of encryption to various of the horsemen, out there. But by definition anything which has ever been imported is already available outside the US, so it'll look rather silly if they try to control somebody from export that came from out of the country. What are the benefits? Maybe it'll destroy the entire crypto-export-regulation system. Domestic software companies can simply set up a practice of buying all their crypto expertise from overseas. If this happened over the long term this would be bad, but it won't because within a couple of years good crypto will be exported by American manufacturers based on foreign designs. Pretty soon the export bans will become meaningless (even more so than they are today) and the pressure to remove the last restrictions will be enormous. Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com