Re: State Dept Response to my second CJ request
There is a problem with these "hair splitting" approaches to avoiding the ITARs (they accept the book; they reject the disks, so we ask to send some- thing that is halfway between the book and the disks, etc.). There is a well-known fallacy (whose fancy name I don't remember) which says that even though night and day change gradually from one to the other, and you can't really draw a line separating night from day, that doesn't change the fact that night is different from day. We may establish that hitting someone with a baseball bat is against the law, and hitting them with a feather is not; then we proceed to ask whether hitting them with a pillow is against the law, and so on. At some point the law is forced to make an absurd decision that hitting someone with item X is illegal while hitting them with Y is not, but X is almost the same as Y. Does this prove that no amount of assault is illegal? No. It just means that lines are not always easy to draw. In the same way, it is not easy to draw a line between a book which is protected by the first amendment and a program which a person can sit down and run to get military grade cryptography. But that does not lead to a strong legal argument that all cryptographic software is export- able, IMO. Hal
Hal writes:
In the same way, it is not easy to draw a line between a book which is protected by the first amendment and a program which a person can sit down and run to get military grade cryptography. But that does not lead to a strong legal argument that all cryptographic software is export- able, IMO.
Though I agree that the feather/pillow/stick/club scenario is unrealistic, I disagree that it applies in this case. The ITAR regulations are being enforced around a situation that's essentially a technological accident. The difference between an exportable piece of software printed with ink on a page and one in human-readable ASCII on a diskette is defined solely by the state of technology. If, tomorrow, some company began selling a $99.95 scanner with built-in OCR translation software, then there would really be no difference whatsoever. To return to the original analogy, it would put the "court" in a position of having to declare an assault with an oaken bat illegal, but one with a hickory bat OK. There is a similar lack of distinction between source code and machine code. If I introduce a computer system whose primary interface includes a C interpreter, then in some ways the source code *is* machine code. -- | GOOD TIME FOR MOVIE - GOING ||| Mike McNally <m5@tivoli.com> | | TAKE TWA TO CAIRO. ||| Tivoli Systems, Austin, TX: | | (actual fortune cookie) ||| "Like A Little Bit of Semi-Heaven" |
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