Mailing list software losing posts

Arsen Ray Arachelian rarachel at prism.poly.edu
Sat Feb 26 22:58:15 PST 1994


Why bother with something as obvious and complex as an encrypted
address with a + in the middle.  If I were Joe Foreign_Guy I would
simply get an account somewhere in the USA, there are plenty of
public access unix systems that allow you a free month or so,
do the request for the crypto software, and immediatly put a 
.forward file in my directory.  I do this because I can no longer
support the high price of calling the USA, and thus want my mail
sent to a machine on the net that is sitting on my desk here in
sunny (insert_foreign_country).  

This way, the author has not broken the law by sending the software
to anysite.com, and I haven't either because all I did was to tell
the unix box to forward my mail out of the country.  Such a setting
isn't illegal, neither is sending crypto software via email to a 
USA site.

Legally who is to blame?  Neither "I" nor the sender broke the law
although the software has been sent.  If I move from the USA to
another country and arrange a deal with my post office to send me
ALL my mail to wherever I am and pay them in advance for the
service plus agree to pay for whatever forwarding costs, who is to
be blamed if Joey_CryptoAuthor sends me a disk with a ton of
crypto software in an unlabled box, and the Post Office does not
check its contents, but exports it?

Neither I nor Joey_CryptoAuthor broke ITAR.  Not really.  Not
intentionally.  But who gets blamed?







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