PING packets illegal?

[Mark M.]

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On Tue, 13 Feb 1996 anonymous-remailer at shell.portal.com wrote:
 
> Concerning the ITAR ...... what would happen if some Evil Hacker Dude in,
> say, England, decided to ICMP-ping a host in America? Nothing wrong with
> that ...... but if those ping packets contained little pieces of something
> like PGP ...... would the host being pinged be breaking the law? Would
> all the hosts in the route between that host and the host in England that
> was doing the ping also be breaking the law?

Exporting encryption to the U.S. from another country is not illegal, only
exporting from the U.S. is.  The method of transmissioni is irrelevant.  It
does not matter if TCP packets or ICMP-ping packets are used to transmit the
data. 

However, it has not been decided if all of the hosts in between the source and
the destination are violating the law.  Since it is impossible to monitor the
contents of every packet being transmitted over a network, I seriously doubt
that any intermediate host would be considered to be in violation of ITAR.

- --Mark

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