Can the inevitability of Software privacy be used to defeat the ITAR?

[jim bell]

At 01:03 PM 7/11/96 -0400, Mark M. wrote:

>> What is to prevent a U.S company to licence a foreign company
>> to sublicence and distribute a Crypto product abroad, if that
>> foreign company obtains that product on the pirate market?
>
>Just because the company didn't break any laws doesn't mean that they aren't
>going to be harassed by the government.  This is similar to the Philip
>Zimmermann case.  A grand jury investigation could be carried on for as long
>as the statute of limitations dictates and then the prosecutor of the case
>decided at the last minute not to indict.  This is the reason that Netscape
>has not yet made a browser with 128-bit encryption available on the Internet.

I think the government's ability to "harass" writers of good crypto software 
has been severely limited by their failure to indict Zimmermann.  Remember, 
today they pretty much have to accept the fact that anybody can write any 
software, DOMESTICALLY, without any sort of legal impediment by the laws 
including ITAR.   This is particularly true of a company like Netscape, 
which presumably has the bucks and/or the political clout to make it a 
difficult target.  Any case against Netscape would probably take years if 
not decades to resolve, and long before this happened the world would have 
adopted good encryption regardless.

Look what happened when MIT put PGP on the Web:  "Nothing."

Jim Bell
jimbell at pacifier.com