[LEGAL] Crypto as Contraband?

[James A. Donald]

    --
At 06:20 PM 3/6/98 -0800, Tim May wrote:
> How could any "outlawing of unescrowed crypto" conceivably
> deal with this vast amount of distributed software? Will a
> user of RSA's MailSafe program face jail time for using a
> program he legally bought in 1991 (as I did)?
>
> More questions than answers. Can anybody help me to
> understand the legal issues?

You are getting out of date.  As the rule of law dissolves,
legal issues become insignificant, and will in due course
vanish altogether.

For example nobody knows what are the "legal issues" with
putting strong crypto on a web site, as I have done.
According to what the legislation says, what I have done is
completely in accord with legislation.  Indeed, it is
completely in accord with US legislation simply to post the
stuff. on any server inside the US, the foreigner doing the
download is violating the legislation, not the person who put
it up.  I have gone considerably further than is required by
legislation, though not nearly as far as some others have
gone.

But mere legislation counts for less and less these days.  If
you read the business press, you will frequently read them
complain of cases where the distinctions between executive,
legal, and judicial powers are effectively dissolved, and
penalties are in effect adminstratively applied for undefined
offences, or retrospectively and administratively defined
offences, often in ways that appear to personally enrich those
administering these quasi judicial powers.

Generally this sort of thing is only applied to people who
are unpleasant and unpopular.  Tobacco companies, junk bond
merchants whose businesses have been more profitable for
themselves than for many of their investors, and the like.
Of course this creates a large vested interest in demonizing
more and more people, so that more and more people can be
dealt with in this fashion.

Similar measures are applied not only to alleged recreational
drug distributors, but to lawyers who defend alleged
recreational drug distributors, but the business press tends
to report such cases less. 

Meanwhile formerly totalitarian countries, such as China and
Cuba, where there used to be no such things as laws, merely
some people having the power to harm other people, power
exercised in accordance with rules that those subject to this
power were forbidden to know, are moving towards the rule of
law.  It used to be that if someone imprisoned in Cuba were
to discover the actual reason for his imprisonment, he might
possibly suffer some draconian additional punishment for
improper possession of state secrets.

In a fully totalitarian state, the regime does not have rules
for most people, merely goals and desires.  If some desire is
not fulfilled, the masters will go around killing people more
or less at random until somebody fulfills that desire, or
until they have killed so many people that they suspect that
what they desire is not readily achievable, or sometimes
until they simply run out of people who might be able to
assist in fulfilling that desire.  For example all people
possessing certain skills and experience were wiped out by

Stalin, and in Cambodia everyone connected to the jute
industry in any way. Such rules as exist only apply to the
privileged, to those administering the terror, not to those
terrorized.

Crypto legislation is likely to resemble the announcement of 
a desire, rather than the announcement of rules and 
restrictions likely to fulfill that desire.  Indeed, the
proposals we have so far seen are desires, not rules. 

As you point out, that desire cannot be fulfilled, except by
means that further radically undermine the rule of law.


    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     KheXnmd1kekBNA4gB1wyUeQgjPT7Y26FWeajCBIR
     43jg9sJBVPllkPf+Yt2ByoAf/sIdt9xbXwh/wMV+Z