Criminalizing crypto criticism + 802.11b access

[Tim May]

At 12:30 PM -0400 7/27/01, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>Like I said, I'm not defending the DMCA. I was merely correcting
>the fellow who didn't know the exemption (of sorts) existed.
>

Not being an expert on the DCMA, I'm still trying to square the 
notion of an "exemption for research" (my words, summarizing my 
understanding of the various clauses) and the fear of the Felten gang 
that presenting their _research_ paper on the weaknesses in the new 
Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) scheme could expose them to 
prosecution.


Felten wasn't building commercial devices for sale, he wasn't 
marketing a product to enable bypassing the SDMI...he and his group 
were doing standard cryptographic analysis of an algorithm...the 
bread and butter of determining the strenghts of ciphers and security 
methods.

I think the threatened suit under the terms of the DCMA goes to the 
point the original poster made: that the way to stop cryptanalysis of 
a cipher ("Digital Snake Oil Bass-O-Mattic Encryptator 1.0"), or at 
least the publication of any results, is to do what was done to 
Felten.

I just don't see how if a Princeton professor is not exempted from 
the DCMA that a guy in a lab in Sunnyvale would be. And so the 
chilling effect on research is in fact accomlished.

The courts will no doubt have their say, but right now the DCMA sure 
looks to be a ban on publication of research.


--Tim May


-- 
Timothy C. May         tcmay at got.net        Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns