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1995-07-13 - Re: Anti-Electronic Racketeering Act of 1995 (fwd)

Header Data

From: lmccarth@cs.umass.edu (L. McCarthy)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com (Cypherpunks Mailing List)
Message Hash: 2ac1de4259c614118a9df0ce3a029f405aa6c905860497f7c9709a4e66702982
Message ID: <9507131212.AA21613@cs.umass.edu>
Reply To: <9507122221.AA24506@toad.com>
UTC Datetime: 1995-07-13 12:12:07 UTC
Raw Date: Thu, 13 Jul 95 05:12:07 PDT

Raw message

From: lmccarth@cs.umass.edu (L. McCarthy)
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 95 05:12:07 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com (Cypherpunks Mailing List)
Subject: Re: Anti-Electronic Racketeering Act of 1995 (fwd)
In-Reply-To: <9507122221.AA24506@toad.com>
Message-ID: <9507131212.AA21613@cs.umass.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


bal writes:
> It's much worse than this.  Look at the definition of "predicate act":
> 
>             `(b) For purposes of this section, each act of distributing
>           software is considered a separate predicate act. Each instance in
>           which nonexportable software is accessed by a foreign government, 
>           an agent of a foreign government, a foreign national, or an agent 
>           of a foreign national, shall be considered as a separate predicate
>           act.
> 
> Now, since the bill also makes 1030A violations "racketeering
> activities", all you need are two predicate acts and RICO comes into
> play.  

In the subsection that explicitly mentions crypto, it says that it's
unlawful to put (non-GAK) crypto on an open net, "regardless of whether such
software has been designated non-exportable". If the phrase "nonexportable"
means the same thing in the context of this subsection, then provision (b)
would only seem to apply RICO to stuff that already falls under ITAR.

For whatever it covers, this provision conveniently makes you liable for the
actions of others. I could see quid pro quo between governments coming into
play here. They can get practically anyone connected with a foreign country 
to click a button on a Web browser, download PGP half a dozen times, and then
hit you with 7 counts of racketeering. Hey, they could run a net searcher
daemon that automatically snags a heap of copies of anything it finds that
looks like a non-GAK crypto app.  

[...]
> Get a copy of this bill from:
> 
> 		ftp://ftp.loc.gov/pub/thomas/c104/s974.is.FTP
> 
> and read it.  
> 
> 					--bal

-Futplex <futplex@pseudonym.com>

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