From: frantz@netcom.com (Bill Frantz)
Date: Sat, 23 Mar 1996 21:57:58 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Dorothy Denning attacks Leahy's crypto bill
Message-ID: <199603222230.OAA16208@netcom6.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At  9:33 PM 3/21/96 -0800, Bill Stewart wrote:
>>From: denning@cs.cosc.georgetown.edu (Dorothy Denning)
>>>The Commerce/NSA study did acknowledge that the existence of foreign
>>>products claiming strong encryption could have a negative effect on
>>>U.S. competitiveness.  However, by allowing encryption services to be
>>>sold separately from the applications software that uses them, CAPIs
>>>will make it extremely unlikely that general-purpose software will be
>>>substantially effected by export controls.
>
>Which side is Dr. Denning _on_ here?  At present, software using CAPIs
>is not exportable under the ITAR, since the CAPI is a "component of a 
>munitions system"; is she now advocating legalized export of software
>using government-approved CAPIs only?  

Case in point.  I recently had a client ask me to locate a reference
implementation of SSL.  I fired up AltaVista and quickly found two of them.
 One was available thru Netscape, and the other was Eric Young's from
Australia.

Now, in good conscience, do I give them Netscape's non-exportable version,
or Eric's already exported version.  Of course I gave them Eric's.  They
were delighted since they can just point their foreign customers to Eric's
site and avoid the whole export issue.

I would like to publicly thank Eric for making his code available to US
sites.  I hope that this description, in some small way, helps to overcome
the idiocy of not being able to export what is already freely available
abroad.

Regards - Bill


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