From: John Young <jya@pipeline.com>
Date: Mon, 17 Feb 1997 12:56:18 -0800 (PST)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: WTO_tap
Message-ID: <199702172056.MAA13516@toad.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Three newspapers have pieces today on the new WTO
telecom agreement. A Page 1 NYP report examines the
administration's favoring of the once-moribund WTO over 
the UN as a principal means for "exporting US free-market 
values through global commercial agreements."

The telecom agreement, for the first time, allows the WTO
to go inside the signatory countries and check compliance, and
if warranted, impose sanctions, a role once reserved to the UN.

While encryption is not mentioned, it's worth watching the
WTO globally unite its privacy-invasive predecessors: the 
national tele-tappers. The spin is that now all governments can 
have access to the global (wiretap) network under guise of
enhanced commercial competition. (And that's why Commerce was 
given EI for CCL.)

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WTO_tap

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For related background, there's informative discussion on the 
encryption switchover from State to Commerce in the Defense 
Trade News, archived at the Dept of State Web site.

We've put the five issues in which the shift of encryption 
items from the USML to the CCL is formulated by the Technical
Working Group at:

  January/April 1993:     http://jya.com/dtn0193.htm  (76K)
  January 1994:           http://jya.com/dtn0194.htm  (99K)
  April 1994:             http://jya.com/dtn0494.htm  (66K)
  July/October, 1994:     http://jya.com/dtn0794.htm  (67K)
  October 1995:           http://jya.com/dtn1095.htm  (35K)