1997-05-08 - Re: Clinton Admin. to announce new Crypto regs

Header Data

From: Rick Smith <smith@securecomputing.com>
To: Will Rodger <cypherpunks@toad.com
Message Hash: ce65db5ddbfe1e384ae472ddb31f6afe8bd78ee1d467228ae852593dd858fb51
Message ID: <v03007814af9801832ac0@[172.17.1.61]>
Reply To: <3.0.32.19970508104809.0070e8cc@postoffice.worldnet.att.net>
UTC Datetime: 1997-05-08 22:17:11 UTC
Raw Date: Fri, 9 May 1997 06:17:11 +0800

Raw message

From: Rick Smith <smith@securecomputing.com>
Date: Fri, 9 May 1997 06:17:11 +0800
To: Will Rodger <cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Clinton Admin. to announce new Crypto regs
In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.19970508104809.0070e8cc@postoffice.worldnet.att.net>
Message-ID: <v03007814af9801832ac0@[172.17.1.61]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


These "new" regulations "to be issued" are scrambling to catch up with
previous and current practices. It doesn't change things at all.

When they issued the new export regulations in January, the glaring hole
was the absence of an explicit exception for the financial industry. Under
the customs that evolved around ITAR, you could get an export license for
strong crypto as long as the overseas customer was a financial institution.
This announcement is simply a public acknowledgment that the BXA will look
favorably on export requests to banks and that someday they'll try to draft
specific regulations on the subject. Meanwhile you do it by grinding
through the bureacracy.

Export permission for strong crypto that only encrypts financial data is
clearly a variant of this tradition. They already granted export permission
for one vendor of such a system, so I'm not surprised they're planning to
make up a regulation to cover it.

Rick.
smith@securecomputing.com







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