The laws in question are OFAC sanctions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Foreign_Assets_Control
The specific acts that enable this are varied. In theory they apply to any US citizen or resident. The issue is not cryptography, it's "trade with sanctioned countries", period, where making files available to download is considered trade. For Bitcoin to be available in these places, the sites and download mirrors would need to be hosted outside the USA by non-citizens. EU sanctions are primarily financial at this time, as far as I know there are no attempts to prevent people from serving data to Iran. Example of places where there are no sanctions in effect: Switzerland. Unfortunately datacenter space in Zurich is quite expensive (as is everything here). I would not ever describe OFAC as "effective law". The SDN list has repeatedly been found unconstitutional, representing as it does a complete evasion of the judicial system. If you end up on the sanctions list no evidence is required, no process is followed and no appeals are possible. The list itself assumes names are globally unique. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
