On 6/13/06, Marcus Watts wrote:
In this case, the vendor appears to be talking about documentation, which means they're actually confused. EAR covers chips but not documentation. By US law they *have* to care about the chips. Otherwise they're not in business. However the same law and a bunch of court cases also makes a big thing about "free speech". For quite a number of years, when cryptography was considered a munition and not allowed to be exported without special license, people were writing books and talking about cryptography almost entirely without problems. Somebody needs to point this out to them; there's simply no defensible US export legal reason for them to make people fill out web forms of any form to acquire human readable documentation.
As one example, Phil Zimmerman was not permitted to export the source code to PGP electronically, so he published a print book containing it in a character set particularly conducive to OCR (in the state of that technology at that time). The issue there was that people in the NSA and other anti-public-crypto goons in the US government were comfortable and secure in their authority to obtain censorship of electronic communications, but it was totally out of their league (at least in that particular instance) to extend the censorious regulations to the print medium. So that issue is very real, but it is totally separate from what is going on here, because: (1) the materials in question are being distributed in an electronic form (2) the materials in question are not actually subject to any US export restrictions of any kind, and Mr. Cohen is either lying to us or is quite misled. The issue of the US government not being permitted to restrict speech does not appear to me to be the applicable one here, because the only organization that is acting against the interests of freedom in this case is Hifn. They can blame the US government all they want--they're lying (or severely and inexcusably mistaken). -Eliah
