Compliance and lax Customs

[rishab@dxm.ernet.in]

In India telco (and several other) laws are ridiculously outdated (see my
"FREEdom on the Net in India" Electrosphere, WIRED 3.01), although our
Customs are pretty techno-savvy, as they need to know prices off the cuff
for all the goodies people try to smuggle in without duty. But we're quite
adept here at ignoring many of the more inconvenient laws - I just bought
myself a new 540 mb hard disk for the equivalent of $350, and none of the
BBSes pay the required $50,000/year license fee.

It's nice to know that the US Customs are catching up with the technical
incompetence one sees in the LEAs here. But I guess American Cypherpunks are
to compliant to attempt to take advantage of such things. In fact, there's
been a noticeable slump in the mirroring of crypto from US-only ftp sites to
Europe. Obviously Cypherpunks are far more law-abiding in _practice_ than
the media would have us believe, based on what they _discuss_ ;-)

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Rishab Aiyer Ghosh                                "In between the breaths is
rishab@dxm.ernet.in                                  the space where we live"
rishab@arbornet.org                                        - Lawrence Durrell
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