Re: NSA, ITAR, NCSA and plug-in hooks.

[Rich Salz <rsalz@osf.org>]

>are specifically designed for the insertion of cryptographic materials, 
>or is it the fact that they could be used to support cryptographic 
>enhancements?

Everything is decided on a case-by-case basis.  I was in a meeting
with some NSA export-control people (Dept Z03) and asked a few questions
on this topic trying to nail down the angle of this slipper slope.

Basically, generic buffer-manipulation is okay.  "Keyed compression"
where you explicitly passed something called a key to a DLL routine
would be looked on suspiciously.  An abstract set of open/modify/close
routines (where open returned a pointer to opaque state, say a session
key :) would be fine.  The technical guy quickly grasped that I was
talking about anonymous remailers, but they "conceded" there's nothing
they can do about it.

I say "concede" because that implies more political/control-issues
then were really present at the meeting.
	/r$