Re: Crypto Exports, Europe, and Conspiracy Theories

[tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)]

At 7:06 PM 1/26/96, Alex Strasheim wrote:

>Why aren't foreign companies flooding America with strong crypto?  Well,
>there are clearly pressures of the sort Tim described at work.  But there
>are other factors as well:

Let me emphasize that I was raising the issue as food for thought, as an
obvious question. Put another way, there are a lot of non-U.S.
cryptographers, Cypherpunks, and programmers. They  should be looking at
the (putative) $60 billion a year cost of the ITARS as evidence that a
market for strong crypto probably exists.

(I will be interested to see what non-U.S. code gets developed over the
next year or two, and how the U.S. government reacts to its importation
into the U.S. The main RSA patents will soon be expiring, those that don't
get thrown out in the wake of the RSA-Cylink-MIT-Stanford-PKP-Schlafly-etc.
brouhaha, that is.)

>o       Crypto isn't at the top of the list of factors when people pick
>        software.  Do most of use use 40-bit downloadable Netscape's
...

Maybe not important for casual users, but there's that $60 billion a year
figure again, so somebody cares. And digital commerce is front page news
almost every day, with security a major hot topic.

>o       Most foreign countries aren't wired as well as we in the US are.
>        Most people in Switzerland don't have cheap easy access to the net,

Though of course many countries are extremely well-wired. The Scandinavian
countries, for example. And the U.K. (e.g., demon, one of the earliest
full-service ISPs). But I don't want to get into a debate about numbers of
subscribers, etc. My main point was that crypto tool development has
traditionally been possible with fairly small teams...so I wonder why more
development has not happened in Europe and Asia, given the apparently
compelling advantages of not having to worry about the U.S. ITARs! (That
this "apparently" may not actually be so real is of course my main "food
for thought.")

>        for example.  That's one reason that the web, a good Swiss idea, has
>        been developed primarily in this country.  America has more people
>        thinking about the net than other countries do, and it's not
>        surprising that we're out in front in net software.

A minor correction. Tim Berners-Lee is British, and was only working at
CERN, which effectively straddles the French-Swiss border, near Geneva. And
he is now, or was recently, working in New York. I would have a hard time
calling his work "a Swiss idea."

Obviously many of the ideas that go into the Web (hypertext, a la Bush and
Nelson, connectivity, ISPs, etc.) are heavily American-based or
-influenced.

>Digicash is probably the first significant crypto product to be exported
>to America.  It's not very popular yet, but I think that most of us here
>agree that it is, in potential at least, as significant as
>Mosaic/Netscape.  It's important to note that this extremely important
>product couldn't have been produced here, patents aside.  Transaction
>systems need to be international, and our rules make America an unsuitable
>place from which to launch tranaction software.

I agree about Digicash (and I cited it as an example in my first article).
However, the lack of available crypto for export, and the cloudy situation
about Chaum's patents (*) has made Digicash almost a footnote in the race
for digital commerce, with a dozen other more visible product announcements
in the news.

(* I wrote up my views on the problems with software patents, having to do
with the inability to "meter usage," in contrast with physical objects such
as microprocessors.)

--Tim

Boycott espionage-enabled software!
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1  | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."