Export what's imported

[jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>]

Recently, Senator Burns introduced that bill, S.1726, "ProCode."  Part of it 
had to do with changes in the export laws to allow export of things that are 
currently not allowed.

It occurs to me that this bill should be amended to say, explicitly, that 
any object or software which has ever been imported into the US can be 
legally exported. (Including multiple copies of software.)  It is 
particularly important that we do this now that the NTT encryption chip set 
has been announced.   Why?

Well, first, we CAN easily justify this.  The claim for export controls is 
that they restrict the access of encryption to various of the horsemen, out 
there.  But by definition anything which has ever been imported is already 
available outside the US, so it'll look rather silly if they try to control 
somebody from export that came from out of the country.

What are the benefits?  Maybe it'll destroy the entire 
crypto-export-regulation system.  Domestic software companies can simply set 
up a practice of buying all their crypto expertise from overseas.  If this 
happened over the long term this would be bad, but it won't because within a 
couple of years good crypto will be exported by American manufacturers based 
on foreign designs.  Pretty soon the export bans will become meaningless 
(even more so than they are today) and the pressure to remove the last 
restrictions will be enormous.

Jim Bell
jimbell@pacifier.com