Re: White House crypto proposal -- too little, too late

[Lucky Green <shamrock@netcom.com>]

On Tue, 1 Oct 1996, jim bell wrote:
> An import restriction would be even less effective than the current export 
> restrictions.  With an import restriction, a person need merely receive a 
> given piece of software in the mail from an "unknown" benefactor, software 
> that (surprise!) would have been illegal to import.  (the software doesn't 
> even have to be mailed from outside the US, merely trucked in by a wetback 
> and anonymously mailed by tossing it into the ubiquitous USnail PO Box.)   
> Redistribution of this software would have to be legal, if for no other 
> reason than nobody could prove it was imported illegally.  Nobody outside 
> the US would have any standing to sue for copyright violation, because they 
> couldn't import it and sell it without restrictions.

You are missing something. Import restrictions only make sense if 
possession of the software will be illegal. And as any long time reader of 
this list should realize, this is what the government's crypto 
initiatives are in the long run all about. Clipper IV is just the nose of 
the camel.

--Lucky