Re: Announcement: RPK InvisiMail released on 12 Jan, 1998

[John Young <jya@pipeline.com>]

Bill Stewart compared the PR of RPK New Zealand's crypto
to Peter Gutmann's claims for NZ export controls.

This contrast confirms the report a few days back that any 
commercial crypto product that receives export approval from
any country is probably compromised notwithstanding the 
manufacturer's claims otherwise. Not that it's news here, but
this appears to be the unpublished requirement for granting 
of approvals, case by case. Either cooperate or face indefinite 
delays.

As Peter noted some time ago, this is what he was running into 
when he could not get a clear answer about NZ regulations, 
and parallels reports of similar experiences in the US, UK and 
other countries.

There is a similar current thread on UK Crypto about the difficulty
of getting a straight answer about crypto policy from HMG while
observing the success of cooperating crypto manufacturers.

It will be interesting to see how hard Congress pushes in the new 
session to expose what the Administration is up to behind BXA's
closed doors in contrast to open accounts.

And, what will be revealed (and concealed) bit by bit from the 
horse-trading of the Bernstein, Karn and Junger cases.