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Re: Dorothy Denning attacks Leahy's crypto bill
At 9:33 PM 3/21/96 -0800, Bill Stewart wrote:
>>From: [email protected] (Dorothy Denning)
>>>The Commerce/NSA study did acknowledge that the existence of foreign
>>>products claiming strong encryption could have a negative effect on
>>>U.S. competitiveness. However, by allowing encryption services to be
>>>sold separately from the applications software that uses them, CAPIs
>>>will make it extremely unlikely that general-purpose software will be
>>>substantially effected by export controls.
>
>Which side is Dr. Denning _on_ here? At present, software using CAPIs
>is not exportable under the ITAR, since the CAPI is a "component of a
>munitions system"; is she now advocating legalized export of software
>using government-approved CAPIs only?
Case in point. I recently had a client ask me to locate a reference
implementation of SSL. I fired up AltaVista and quickly found two of them.
One was available thru Netscape, and the other was Eric Young's from
Australia.
Now, in good conscience, do I give them Netscape's non-exportable version,
or Eric's already exported version. Of course I gave them Eric's. They
were delighted since they can just point their foreign customers to Eric's
site and avoid the whole export issue.
I would like to publicly thank Eric for making his code available to US
sites. I hope that this description, in some small way, helps to overcome
the idiocy of not being able to export what is already freely available
abroad.
Regards - Bill
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Frantz | The CDA means | Periwinkle -- Computer Consulting
(408)356-8506 | lost jobs and | 16345 Englewood Ave.
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