ITAR double standards?

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

I think there's been ample evidence that the ITARs are often used to harass
U.S. companies that "won't play ball," that refuse to go along with certain
governmental policies. (Part of the think we libertarians hate about Big
Government and Lots of Laws is that government can use selective
enforcement an another lever of power. As a felon, I am acutely aware of
this power.)

Something Black Unicorn/Uni/Dirsec/whatever said reminded me of something
interesting:

At 8:45 PM 3/25/96, Black Unicorn wrote:

>Further, a entirely foreign production, say for chip manufacture, would
>probably make things easier.  I had specifically contemplated hardware
>applications.  Indeed, there are problems with both, but they don't stem
>from ITAR.

Now when I was with Intel, we made many of our chips in plants in Ireland,
Israel, and other locales outside the U.S. Some of these chips were
forbidden for export by the ITARs. And certainly the knowledge of the
engineers sent overseas was comparable to the knowledge of RSA
programmers....

(Before anyone points out that Intel presumably was not skirting the ITARs
by drop-shipping chips from Ireland directly to non-U.S. countries. This is
indeed the case. My point is a slightly different one. Read on.)

So, did Intel have to apply to the State Department's office on munitions
exports in order to send engineers to Malaysia, Israel, Germany, Ireland,
etc., to do development work? Not that I ever heard. Engineers simply
hopped on planes and that was that.

(I suspect the same is the case with programmers at RSADSI, Microsoft, etc.
That is, people ignore the Munitions Act laws which--it is argued by
some--forbid the export of "expertise.")

Where am I going with this? It seems to me that crypto companies could
point out to the ITARs/Munitions Office/etc. folks that vast amounts of
"sensitive technologies" are being developed and built by U.S. companies in
offshore locations without so much as a ripple of publicity or concern.

(I should note that in several examples I can think of, the engineers I
mentioned who were relocated to these offshore locales for chip development
later left the companies that moved them offshore and started or joined
competing companies. Sounds like an exact parallel to the dreaded "RSA
moves development to Switzerland" scenario that so many of us have urged.)

And yet mention that a crypto company is considering a move of its key
development folks to Switzerland or Austria or Zambia and watch the sparks
fly.

Sounds like a double standard to me, meant to exert pressure on the crypto
companies (whom the U.S. government, it is clear now, would just as soon
see put out of business or strictly controlled).

--Tim May

Boycott "Big Brother Inside" 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."