Borders *are* transparent

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

At 5:51 AM 7/18/96, snow wrote:
>On Tue, 16 Jul 1996, David Sternlight wrote:
>> At 3:36 AM -0700 7/16/96, Duncan Frissell wrote:
>> >At 04:18 PM 7/15/96 -0700, sameer wrote:
>> >>    Not like that's tough to figure out. Congrats. It's cool to
>> >>actually be able to connect to my webserver using real encryption.
>> >>Glad the lawyers don't think Barksdale is going to jail anymore.
>> >I'm glad too.  So how many minutes did it take to leak overseas?
>> It doesn't "leak overseas" as if there were some regrettable lapse in the
>> plumbing. Someone has to commit a felony violation of Federal law.
>
>     No they don't. If they are French, Russian, English, Greek, etc. They
> _may_ be violating their countries laws, but they are not necessarily
>violating ours.

This is a terribly important point: if a citizen of Foobaria succeeds in
connecting to the Netscape site--perhaps by experimenting with various
combinations of domain names and submitted address/zipcode
combinations--and Netscape sends him the file, he has not committed a crime
in his own country. (Unless they have their own laws....)

Ironically, under the ITARs, as I understand them, a citizen of Foobaria
who "exports" (= retrieves from Netscape's site) such materials actually
*has* violated our ITARs. (It is possible for persons outside the U.S. to
violate U.S. laws, of course. You can all imagine examples.) Prosecuting a
person in Foobaria for violating U.S. ITAR regs would of course be
problematic, and unlikely.

Likewise, much "export-controlled" software is freely purchasable without
any form of identification or proof of citizenship/residency in any of
thousands of U.S. software stores. (I don't know if the copies of Netscape
Navigator on the shelves in U.S. stores are now the "U.S." version, as
opposed to be a somwhat-crippled version, but I sure do know that a *lot*
of nominally-export-controlled software _is_ freely purchasable.)

Much of this software goes out of the country in luggage. In my various
flights out of the U.S. over the years, never have my bags been so much as
glanced at, except presumably for bombs with sniffers, scanners, etc.
Further, I have mailed optical disks out of the country--a single one of
these can store a whole lot of stuff.

(As I said in a 1992 interview, a DAT is like a shoulder-fired Stinger missile.)

On a trip to France and Monaco last year, I deliberately carried several
optical cartridges and couple of DATs, all crammed with  software, PGP,
RSADSI's MailSafe, Mathematica, etc. To make a point, and as props for my
talk on crypto anarchy. Certainly there was no checking on the way out at
SFO, and no checking whatsoever at Charles de Gaulle in Paris.

(On my return trip, the bored inspector in San Francisco asked what my
purpose in being overseas has been. Had I said "tourism" I would've been
waved through. Instead, for interest, I said "Meeting with Russian
cryptographers in Monte Carlo," just to see what would happen. He asked me
what "cryptographers" are or do... "They make secret codes." He then waved
me through. Sigh.)

None of this is surprising, of course. Borders _are_ transparent. There are
so _many_ degrees of freedom for getting stuff across borders. The hope
that a bunch of *bits* can be stopped in ludicrous.

_This_ is why I expect the Netscape beta to arrive overseas pretty soon.

--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,
Licensed Ontologist         | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."