Re: Clinton Admin. to announce new Crypto regs

[Rick Smith <smith@securecomputing.com>]

These "new" regulations "to be issued" are scrambling to catch up with
previous and current practices. It doesn't change things at all.

When they issued the new export regulations in January, the glaring hole
was the absence of an explicit exception for the financial industry. Under
the customs that evolved around ITAR, you could get an export license for
strong crypto as long as the overseas customer was a financial institution.
This announcement is simply a public acknowledgment that the BXA will look
favorably on export requests to banks and that someday they'll try to draft
specific regulations on the subject. Meanwhile you do it by grinding
through the bureacracy.

Export permission for strong crypto that only encrypts financial data is
clearly a variant of this tradition. They already granted export permission
for one vendor of such a system, so I'm not surprised they're planning to
make up a regulation to cover it.

Rick.
smith@securecomputing.com