[2482] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Of encryption and bananas
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ernest Hua)
Mon Apr 13 12:54:05 1998
From: Ernest Hua <Hua@teralogic-inc.com>
To: cryptography@c2.net
Cc: Ernest Hua <Hua@teralogic-inc.com>
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1998 07:51:59 -0700
My recent contribution to the Encryption Forum on NYT on-line:
ernesthua - 10:56am Apr 13, 1998 EST (#207 of 207)
I think "sboland1" (#201)'s comments hit it right on the nose.
Really, I don't care if the government wants to put up export
restricts for whatever policy
reasons it makes up. There are export restrictions galore for
everything from software to
bananas.
The problem is that the average person cannot "accidentally"
export a banana. When was the
last time you accidentally exported what the government
considers a military grade banana?
And yet that is what export controls (for whatever reason) on
encryption means to a software
engineer. Encryption is as common as bananas. It is absolutely
required where a software
engineer wants to achieve a real level of security for his/her
customers. But export controls
instantly prohibits one of the most productive and prolific
methods of software engineering:
sharing source code.
Take a look at any high-tech start-up today. They are frugal.
They are smart. What do they use
for tools? GNU and various other thousands of freeware available
on-line. These are not your
grandma's rinky-dink freeware. These are full commercial-grade
software systems available for
free for your download. These are not just a handful of programs
some commie liberal wrote.
These are some of the most powerful tools available anywhere.
And the key is:
The source code is available for you to port to any platform you
like.
If you are wondering how this could even be significant. Ask
your friend or relative working
at a high-tech start-up where they would be if GNU and other
freeware were not available.
For the business-aware, check out the latest strategy by
Netscape: They did the software
company's unthinkable ... they gave away their source code.
For the entertainment-industry-aware, check out what they used
for Titanic: Not SGI. Not Sun.
Linux-based Alpha workstations. (Linux is a freeware operating
system.)
Freely available source code (despite the fact that it goes
against the intuitive open-market
concepts of keeping trade secrets to yourselves), is a very very
important component of the
high-tech industry.
And yet, the moment I share any source code related to
encryption, I am in violation and can
be jailed and fined up to $1 million. YES! Check out that big
fat number! $1 million! YES!
JAIL! No kidding! Just doing my job responsibly for my client
can land me in jail and leave
me in the poor house!
And if you are wondering how the top law enforcement agency in
this nation (which leads the
world in high-tech) can utterly crush a blossoming industry,
just watch ... the NSA and the FBI
have no qualms arguing and setting up legal precedence to
regulate software source code and
to remove any notion of speech status for source code, in order
to justify their attempt to
regulate encryption.
