[290] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: UK Encryption Policy
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (jim bell)
Sun Feb 23 15:38:27 1997
Date: Sat, 22 Feb 1997 17:05:17 -0800
To: pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz, cryptography@c2.net, ukcrypto@maillist.ox.ac.uk
From: jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>
At 07:28 PM 2/22/97, Peter Gutmann wrote:
>The export regulations as a whole are pretty bizarre. Because todays high
>technology is tomorrows museum curio, the regulations restrict a wide variety
>of items which are freely available and have no special significance - probably
>half the technology exports from any country violate at least one part of these
>regulations, and the only reason noone is prosecuted is that the regulations
>are so obscure and bizarre that noone knows or cares about them. For example a
>20-year-old video game I have up in the attic violates 3A001.a.1 (the
>museum-piece 1802 microprocessor on it happens to qualify as "radiation-
>hardened"); most laptop computers violate 3A001.a.3.10.a (they have chips with
>more than 208 pins in them); some video-game-oriented PC graphics cards and
>possibly recent Nintendo and Sega video games (I'd have to check this, no two
>sources ever state the video performance of their toys the same way) violate
>4A003.d (graphics systems with performance above a certain level); Linux
>violates (at least) 4D003.a (an operating system which supports multiple
>processors) and 5D001.c.4 (dynamic adaptive routing software); the routers used
>by many telcos violate 5A001.c.5 (they handle ATM routing); many software
>development tools violate 5D001.c.3 (they allow decompiling of software). The
>list goes on and on. It would be interesting to get some PC suppliers
>catalogue and sit down with it and the regulations one afternoon to see how
>many rules and regulations you'd be breaking by shipping one of their PC's out
>of the country.
This could be considered an OPPORTUNITY, perhaps. There are certainly going
to be some rather large companies shppping such computers out of various
restricted countries, and they would probably like to have their way cleared
in the future even if they don't seem to follow the rules _today._ Buy
their computers, look at their guts and specs, and determine all the
different ways they fail the rules, just as you suggested. But at that
point, rather than merely clucking over this, how about approaching the
company(ies) involved and explain how you'd like to have the rules changed
to make their exports _legal._ It shouldn't take long to convince them to
help.
Jim Bell
jimbell@pacifier.com
