[3570] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Movement on Export regulations
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Rose)
Fri Oct 30 16:47:12 1998
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 1998 11:07:35 +1000
To: cryptography@c2.net
From: Greg Rose <ggr@qualcomm.com>
I was in a TIA standards committee meeting the other day, which was
attended by a couple of representatives from the NSA's export regulation
group (they don't like naming names), and an interesting comment came out
of them. After clarification, the comment boiled down to:
"There is no longer any reason that an export licence for 56 bit
encryption would be denied."
That is, s/40/56/ in all previous discussions.
This prompted me to ask whether the guidelines they used were themselves a
matter of national security, that is, would a FOIA request for the
guidelines be productive. I should have learned not to ask double barreled
questions by now. After a short period of silence, I rephrased it to two
questions. The former got an explicit "no comment", while the latter got a
somewhat whimsical "if you like to see mostly black paper, with the
occasional 'if' or 'the' visible, yes, it would be productive."
With the US involvement in the international efforts to standardise 3rd
generation mobile phones hamstrung by these regulations ("SHA based
authentication algorithms cannot be exported to the ITU, because they don't
exclude the T7 nations"), expect to see some more interesting action on
this front from the telephone industry.
Greg.
Greg Rose INTERNET: ggr@Qualcomm.com
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