[3576] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Movement on Export regulations
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Marc Horowitz)
Sun Nov 1 17:52:03 1998
From: Marc Horowitz <marc@MIT.EDU>
To: Greg Rose <ggr@qualcomm.com>
Cc: cryptography@c2.net
Date: 01 Nov 1998 17:07:41 -0500
In-Reply-To: Greg Rose's message of Fri, 30 Oct 1998 11:07:35 +1000
Greg Rose <ggr@qualcomm.com> writes:
>> 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.
About a month ago, I sent email about a BXA crypto export workshop.
This was Thursday, and I did attend. I will post a more detailed trip
report later, but they spent some time talking about the new
regulations. Basically, they said that while the new license
exemptions have not been written, if you ask for a license for
something which will be exempted, that license will likely be
rubber-stamped.
So, people should start submitting license requests for 56-bit based
stuff, to see if this is true.
>> 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.
When I asked on what basis they make their decisions, I got the
impression that there were no written guidelines, at least not on the
BXA side. Of course, they had no information on the other agencies'
criteria, but they did say that there is frequently internal
disagreement between the agencies.
Marc
