Open Source's Role in Lowering Export Restrictions

Bozo points to this article (PDF) "from the latest issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society by Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau. It mentions the role of Open Source software in the U.S. government's backing off on export restrictions on cryptography. Here is a quote from the article: 'Open-source software has taken its place as a major element in the software marketplace. The consequence is a general decrease in the controllability of software and,in particular,a serious threat to effectiveness of the government efforts to stop the export of software containing strong cryptography.'"

Comments

Re:Its more sinister than that

[ecrips]

Or maybe they realised that the people whose encryption they really want to crack (ie terriosts) isn't going to be the standard encryption which comes with your OS/browser. If you really cared about security you'd download the illegal encryption software which didn't meet the export restrictions - you wouldn't care about breaking the law.

Really its stupid asking people to submit their keys or use weak encryption - because the people you really care about are always going to be using the strongest encryption they can get their hands on - and it doesn't matter whether its legal for them to have it or not.