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SA Government's Crypto Registration Up And Running

Posted by Hemos on from the bad-bad-policies dept.

orange writes "Anyone who supplies crypto products to South Africans (and the government defines crypto as almost anything) has to register with the appropriate agency and pay a ZAR2000 fee (US$200). Failure to supply South Africans without being registered means potential jail time (How they're gonna get you unless you come to South Africa is another story). A copy of the legislation can be found can be found online."

4 of 249 comments (clear)

  1. How are they going to get you? by gmhowell · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There are these things called 'extradition treaties'. I have no idea what the nature of one (if any) between {US|CA|UK|DE|etc.} and SA is, but it might exist.

    --
    Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
  2. WTF by tomhudson · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Of course, if you don't supply them with the key, how are they going to proove it's YOUR product that did the encryption in the first place?

  3. What about credit card numbers? by jc42 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The obvious intent of all this is to make people pay the registration fee for every browser they may have on any machine. Otherwise, if you even accidentally download an encrypted page, i.e., you make a credit-card purchase over the web, you are risking a jail term.

    Of course, the obvious thing is for vendors to supply Windows machines that don't have any encryption installed, so that the vendors don't have to pay the registration fee for every sale. This is likely to lead to a situation where credit-card orders are sent unencrypted. The SA spammers will love this.

    People keep talking like encryption is some military or law-enforcement topic. But the main use of encryption these days is to prevent the interception of commercial information. The fact that restrictions on encryption will make financial data easily available is not necessarily accidental. The goal could very easily be a desire on the part of the government to have easy access to everyone's financial transactions. Such information has a lot of political uses.

    --
    Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
  4. That's *in* SAf, not *to* SAf by jon_eaves · · Score: 4, Insightful
    When will people read the friggin articles first. Oh, I forgot, this is /. with people having a reading age of about 10, and a concentration span in the nanoseconds.

    When I saw it, I nearly had a heart attack, I write freely available Java crypto BouncyCastle.org and thought of the horrible problems that we're going to have keeping SAf off the site.

    I spent the 2 seconds actually reading the paragraph at the SAf Gov Site and it says:

    All Cryptography Providers providing services or products in South Africa are required to register their services or products with the register maintained by the Department of Communications.

    Note, the wording is in.