US Encryption Ban Would Only Send the Market Overseas (dailydot.com)

Patrick O'Neill writes: As U.S. legislatures posture toward legally mandating backdoored encryption, a new Harvard study suggests that a ban would push the market overseas because most encryption products come from over non-U.S. tech companies. "Cryptography is very much a worldwide academic discipline, as evidenced by the quantity and quality of research papers and academic conferences from countries other than the U.S.," the researchers wrote.

Comments

Only Outlaws will Have Encryption

[NReitzel]

You would have thought that our government would have learned when they attempted to ban PGP, decades ago.

For those of you who don't remember, the software got classified as a munition, people who sold it could be arrested as arms trafficers. Downloads instantly moved from US servers to those in Finland (and elsewhere) and the end result was a big spectacular nothing.

Calmer heads prevailed, in the long run.

The technology is out there, the knowledge of how to do encryption is impossible to stuff back into the bottle.