Bernstein Back in Court

William Tanksley send us the story that Bernstein, who's case against the United States resulted in a three judge panel over-turning the US laws regarding exportation of cryptography software. At the request of the DOJ, a full Court of Appeals will rehear the case. Here's to hoping that the full court follows the advice of the panel.

Comments

Analogy

[TheBeginner]

Sometimes I feel like the war against cryptography exportation is a lot like the war on drugs. The American government fights and fights against it on the grounds that it could fall into the hands of terrorists or hostile governments, just as in the war on drugs, the government fights to stop drugs from entering the marketplace as a whole.

But in both cases, it is completely ineffectual. Let's face it, we are doing as good a job keeping our cryptography methods secret as we are preventing drugs from crossing the border. In both cases, we are going about it the wrong way. In the case of drugs, the government causes an increase in crime, inflates the prices of drugs, and spends billions of dollars while only stopping a small percentage of the actual trafficking. In the war against crypto exportation, yes, the government is keeping our "secrets" from falling into the hands of the world at large, but is it keeping it from those that it claims are the problem?

Do any of us really believe that just because there is no official exportation, that anything on the U.S. market is still secure from high-powered foriegn organizations, be they countries or terrorists? In fact, they are the ones most likely to get whatever the software they want. Hell, if they can smuggle American missiles out of the country from "secure" military bases, how hard is it to steal software?

Once again, the U.S. government is costing the American cryptography industry a phenomenal amount of money by not allowing exportation (even though they do now, this is in the case of the ruling being overturned) while still not keeping the information from the "enemies." It is a backwards approach to the problem.

While it is nice to be moral and an upright country (relatively), the majority of the world is not. Those who want the crypto information can get it, and those who can pay for it can not. Is that really the solution?

Thus, as does the majority of Slashdot, I hope that this ruling stands.

This is the qmail author

[rsidd]

Since nobody's mentioned it so far... Dan Bernstein is the author of
qmail, ezmlm, and lots of other great software. Anyone who
has read the qmail docs or his webpage
will know that he places security above anything else, doesn't
mince his words, and doesn't hesitate to be a nonconformist
(eg, running his web site with his own secure anonymous
FTP server, rather than a http server...)

He's probably among the best possible people for this case.