I have always found the U.S. government's logic behind export restriction of strong encryption to be specious at best (say that five times fast...). To paraphrase: if we prevent all strong crypto originating in the U.S. from leaving its borders, we will therefore prevent strong crypto from existing elsewhere, as the United States maintains a monopoly on mathematics, and no non-U.S. mathematician could possibly be as clever as that.
If you were to browse the bookshelves of an arbitrary math grad student, I'm afraid that you'd find many of the text's authors are not U.S. citizens. Mathematics knows no political boundaries.
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I have always found the U.S. government's logic behind export restriction of strong encryption to be specious at best (say that five times fast...). To paraphrase: if we prevent all strong crypto originating in the U.S. from leaving its borders, we will therefore prevent strong crypto from existing elsewhere, as the United States maintains a monopoly on mathematics, and no non-U.S. mathematician could possibly be as clever as that.
If you were to browse the bookshelves of an arbitrary math grad student, I'm afraid that you'd find many of the text's authors are not U.S. citizens. Mathematics knows no political boundaries.