[Cryptography] On 40-bit encryption

[Dave Horsfall]

OK, call me a newbie (which basically I am), but I'm baffled by something 
that's popped up in a couple of threads here, so for the benefit of me and 
other newbies, I'd appreciate an authoritative answer (and I don't mean 
Wikipedia - the place is rife with edit wars in general).

Nothing stronger than 40 bits was permitted to be exported, because it was 
classed as a munition (I'll leave the politics etc out of it, as there's 
too much confusion with both PGP and alleged RC4 being leaked, and strong 
crypto development by non-US nations).

It then got relaxed, apparently because the "enemy" already have strong 
crypto so it was pointless.

I now read that because RSA is so strong, it resulted in the aforesaid 
relaxation; this doesn't seem to pass the sniff test for this non-US 
citizen....

-- Dave