[Cryptography] On 40-bit encryption

[Sandy Harris]

On Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 5:43 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:

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

I'd say the main reason for the relaxation in the US was the Bernstein case
Dan Bernstein (grad student at Berkeley, later prof at U Illinois), supported
by the EFF, sued the US government arguing that, since code can be
read and discussed by humans, it qualifies legally as speech, so export
restrictions on source code are an unconstitutional restriction on free
speech. He won in the first court & again on appeal. There is an archive
of case documents with links to related cases:
http://cr.yp.to/export.html

At that point, the government changed their regulations -- moved the
controls from the State dep't to Commerce and allowed export of
"public domain" code, provided the Commerce dep't is notified. As
I see it, they were scrambling to salvage anything they could and
desperately trying to avoid having the Bernstein case make it to
the Supreme Court and perhaps overturn the regulations completely.

The EFF says the requirement for notification is still unconstitutional,
but I have not heard of any court case over that.