Duane wrote:
This where the second part of the federal case comes in, as part of the case they appealed to a higher court and in turned had stopped. The reason the judge let the case be dropped (at that point in time) was only because they said they had no plans to actively prevent the export of crypto.
Right. I think the basic idea was that the US government needed to loosen the encryption export control regulations enough to prevent a successful challenge based on free speech grounds (First Amendment), but it wanted to leave in place any regulations that could be justified to US courts on the grounds of preventing terrorism, etc. Among other things, that accounts for the special exemption granted to public posting of source code (which presumably might be viewed as speech in a public forum and hence protected under the First Amendment), as well as the continued designation of particular countries, individuals, and organizations as prohibited in the context of "knowing" export/re-export of encryption software.
Those wanting to push ahead with the case wanted the precedent to be federal, not just in the 6th circuit and the Clinton administration didn't.
Minor correction: If you're referring to the so-called "Bernstein case", that was actually in the 9th circuit, not the 6th circuit. See
http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Crypto_export/Bernstein_case/ Frank -- Frank Hecker [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ dev-tech-crypto mailing list dev-tech-crypto@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-tech-crypto
