AUCRYPTO: `Germany Frees Crypto' - do you believe it?

[Mok-Kong Shen]

Ross Anderson wrote:
> 
> Some people are under the impression that France and Germany have
> freed crypto. However, export controls look like being tightened.
> Guess who organised that? As Brian eloquently puts it:

To my humble knowledge, there is currently no export regulation in
Germany of crypto (at least in software). The recent paper issued
by the government expressedly says that R&D of crypto is free but adds
that the situation is to be reviewed in 2 years. There is some wording 
apparently related to the issue of Wassenar but it appears that the 
government wishes not to implement Wassenar if possible rather than 
to implement it. I might be wrong in my reading and interpretation,
of course. You should read the original

    http://bmwi.de/presse/1999/0602prml.html

or an English translation of it at John Young's site

    http://jya.com/de-crypto-all.htm


> GCHQ's agenda is obviously to stop people like Brian and me having
> crypto source code on our web pages. They don't seem to have
> understood that:
> 
> (a) the public domain exemption will apply to the Serpent home page
>     which will still be there. If the exemption is removed, the Serpent
>     home page will still be available in Norway, Israel, Taiwan ...;

However, if the law prohibits export of crypto in any form, whether
printed, on magnetic media or via eletronic transmission, then there 
is no legal way the material can get across the country boarder at
all and web publication will be out of question. But in US Berstein has 
had success recently. His case probably will be re-opened in the near 
future though. The outcome of that could have fairly wide impacts. 
That's why I suggested that some collective actions be taken to 
attempt to find somw arguments that eventually could be useful for the 
Bernstein case. (See my recent two posts to aucrypto; the same content
can be found in sci.crypt.)

M. K. Shen
-----------------------------
http://www.stud.uni-muenchen.de/~mok-kong.shen/ (Updated: 12 Apr 99)    
(Origin site of WEAK2-EX, WEAK3-EX and WEAK4-EX, three Wassenaar-conform
 algorithms based on the new paradigm Security through Inefficiency.)