Re: mutt no longer in non-us?
On Thu, 18 Nov 1999, Joseph Carter wrote:
> If you think about prime numbers near the Mexican borders the US could try
> to say you're exporting crypto. We made the decision that a simple "run
> this seperate program and pipe output back to me" cannot reasonably be
> considered encryption hooks.
That's great, again, so long as the program itself doesn't mention
encryption in its own code or docs. Signing is OK, as the gov't has said
that they're only worried about encryption, not one-way hashes.
This is the same reason why the SSL-tunnelling-through-regular-HTTP-proxy
HTTP directive is CONNECT rather than something like SSL-PIPE.
> If such is allowed to be considered encryption we must also conclude that
> bash contains encryption hooks (as it too will optionally run pgp and read
> its output) and so would any program which may run any arbitrary binary
> and pipe its output someplace useful.
Do the bash man pages describe how to use pgp to encrypt messages?
> And frankly speaking for only myself as a citizen of the US and not as a
> developer here, the US government can shove their crypto regs someplace
> unpleasant---I refuse to comply with them on the grounds that they are an
> affront to the protections guaranteed me under the first, fourth, and
> fifth ammendments to the constitution and further do place myself and my
> personal property at great risk when conducting wire-based transactions.
I'd also like to make sure the debian.org machines don't get seized one
day when the gov't gets a bug up their butt. Yes, it's likely that mutt
won't be the critical factor here. But if you're going to willfully
violate the common interpretation of the law, at least you should make
sure everyone else is on board, such as the various Debian distributors.
Brian
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