Re: Irchat contains strong Crypto..
Rick Campbell <rick(a)campbellcentral.org> writes:
[1 <text/plain; US-ASCII (7bit)>]
From: SL Baur <steve(a)xemacs.org>
Date: 14 Oct 1998 01:16:20 -0700
XEmacs is small fry and we have done such civil disobedience in the
grey area of Mailcrypt since before my time. It contains crypto hooks
and thus is barred by the EAR.
IANAL, but I think that you're wrong about this. The coupling is very
loose -- it runs a seperate program that contains crypto, but one could
put another filter in it's place and still have the package do useful
things.
I don't recall all of the details, but someone claiming to be a lawyer
(Duncan??) on cypherpunks a few years back said that packages like
mailcrypt and my own PGP Augmented Messaging were outside the scope of
(at the time) ITAR and (I would assume) EAR as far as they address
``hooks'' in software.
Well, I would still think things like 'ssl.el' would be out. It has no
other purpose in life than to provide ssl encryption. Via an external
program still, but... :) Then there are my patches to add native SSLeay
support that got lost ages ago, that would DEFINITELY be bad mojo. :)
-Bill P.