[HN Gopher] When Encryption Was a Crime: The 1990s Battle for Fr...
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       When Encryption Was a Crime: The 1990s Battle for Free Speech in
       Software
        
       Author : Overton-Window
       Score  : 17 points
       Date   : 2021-08-07 21:27 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (reason.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (reason.com)
        
       | retrac wrote:
       | One of my favourite loopholes of all time, just legally and
       | technically. It was illegal to export "munitions" of which
       | computer hardware such as floppy disks with bit patterns encoding
       | strong encryption software, along with ROMs, and ASIC microcode,
       | and the like, could be considered munitions. This is a reasonable
       | enough interpretation of that law, even with the US First
       | Amendment.
       | 
       | But in no way is a book a munition. So the PGP source code was
       | published on paper and mailed to Canadians, but also some in
       | Europe (I believe?), in any case, to countries which do not have
       | such laws applying to encryption software. The reams were OCR'd
       | and typed in, and then put online, where they could be freely
       | downloaded from elsewhere in the world. I believe this is part of
       | why the OpenBSD project was and still is based in Canada.
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7885238
        
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       (page generated 2021-08-07 23:01 UTC)