[pjc50]

There was also in the 90s the weird period of export control of encryption software from the US, leading to the "this tshirt is a munition" shirts with the algorithm printed on them. And the (thankfully failed) "clipper chip" mandate.

[dcow]

Those controls all still exist. You just get a pass if you’re using “standard crypto”. Or if your implementation is open source.

[Quarrel]

Export controls still exist, but we're at least a far cry from the days of "This version of Mozilla is illegal to download if you are outside the USA. Please don't do it."

(and before that PGP!)

[aspenmayer]

Japan was worried about running afoul of these same laws and banned sales of the PS2 in certain countries, I think the same countries we weren't allowed to share advanced crypto with.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/20-years-later-how-concerns-about... | https://web.archive.org/web/20250619030114/https://www.pcmag...

> All that power caught the eye of Japan’s Trade Ministry. In April 2000, they issued an edict[0]: if Sony wanted to ship the PS2 abroad, they would need to request a special permit. The law as written required any exporter who wished to ship hardware with potential military applications worth more than $472 outside the country to obtain permission from the government or face up to five years in prison.

> With a sticker price of $376, that meant any kind of bulk PS2 shipments would run afoul of the law. If the company couldn’t convince their government otherwise, American gamers wouldn’t have a chance to play Ridge Racer V or TimeSplitters on launch day.

> Sony applied for a special export permit to get its new console to the rest of the world, but a few countries were blacklisted. Libya, Iran, Iraq, and North Korea were considered potentially likely to use the console for nefarious purposes. Here in the United States, we got the hardware on October 26, as planned.

[0] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/716237.stm | https://web.archive.org/web/20241212131304/http://news.bbc.c...

[hungmung]

There are no real laws or court rulings protecting crypto, the Department of Commerce simply changed their rules to allow it, and I have no doubt they could easily change them back if the mood struck them.

Zimmerman had a novel defense (selling PGP source code as a book, which should be protected by 1A), but it was never actually tested in court.

[gosub100]

I wonder if the primary purpose of the law was to have a catch-all charge to file against people who stole military equipment? Of course there are charges like espionage and theft, but it seems like it could be a tactic to be able to levy "exporting an encryption device" charges in addition to everything else.

[pjc50]

It was a legacy from the era of the enigma machine, where encryption required a dedicated cipher device, rather than something you could do in pure code.