[ale] Better do my talk before it is illegal

[Michael H. Warfield]

On Fri, 2012-01-27 at 12:13 -0500, Charles Shapiro wrote:
> Next month's ALE talk is on jailbreaking  your Gphone and installing
> CyanogenMod on it ( by yours truly).  Better hurry.
> That's about to become illegal (again)

> https://www.eff.org/pages/jailbreaking-not-crime-tell-copyright-office-free-your-devices

This brings back such memories, like an overwhelming feeling of deja
vu...

There was a time, when they told us we could not "export" cryptography,
because it was a munition, a weapon of war.  Technically, we could not
even assist a foreign national with such matters.  I could not even
contribute to the Canadian "Free/SWAN" project out of their fear of
"contaminating" their source with US regulations.  Even so, under the
regime of ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations), I
contributed to Tatu's SSH (the pre-OpenSSH SSH) which he acknowledged in
his README file (Ok - I got the bloody thing working under SCO ODT, so
sue me.  It was before that whole bullshit mess hit the fan with
Caldera, it was that long ago.)

After ITAR, there came EAR under a different department, which was
merely the government's last ditch effort to avoid loosing ALL their
crypt export regulations in court (one of the things Dan Berstein did
right).  And in that time, I wrote the SSL patches to fetchmail and Eric
Raymond and I decided to proactively post my patches and the patched
sources to his site and to flip the powers that be the bird.  That was
less than two months before they threw in the towel and declared
OpenSource software to be free from such ridiculous regulations and
another year before they decided, "oh, yeah, that's both source and
binaries from the source."

I remember walking into an AUUG meeting one evening with Luke Leighton
(then fellow Samba team member, fellow co-worker, and British citizen)
and the talk was being given by a couple of FBI reps.  Brent was running
the "guru session" and saw us coming in.  He remarked "and here is our
prerequisite cryptographer.  I immediately replied "Yes!  And I have
with me my prerequisite foreign nation whom I'm not allowed to speak
with about cryptography!".  Their reaction was to turn red and remark
"that's not our department".  Next day, at the office, I heard ISS got a
call from the FBI that is summed up thusly:  "DO YOU KNOW THIS
ASSHOLE?!?!  Sigh...  Yeah, he's one of our founders.  We know him.
Sigh..."  The two FBI dudes are still friends to this day and I attended
one of their retirement parties.
 
People...  The more things change the more they stay the same.  Have the
balls to stand up for your rights when you know you're right.

> -- CHS

Regards,
Mike
-- 
Michael H. Warfield (AI4NB) | (770) 985-6132 |  mhw at WittsEnd.com
   /\/\|=mhw=|\/\/          | (678) 463-0932 |  http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/
   NIC whois: MHW9          | An optimist believes we live in the best of all
 PGP Key: 0x674627FF        | possible worlds.  A pessimist is sure of it!
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