[ale] Better do my talk before it is illegal

[Charles Shapiro]

Dang, I missed that fight.  I still have my computer case autographed
by Phil Zimmermann though.  A friend of mine actually had the "This is
a Munition", but wouldn't part with it for love nor money.

-- CHS

On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 5:27 PM, Michael H. Warfield <mhw at wittsend.com> wrote:
> 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!
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>