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> makes it a crime to circumvent an “effective means of access control” that sits between users and copyrighted works

US had always legal troubles with cryptography. In past programs like PGP, TrueCrypt etc were developed outside US. That can easily happen with browsers.

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Huh? PGP was developed in, and published from, the US. Hence the criminal investigation.

It's was split off at version 2.6.3(i) into an "international version" that was exported by printing the source into several large books and scanning them in, and then further developed outside of the US. I believe most current PGP versions are descended from the international branch, but I could be wrong.

That sounds interesting. What was the point of printing source and scanning it back into computer? Did that bypass the export law back then?

http://www.pgpi.org/pgpi/project/scanning/

> However, the Export Regulations only covers software in electronic form (e.g. on disks, or via the Internet).

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