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Comment by ransom1538 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the government actually wanted to stop math [1] from leaving the border. It was just a tool to use against people they suspected being involved espionage. Just another reason to put you in a cell.

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_algorithm

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The intentions of laws vs the real world implications are so often disconnected. There's been a million cases where the mere side effects of laws have caused more trouble for the intended target of the good intentions than it actually helped itself (see rent control laws in NYC and Toronto ultimately significantly reducing low income housing for over a decade in the 70s and 80s because no developer would build there, significantly increasing average rents by reducing supply).

Thomas Sowell wrote a quite a few good books about this.

I have no doubt it applies equally to export laws.

No it makes it a pain to export any products abroad. In today's world where your market is probably not just the US anymore it is insane to have such rules in place.

> It was just a tool to use against people they suspected being involved espionage. Just another reason to put you in a cell. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_algorithm

The wiki link you provided does not have the words "export" or "espionage". Are you trying to imply that R,S, and A were suspected of espionage? You'll need a real source for that..

The link is for simple English Wikipedia, which does not use those words. Perhaps the standard English Wikipedia article would be a better reference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_(cryptosystem)

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