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Comment by Longlius | Hacker News Reader

Any signatory to the Wassenaar Arrangement, which includes the entirety of North America, Europe (including Russia), Australia, India, and Pacific Asia (minus China) must consider cryptographic technologies to be munitions for the purposes of export. Now, these restrictions have been considerably loosened to the point that the export isn't really controlled, but international law still considers it a munition. The US is hardly unique in this regard.

It works the other way too. A surprising number of countries still restrict the import of cryptographic technology, including several EU states.

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I used to be involved in building and shipping research robots (from Canada) and I remember we ran into this a few times with a bog-standard industrial wifi radio that for some reason was under ITAR. Interestingly, the manufacturer of the radio was set up to ship it directly to our customer, we just couldn't integrate it into their robot and ship it from our facility. So they had to put on the radio themselves.

The whole thing seemed very silly and theatre-y to me.

Ah yes...the efficiencies never stop coming when you forced to skirt government mandates about tech they know almost nothing about.

I have war stories for days about all times companies I worked for had to have customers pull DLLs from 3rd party sites in order to comply with completely political mandates.

I had a professor tell me a story about a small tech company he worked at way back when, where they actually smuggled their POS terminal system by fishing boat out of the US and into Canada to sell outside the US to get around export controls even though the algorithms they used were widely known.

It'll be even more efficient soon, when the backdoors come.

Is establishing a HTTPS connection internationally exporting a munition, using a munition, or none of the above?

As far as I understand current interpretation, hosting a dowload of a piece of software that includes code capable of establishing a https connection (e.g. bundling a tls lib), on a US server, that can be dowloaded to a computer outside of the US, constitutes munitions export.

TIL github is one the biggest international munitions dealer

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/504/

For those that don't click through, it repeats what is a fairly cogent argument. If cryptography is classified as a munition, then there should be legal room to argue we have the right to it as provided by the 2nd amendment.

The the 2nd amendment is irrelevant here. That amendment only applies within the US and this is about export controls. Pretty much every US constitutional protection disintegrates once the issue becomes international.

The joke is pointed towards legislation that would make encryption illegal in the US.

Congrats, you don't get encrypted because you're not a member of a tightly regulated militia.

Sarcasm aside, the only way to make sure people get encryption is to make it impossible to restrict the technology. That's how encryption ended up spreading. You don't put disruptive tech on every computer on the planet by waiting for permission.

I see your point, but as a non-American who's flooded with videos of random Americans walking around supermarkets carrying semiautomatic rifles, I'm not sure what you mean with "tightly regulated militia".

It's a joke. The text of the 2nd amendment is slightly ambiguous. Many people (myself included) believe that the intent of it was to protect citizens' right to arm themselves, but only in the context of being a member of a state-run/regulated militia.

Unfortunately SCOTUS has continually widened the scope of 2A over the years.

> as a non-American who's flooded with videos of random Americans walking around supermarkets carrying semiautomatic rifles

You need to broaden your news sources; this is by no means common, except for perhaps in a few gun-happy states like Texas.

Thanks for the context, that joke about the 2nd amendment's widening scope had indeed gone over my head.

> You need to broaden your news sources

To be fully honest, I don't think I "need" to anything. My life doesn't revolve around having an accurate impression of the US. The image your country spreads of itself is one of loud angry lefties on the coasts and gun wielding red necks in-between. I'm sure that reality is very different, but don't blame me for the bad country marketing :-)

Texas isn't like that either. I've lived in Texas for almost a decade and I've never seen someone open carrying a long rifle at the supermarket.

Geez, the stereotypes people spread!

Sure, I know it isn't. But it still depends on where in Texas. If you're in Austin, yeah, you're probably not going to see people toting guns in supermarkets all over. If you're in Dallas or Houston, it'll be more common, but still not that common. If you're somewhere like San Antonio or Corpus Christi, it'll be even more common.

But yeah, there are vanishingly few places in the US where you should expect to be in the presence of gun-toting civilians while doing something as mundane as grocery shopping.

I have a different perspective. I think that the scope of the 2nd amendment has narrowed over the years. In 1776, private citizens owned every kind and sort of weapon used by the military. Ordinary people owned cannons, were instructed to put cannons on their private ships to defend against pirates, and owned the same sorts of muskets used by the army. The modern equivalent would be buying tanks at Walmart for cash and not registering the purchase nor requiring a background check.

By the way, the archaic meaning of "regulated" means "properly disciplined and drilled". It did not refer to control or supervision by a state.

> By the way, the archaic meaning of "regulated" means "properly disciplined and drilled". It did not refer to control or supervision by a state.

That still leaves open the question of what levels of discipline and drilling the (federal or state) government could demand of someone for them to be included in the Militia.

It is already accepted that felons and the mentally ill may be prevented from exercising 2nd Amendment rights, so it is perhaps not inconceivable that there could be minimum and maximum age limits, or minimum numbers of training / inspection days for people to be deemed validly part of the Militia.

Whether any such changes would reduce gun crimes, or increase crimes generally, or be politically viable or desirable, are separate questions.

The government cannot demand anything. The well-regulated part is a justification clause.

Imagine if the 2A said this: > "A well tailored suit, being necessary to a sharply dressed citizenry, the right of the people to keep and wear clothing, shall not be infringed."

Does this mean that the government now has a right to force dress codes on people so that their suits are well tailored?

Also justification clauses have been used in other contemporary laws too:

> Retrospective laws are highly injurious, oppressive and unjust. No such laws, therefore, should be made, either for the decision of civil causes, or the punishment of offences. (From NH Ex Post Facto Article)

Does this mean that ONLY when the ex-post facto laws are injurious, oppressive and unjust, should that law be unconstitutional according to the NH constitution?

Great points, thank you, but I think I still disagree.

In the absence of the 2A, the government would have the power to ban any weapon (using the same authority they have to ban weapons that are not covered by the 2A today). By contrast, under your proposed fictional constitution, there would be no underlying basis for the government to control clothing generally, so your 2A wouldn't expand or limit the sorts of clothing allowable.

As for your second point, I interpret the "justification clause" as saying that all retrospective laws are ...unjust, and that "No such laws" means "No retrospective laws". The hypothetical of a ...just ex-post facto law is ruled out by definition.

> the intent of it was to protect citizens' right to arm themselves

Unlike european countries, the american frontier was a dangerous place where every household needed a gun. Armed citizens existed regardless whether there was a militia or not.

Except it was also seen as a civic duty for able-bodied men to join the militia. If we're talking late 18th century, the Venn diagram of gun ownership and militia membership has a very large degree of overlap.

While that may be true, that was not the intent of the 2nd amendment, which was there to ensure that regular citizens were both involved in the protection of the country's interests, and could act as a counter (by force, if necessary) to their own country if it decided to try to grab too much power and become tyrannical.

Enshrining this right in the constitution had little to do with frontier safety.

The US is all about selective enforcement, and the undesirable hacker type and their unpleasant "cryptography" is likely a higher priority for munitions enforcement than an irritable white guy with an AR-15 at the supermarket, because only one of them actually threatens the status quo.

But is the guy wearing a mask?

Cryptography and the AR-15 may both be classified at weapons, but you can't actually shoot someone with cryptography. I suspect that may also play a role when it comes to enforcement...

Well, not anymore as it seems. But the hacker type might now share common interests with the AR-15 guy.

“and on that day the ACLU and the EFF cited DC vs Heller (2010), and a crack appeared in the heavens and a loud voice spoke, saying ‘oi! wot’s all this then?!’”

There is no definition given for what "well regulated" entails. A bunch of nerds on the internet can certainly form their own militia to practice with crypto munitions.

Side note: don’t call the countries in the European Union “states”. They’re sovereign countries that have committed themselves through treaties to the Union, not a US like government body

I'm pretty sure state meant a sovereign government before the united states existed.

Remember, the original idea of the united states was that it was a bunch of separate governments that were federated. It still kind of is, but the federal government used to have much less control.

The European Union (EU) consists of 27 member states.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_state_of_the_European_U...

I don't think it's incorrect to call them states. They're nation states. They are regularly referred to as member states.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_state_of_the_European_U...

Languages are strange in very different ways. The Italian word for country is "stato". How do we translate state as in "NY is a state of the USA"? Again "stato". We have "nazione" for nations but really nothing for countries. We do say "paesi esteri" for "foreign countries" but that's almost the only occurrence with that meaning. A "paese" is a town, so nobody will ever say that Germany or France are a "paese".

Actually, "paese" is the normal translation for country (optionally with capital "P" if one wants to avoid ambiguities with the "town" meaning)

> nobody will ever say that Germany or France are a "paese"

Google lists > 200.000 results for "la Germania è un paese".

Country means “sovereign state” - no-one’s suggesting EU member states aren’t sovereign nations in the sense US states aren’t.

U.S. states are sovereign states, just like EU states are. They United States government itself is also sovereign, in a sense that the EU government itself may or may not be. (Most) Americans live under two sovereigns: their state and the U.S.

Maybe so, but then we need to come up with more words. As the UK proved, a nation in the EU is free to leave the EU, but a state in the US is not. (Without consent of the US, of course.)

> As the UK proved, a nation in the EU is free to leave the EU, but a state in the US is not. (Without consent of the US, of course.)

Which article or amendment of the U.S. Constitution forbids a state to leave without permission of the U.S.?

There is of course no clause of the constitution that forbids secession but SCOTUS currently interprets the constitution as creating an "indestructible union" if I recall the language correctly.

And good luck finding a good vehicle to overturn that precedent.

The TEU at least provides an explicit process for leaving

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secession_in_the_United_Stat...

When we nitpick,

"country" = geographic unit, "state" = political unit.

The United States is itself a state, albeit a federation of smaller states.

This is a nice distinction, actually. It means we can think about "stateless countries" (like Western Sahara, perhaps), and "countryless states" (like the Sovereign Military Order of Malta).

Stateless countries are also those that cross state borders. Example: Kurdistan, Ireland.

And conversely, there are states spanning (parts of) more than one country: The UK with North Ireland and many others (perhaps England, Scotland and Wales if you consider them separate countries).

It's amazing how contrarian HN can get. The EU is literally composed of member states in its formation documents

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