Hacker News Reader

Comment by codazoda | Hacker News Reader

I can’t help but wonder if encryption export controls will be slipped into this mess. Seems like a good place to hide them but I don’t have time to drudge through this at the moment.

View on HN

I doubt it. The link says it’s consistent with Wassenaar Agreement (WA) negotiations, which is the international export control agreement that is quite well harmonized across many nations. WA has a lot of restrictions on encryption, but a huge carve out for most items that says encryption on commercially available devices is exempt.

There's already export controls on encryption. Have been for decades.

We're way past that, the horse has bolted.

Are you saying we're way past the point where encryption could be restricted from export in the U.S.? Because encryption exports are controlled and when I first started programming they were completely illegal. Every once in a while new legislation is proposed to make these exports illegal again, usually to "save the children".

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

Based on other comments here, I'll assume there is no hidden agenda on encryption here but a document this messy is probably hiding "stuff" (on purpose or not).

With AES widely available in free code, adding export controls today wouldn't seem to do much damage to symmetric crypto at least.

Maybe post-quantum schemes could be affected, but it's only a question of time until people agree on a standard, and if that one gets exported and doesn't get broken, controlling crypto exports won't prevent anyone from using secure ciphers.

Encryption is restricted from export in the US. I've had to submit forms to do things as trivial as buying microcontrollers from TI which happened to have AES instructions.

No idea why I can go into a store and buy an infinitely more powerful Intel laptop without a form, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com