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Comment by cjbprime | Hacker News Reader

"You have to get an export license if you're distributing from inside the US to outside the US" is pretty different to "sending encrypted emails was illegal", no?

For one thing, it sounds like sending wasn't impacted at all, once you had the software.

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How would you send encrypted email without an encryption library?

From what I remember, what was illegal was exporting a (useful) encryption library, and that Wikipedia link supports my memory: It talks about exporting munitions. I remember at the time that even though libraries existed inside the US they weren't supposed to be exported to other countries (i.e. the rest of us should get encryption libraries developed outside the US). Nothing prevented US citizens in the US to use encryption. Nothing in that "cryptography is considered munitions" legal issue, at least, because that was about export.

They can't use encryption if they can't get encryption software. I recall hearing that companies outside the US could distribute software with competent encryption without problems (to people inside and outside the US), but companies inside the US basically couldn't distribute software with competent encryption, because someone outside the US might download it.

But I remember the time. The software could be downloaded from inside USA. Mid-nineties the internet wasn't particularly large and (what's nowadays) simple measures were in place. In practice you could get it from the US even if you were outside, but then again USA wasn't the only place where encryption software was made, so we all thought it a bit silly.

What I'm getting at is that it's simply incorrect that encryption wasn't available in the US, and it's also incorrect that encryption couldn't or wasn't in use. It most definitely was. The regulations were only about export. 40 bits max and all that.

I understand where you're getting at, but lawyers would see "is it possible for people out of the US to download this? Yes? Well lawsuit incoming, by the government/military."

This is way too much of an unknown. And we've seen with P2P/Napster and DMCA where just listing links without distributing still opens people to legal issues.

None of this is true. It really feels like there are a couple people who were, like, alive in the 1990s trying to explain to people that cryptography was not in fact illegal or even regulated in the USA during the heyday of Ace of Base, and then a lot of younger people trying to axiomatically derive an alternate history where nobody could encrypt anything. You could just download PGP and run it, and if you go look at back issues of Wired, you'll see that lots of people were begging Americans to do just that.

The fact that it was not enforced doesn't mean there wasn't a sword of Damocles above your head.

There was nothing to enforce. This concern is made-up. Again: the people telling you this were there in the 90s, in the workforce, "dealing with" this stuff. The far bigger problem was that the maintainers of Apache's SSL code wanted a license fee to use it. I do get that if you were 7 years old at the time, and in France, it might have seemed complicated, because of the (unenforced) export rule, but that rule didn't matter to Americans or in any meaningful way restrict our access to encryption.

As someone who watched all of that at the time.. I believe nobody in the US felt any sword of Damocles above their heads. The net was a very different place from now. A simple automated download check was what was needed, or even just a statement. There was other kind of software as well, and I remember having to fill out a form stating that I wasn't going to re-export the software to [short-list of certain countries] before I got the actual download link. That was about it, back then.

What would that check do? Check IPs?

Some companies literally just provided two links, one for the US version and one for the international version. That's how not-serious this whole thing was.

Really, even back in 1995, people did understand how the Internet works. Nobody was under any illusions that you could actually control "export" of cryptographic software. If you were a US-based company that sold shrink-wrap software, you probably also filled out some paperwork once a year. For "open source" software (note: not a thing, as such, in 1995): forget about it.

geoiplookup wasn't a thing until 1999 or so, plus/minus, but "whois" was, and mid-nineties the net was pretty small compared to now (for a definition of "small"). So yes, knowing where an IP address came from was a thing even then. But there were also the two-versions links mentioned by the sister comment. Among other things. This was not a big deal. Really.

Those of us who were active back then did see the software. It was not kept off servers. It's just that I don't think archive.org was active at the time so we have no way of showing it to you, I believe.

Edit: As for Napster and DMCA, the Napster story happened in 1999 and the DMCA in 1998. The limitations on crypto were loosened in 1998 and 1999 and removed in 2000. In other words, Napster and DMCA isn't really relevant here - the encryption story mostly unfolded before that time.

You are speaking past the GP by missing the de jure (their point) versus de facto (your point) aspect of the discussion, I think.

Possibly - but my impression is that the GP is rejecting as impossible what I'm stating - that in fact you could use cryptographic libraries in the US, because they were, indeed, available. GP seems to argue that they could not have been available because that would have allowed them to potentially be downloaded (exported) outside of the US, which was illegal at the time.

You would use an "encryption library"? I don't understand what's complicated about this. I thought perhaps that top comment was talking about some country other than the USA, where cryptography had actually been outlawed, but it seems people really believe the US outlawed crypto in the 1990s? No, they did no such thing. They didn't even regulate it, excepting export controls.

You (as a US citizen or company) would acquire one from a US vendor. Exporting outside the US was illegal, using it within the US was not.

How would US vendors prevent people from outside the US to acquire the software?

They put a notice above the download link that said it was illegal to export to certain countries. Really. The onus was on the person downloading the software, not the person providing it.

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