[Jay D. Dyson]

Strong cryptography really is a powerful munition, and the U.S. would certainly be more secure if we'd been able to restrict its export abroad, and we were acting on sound legal and strategic grounds to try to do so.

I respectfully disagree. It's because of the unreasonable restrictions on cryptography that the U.S. lost its competitive edge on the free market in which other nations were not thus encumbered by such silly laws.

While the rest of the world was able to offer 128-bit (and higher) encryption with their commercial products, U.S. firms could only offer 40-bit encryption. We were -- quite literally -- the laughingstock of the security and technology world because of that.

As many (myself included) are fond of saying, "If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns."

The same is true for strong cryptography.

-Jay

[only1percent]

You point out a latent overgeneralization in my argument -- we were (as you quite rightly say) foolish in the extreme to prevent the export of encryption which was less than state of the art -- US businesses suffered and no enemies were even slightly inconvenienced. I do think it was, and remains, proper for the US to have reasonable export controls upon any potentially dangerous technology when that technology IS the state of the art and cannot be obtained from other sources.

[thunderdome]

..."U.S. lost its competitive edge on the free market..."

And now we have HIPAA for the PROTECTION of consumer medical data that requires the use of this "MUNITIONS" technology that was stymied by the arcane laws of the past and present.

Will the US Government put a policeman at every house, a wiretap on every phone an AI bot on every internet connection and take away from the people the very means that they could use to protect and defend themselves? No, that is a ridiculous approach and there are too many of us in and out of government service that will not let this path continue.

Write your congressperson and let's fix these laws now.