The new U.S. regulations are based on the Wassenaar Arrangement Revision of 1998, where exports without license of 56 bit
For more information see:
Seven states stay excluded from the new freedom. These are states like Libya, Iraq, Iran, North Korea and Cuba, altogether states seen as terrorist supporting. No encryption tools may be exported into those countries.
This is, what happened in the USA, whereas in Germany the issue of a cryptography-law is still on the agenda. Until now, in Germany, everyone can decide by her-/himself, whether she/he wants to encrypt electronic messages or not. Some organizations fear that this could get changed soon. Therefore an urgent action was organized in February 2000 to demonstrate the government that people want the freedom to decide on their own. One governmental argument is that only very few people actually use cryptography. Therefore the urgent action is organized as a campaign for using it more frequently.
For more information on this see:
Other European countries have more liberate laws on cryptography, like France. Austria doesn't have any restrictions at all, probably because of a governmental lack of interest more than accepting freedom.
The (former) restrictions in the bigger countries influenced and hindered developments for safer key-systems, e.g. the key-length was held down extraordinarily.
"Due to the suspicious nature of crypto users I have a feeling DES will be with us forever, we will just keep adding keys and cycles (...). There is a parallel between designing electronic commerce infrastructure today that uses weak cryptography (i.e. 40 or 56 bit keys) and, say, designing air traffic control systems in the '60s using two digit year fields. (...) Just because you can retire before it all blows up doesn't make it any less irresponsible."
(Arnold G. Reinhold)
The Chinese State Encryption Management Commission (SEMC) announced in March 2000 that only strong encryption tools will have to be registered in the future. Which sounds so nice on first sight, does not mean a lot in reality: any kind of useful encryption technique, like the
The restrictions and prohibitions for cryptography are part of the states' wish to acquire more control - in the name of the battle against criminality, probably?
Due to the emerging organized criminality the governments want to obtain more freedom of control over citizens. Organizations like the NSA appear as the leaders of such demands.
What about civil rights or Human Rights?
TEXTBLOCK 1/2 // URL: http://world-information.org/wio/infostructure/100437611776/100438659135
What we seem to fear most is to get into a status of insecurity - given that the definitions of the word security vary extremely. Thus methods of securing ideas, people, things or data increase their popularity and necessity tremendously. One of them is cryptography - as well as the prohibition/restriction of cryptography.
Questions whether cryptography is absolutely inevitable or on the contrary supports certain criminals more than the ordinary internet-user, are arising. And as the last developments in international and national law showed, Northern governments are changing opinion about that, due to economic tasks.
Business needs cryptography.
Still, the use of cryptography is no recent invention. Already the first steps in writing or even in human communication itself meant developing codes for keeping secrets at the same time as providing information.
This site gives a timeline for the history of cryptography, provides an introduction into the most important terms of tools and devices connected to that topic, and finally tries to interpret necessities for and ideas against cryptography or in other words leads through the current discussions concerning democracy and governmental fears and doubts regarding the security of data-transmission.
TEXTBLOCK 2/2 // URL: http://world-information.org/wio/infostructure/100437611776/100438658887
Intellectual property, very generally, relates to the output that result from intellectual activity in the industrial, scientific, literary and artistic fields. Traditionally intellectual property is divided into two branches: 1) industrial property (