Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing has a post:
When is someone going to tell these legislators that there are no borders in the electronic world. To quote someone on NPR this week, "Our country is not an island. The oceans do not separate us from other countries or terrorists. We are all interconnected." Why are they trying to make it illegal for a foreigner to 'sit down' at a console when they can SSH (connect remotely) from anywhere on the planet.
I was at the conference, Hacking In Progress (HIP), in 1997. It was a huge hacker fest in a camp ground outside Amsterdam where the number of computers outnumbered the people two to one. I held up with the cypherpunks from Berkeley. At one point they had 'code monkeys' (people) typing cryptographic algorithms from a book into a computer. At the time it was illegal to export electronic copies of strong encryption algorithms because they were considered munitions. The one caveat is that it was perfectly legal to export the printed code because that was considered intellectual property (of the people.) So they were doing the perfectly legal thing of typing the code from the book into the computer and then compiling a "munition" all perfectly legal.
If that story interests you, check out how to become an arms trafficker.
Posted by volubis at May 8, 2005 02:31 AM