3 ms·

I wouldn't agree that it's hard to outlaw, but I would agree that when the original encryption export laws were written nobody had OCR in mind. It seems like i

• EGreg 11y ago
  But isn't the First Amendment already the legal protection you need? After all, even if a law is passed to protect something, it can be changed later. Not like the Constitution hasn't been... stretched by now.
• kabdib 11y ago
  The US courts are really, really reluctant to ban printed material. If something is printed with ink on dead trees, it's practically sacred. In the 1990s, PGP was published as a printed-and-bound book in a layout that was readily OCR-able, with code-friendly fonts, checksum and other features to make digital reassembly easy. The theory was that the US government would be unlikely to successfully ban an actual, physical book. Thought experiment: Apple provides a pamphlet, free for the taking in every Apple store, that when scanned will armor your phone. Extend the thought experiment to a web page that the phone just downloads, compiles and installs (yeah, you probably want that code signed). This would be hard to forbid in the US. The government would probably go after the plugin system on the phone (which would be an interesting battle). Places like the UK would lose no time banning such media, but it would still be readily available.