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They can mandate to make working encryption illegal if they want. It might mean its impossible to conduct any form of secure technological communication in or
by kevin_b_er 8y ago
They can mandate to make working encryption illegal if they want. It might mean its impossible to conduct any form of secure technological communication in or with Australia, but they can legislate electricity to be illegal too.
If this ruins them economically, maybe the world needs a proper example of what happens when politicians don't understand science.
- ben_w 8y agoYou’re more optimistic than me if you think a proper example will stop this sort of thing. How much hyperinflation happened since the Weimar Republic? (On the other hand, didn’t the first crypto wars end around the time someone put the RSA equations onto a T-shirt to circumvent export rules?)
- mmt 8y agoI think I still have at least one "This shirt is a munition" T-shirt with machine readable (barcode) RSA code (in C?) on it. That might be what you're thinking of. The point wasn't to circumvent anything but to draw attention to the absurdity of the rules, which persisted for quite some time after the shirt. The equations themselves were never export restricted, nor was computer code printed in text in a book (since OCR wasn't considered good enough at the time yet). It doesn't stand out as a great example of "on the other hand".
- ben_w 8y agoHuh, OK. I was a kid when it happened, so I guess it was misreported to me. Thanks for letting me know.