[plug] Any legal restrictions on cryptography use / importation in Aus?

[Christian]

On Tue, Mar 26, 2002 at 07:38:33PM +0800, Anthony Jones wrote:
> 
> My understanding of the US laws is that it used to be a felony (i.e serious 
> offence) to export "weapons grade" encryption (i.e anything more than 56 
> bits). I undestand that the law has now changed so that it is now legal to 
> export encryption to approved countries (including Australia and New Zealand) 
> as long as it doesn't involve exporting it to banned countries (such as Cuba 
> and Iraq).

I've never heard the term "weapons grade encryption" before -- makes it
sound a little like plutonium.  The most common terms were the
delightfully ambiguous and misleading "strong encryption" and "weak
encryption".  The now defunct US ITAR laws prevented the export of
symmetric ciphers using more than 40-bits of unknown key and public keys
longer than 512 bits that were to be used for encryption.  I'm don't
think there was a limit on the length of public keys used for signing
but 1024 is/was the most common maximum.

> As far as I am aware encryption is not illegal to use anywhere. Good 
> encryption is necessary for Internet banking. The non-US Debian mirrors are 
> available inside Australia so you'll certainly have no trouble getting hold 
> of encryption software (at least if you're using Debian). I doubt that they 
> would be available if they were in any way questionably legal.

There are many countries where cryptography is severely restricted, if
not entirely illegal.  Most of these are fairly politically backward
places (i.e., totalitarian dictatorships of various persuasions) but, as
someone has already noted, the most glaring exception is that of France.
I always found it particularly ironic that, prior to the restrictions
being lifted in the US, the two first-world countries with the heaviest
restrictions on cryptography were also the two that were the most
obsessed with the notions of freedom and liberty and how their state was
the most perfect embodiment of such.

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