Yes, the laws covered encryption technology and not ciphertext. You are also correct about regulations concerning amateur radio broadcasts but that is a different topic. The airwaves are highly regulated and broadcasters must have a license. I see no legal difference between inserting ciphertext into this email which is viewable by many and inserting the same into a tweet.
It is indeed antisocial and Twitter may deem it violates TOS but I think it would be legal. Remember, even simple things like ROT13 are considered encryption. ROT13 was used heavily in usenet (you remember that). EBG13 vf rapelcgvba! BTW, the amateur radio regulation has hampered one of my activities in Disaster Response. If communication systems fail, amateur radio is considered the great fall-back. So we discussed how to transfer files which may contain health or financial information. We basically had to go caveman style and write that our backup plan was to use a courier even though we were sitting next to a fully functioning ham radio. On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 1:58 AM, Dave Sherohman <d...@fishtwits.com> wrote: > On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 10:16:40AM -0700, John Adams wrote: >> I think you're referring to ITAR, most of which was repealed in 1997. >> >> Until 1996?1997, ITAR classified strong cryptography as arms and prohibited >> their export from the U.S. Times have changed quite a bit since then. > > Also, as I understood the matter at the time, ITAR only restricted > international distribution of encryption technology (i.e., crypto > algorithms and implementations of those algorithms) and didn't care at > all about what might be done with the resulting ciphertext or where it > might be sent. > > However... Amateur radio regulations in the US do include (or at least > did include last I heard) an absolute ban on transmitting encrypted > information. It used to be fairly common for ham radio operators to use > packet radio technologies to transmit TCP/IP data over the amateur bands > in order to get free roaming internet access; I expect this practice is > less common today (thanks to widespread cellular data access), but not > extinct. When using packet radio on amateur bands, ssh/ssl/etc. are not > legal due to the crypto ban on those bands. I would expect encrypted > tweets to be illgal under the same regulations, although that may be > dependent on whether the receiver has the means to decrypt them. > > -- > Dave Sherohman >
