Michael Richardson | 1 Mar 2004 23:51
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Announce: FreeS/WAN Project Ending


From http://www.freeswan.org/ending_letter.html

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Dear FreeS/WAN community,

After more than five years of active development, the FreeS/WAN project will be 
coming to an end.

The initial goal of the project was ambitious -- to secure the Internet
using opportunisitically negotiated encryption, invisible and convenient 
to the user. (for more, see http://www.freeswan.org/history.html).
A secondary goal was to challenge then-current US export regulations, 
which prohibited the export of strong cryptography (such as triple DES 
encryption) of US origin or authorship. 

Since the project's inception, there has been limited success on the 
political front. After the watershed Bernstein case (see
http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Crypto_export/Bernstein_case/ )
US export regulations were relaxed. Since then, many US companies have exported 
strong cryptography, without seeming restriction other than having to notify 
the Bureau of Export Administration for tracking purposes.

This comfortable situation has perhaps created a false sense of security.
The catch? Export regulations are not laws. The US government still 
reserves the right to change its export regulations on short notice, and 
there is no facility to challenge them directly in a court of law. This leaves 
the US crypto community and US Linux distributions in a position which seems 
safe, but is not legally protected -- where the US government might at any time 
(Continue reading)


Gmane