1 Mar 2004 23:51
Announce: FreeS/WAN Project Ending
Michael Richardson <mcr <at> sandelman.ottawa.on.ca>
2004-03-01 22:51:54 GMT
2004-03-01 22:51:54 GMT
From http://www.freeswan.org/ending_letter.html -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- 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)
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