From: Adrian Tymes (wingcat@pacbell.net)
Date: Wed Jun 25 2003 - 15:40:11 MDT
--- Brett Paatsch <paatschb@optusnet.com.au> wrote:
> Because export prohibitions on cryptography seemed
> to
> have had little effect in the case of Phil
> Zimmerman and PGP
> I will be interested to see if the DoD or NSA have
> some
> means to block dissemination of technological
> information
> (such as in secret patents) in quantum cryptography.
They may sometimes try, but they usually fail. The
most effective blocks are in blocking the physical
goods necessary for whatever you're doing, be that
uranium (nuclear bombs), embryonic stem cells
(cloning), or whatever. These, in turn, are most
effective the closer to "raw material" status their
targets get, since if the raw material gets through,
the knowledge to manufacture can get through, and the
end product thus winds up where they do not want it.
One possibly effective solution would be to encourage
the development of manufacturing processes to create
these "raw materials" from even more basic components.
This (for the near future, at least) has an ultimate
limit - one could manufacture stem cells, for
instance, but not uranium - but blocking raw carbon
and silicon is highly impractical. If these
manufacturing processes can be made extremely cheap,
then blocking anything above that would also become
impractical.
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