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[RRE]UK export controls
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Date: Tue, 11 Aug 1998 11:25:36 +0100
From: Magnus Ramage
This is forwarded without Ross Anderson's permission, but it's come to me via a public mailing list (that of the UK's Software Engineering Association). DTI is the UK's Department of Trade and Industry.
Magnus Ramage Durham University
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Subject: Urgent - white paper that will interfere with research
Date: Tue, 11 Aug 1998 10:33:46 +0100
From: Ross Anderson
The DTI proposes to extend export control from physical goods to intangibles. This will have very serious consequences for people doing software research, development and teaching in fields like computer security, aero engine management, flight control, nuclear power station control, the verification of semiconductor designs, and much more. Here's a note which I've been circulating among colleagues. We need to push back hard on this one!
Ross
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Export Licensing of Intangibles - Executive Summary
Ross Anderson, Computer Laboratory, 7 August 1998
The government proposes, in a recent white paper, to bring 'intangible
exports' within the export licensing regime. This will have extremely
unpleasant effects on universities as it will become an offence to
give foreign nationals (including colleagues and students) access to a
range of common technologies in electronic form, and a narrower range
orally or by demonstration. Previously, only the physical export of
material goods was covered by the regulations. The White Paper may be
found at:
It is important that the academic community make its objections known by the 30th September to the responsible minister, the Rt Hon Peter Mandelson, and through whatever other channels as may be available.
The proposed regulations would instantly terminate our research in computer security; all the technologies of interest to us are on the list, and all my research students are foreign nationals. It would also force a rewrite of undergraduate lecture courses. Many other research teams would also be badly affected; many of our researchers in systems and communications work with anynchronous transfer mode, which is a controlled technology. Neural networks, real-time expert systems and even disassemblers fall under the net.
Nor is the Computer Laboratory the only department at risk. The `dual-use list', on which licensing requirements would at a minimum be based, includes numerically controlled machine tools and fibre winding equipment, semiconductor design and test equipment, robots, high performance computers (even top end PCs), optical amplifiers and software radios, areo engine control software, flight management systems, as well as many lasers, gyros, accelerometers and similar components. In effect, everything that the Pentagon considers to be `high-tech' is listed.
It will also be illegal to communicate, by demonstration or orally, information relevant to `weapons of mass destruction and long range missiles'. This is not precisely defined. Will it force the removal of standard textbooks such as Fieser and Fieser's Organic Chemistry (which contains the recipe for mustard gas) and the Feynman Lectures in Physics (which describe how atom bombs work)? What is the exact definition of such a weapon? Two weeks ago, a Palestinian was jailed for life in New York for conspiring to deploy a `weapon of mass destruction' - a pipe bomb which he intended to leave at a subway station in a Jewish neighbourhood. Does this mean that the applied mathematicians can no longer use the shaped charge as a standard teaching example in second year fluid mechanics? Does Batchelor's `Fluid Mechanics' become contraband?
It appears that the current undergraduate courses in engineering, computer science, mathematics, materials science, chemical engineering and many of the natural sciences subjects including certainly physics, chemistry, biochemistry, molecular biology and pharmacology, will potentially fall foul of the regulations.
The policy appears to be an import. Americans have had controls on the export of cryptography software by intangible means for some time, while other countries have not. Their software companies find this a serious inconvenience, as international companies seeking security software must either buy it in somewhere like the UK, or go through a long export licensing procedure to buy it in the US. US industry wants the controls relaxed; the US government wants them tightened up everywhere else. The DTI crypto policy group is close to GCHQ which traditionally follows the American lead on such matters. However, their proposed regulations are very much wider than the US constitution would ever tolerate.
For parliament to give ministers the arbitrary power to determine what may be taught in university science courses, and what we may or may not say to foreign students and colleagues (even where this material is already public domain) should not be acceptable here either. ```
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