FITUG e.V. Förderverein Informationstechnik und Gesellschaft

France to relax its crypto strictures?

------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
Date:          Fri, 15 Jan 1999 03:41:52 -0500
To:            declan@well.com, pagre@ucla.edu, cryptography@c2.net,
               cmdrtaco@slashdot.org, danny@spesh.com, FoRK@xent.ics.uci.edu
From:          Keith Dawson <dawson@world.std.com>
Subject:       France to relax its crypto strictures?

FYI, just posted this news as Tasty Bit of the Day at
http://tbtf.com/index.html#tbotoday .
__________________________________________________________
Keith Dawson               Principal, the Technology Front
Editor and Publisher, Tasty Bits from the Technology Front
http://www.technologyfront.com/           http://tbtf.com/


1999-01-15:

    The online magazine Liberation Multimedia reports [1] that the
    French economy and finance minister, Domenica Strauss-Khan, has
    announced the French government's intention to liberalize that
    nation's heavy strictures on the use of encryption by its
    citizens.

    (English speakers can feed this URL to the Babelfish [2].) France
    is one of only a handful of nations that forbids its citizens to
    use any encryption technology that the government cannot decode.
    France is many years behind the rest of Europe in its embrace of
    the Internet, having invested heavily in the 1980s in the now-
    obsolete Minitel technology. Allowing its citizens to use crypto-
    graphy to protect credit-card transactions is the rock-bottom
    first step that the nation needs to take in order to participate
    in the era of electronic commerce.

    Thanks for the heads-up to ted byfield <tbyfield at panix dot
    com>, who comments, "Very surprising. But it would be quite nice
    to see the US isolated even further, especially so soon after its
    pro- fessed victory at Wassanaar [3]." I could hardly agree more.

    [1] http://liberation.com/multi/actu/semaine990111/art990114d.html
    [2] http://babelfish.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/translate? [3]
    http://tbtf.com/archive/1998-12-23.html