7 December 1998

    To: cryptography@c2.net, gnu@toad.com
    Subject: Building crypto archives worldwide to foil US-built Berlin Walls
    Date: Mon, 07 Dec 1998 15:23:54 -0800
    From: John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com>

    The US Wassenaar initiative is an attempt to deny the public not only
    all future strong crypto developments, but all existing ones.  As
    today's message from Denmark makes clear, the freedom-hating
    bureaucrats are threatening to prosecute a citizen merely for
    publishing PGP on his web page.

    Let's at least ensure that they don't eliminate *today's* strong
    crypto, by replicating crypto archives behind each Berlin Wall they
    threaten to erect.  Today we depend on a small number of archives (in
    a small number of countries) containing source and binaries for PGP,
    SSH, Kerberos, cryptoMozilla, IPSEC, and many other useful crypto
    tools that we use daily.

    Let's replicate these archives in many countries.  I call for
    volunteers in each country, at each university or crypto-aware
    organization, to download crypto tools while they can still be
    exported from where they are, and then to offer them for export from
    your own site and your own country as long as it's legal.  (The
    Wassenaar agreement is not a law; each country has merely agreed to
    try to change its own laws, but that process has not yet started.)

    And if at some future moment your own government makes it illegal for
    you to publish these tools, after all your appeals are denied, all the
    pro-bono court cases rejected, and all the newspaper coverage you can
    get has been printed, then restrict your web site so that only your
    own citizens can get the tools.  That'll still be better than the
    citizens of your country having NO access to the tools of privacy!

    (I suggest putting these tools on a Web site on a machine that you
    own, rather than on a web site where you buy space from someone else.
    That way there'll be nobody for the freedom-squashers to threaten
    except you.)

    I'm sure that John Young's excellent http://jya.com site will be happy
    to provide an index of crypto archives around the world, if people
    will send him notices at jya@pipeline.com as your sites come up.
    (Each archive should locally mirror this list, so that we won't depend
    on a single site.)

    Rather than having their desired effect of squelching crypto
    distribution, perhaps their overbold move can inspire us to increase
    strong crypto distribution tenfold, by making it clear to the public
    that if you don't keep a copy on your own hard drive, the governments
    of the world will be merciless in scheming to deny you access to it.
    And if crypto developers have to publish on books, or rely on
    smugglers to get crypto from country to country, then at least each
    country will have its distribution arrangements already ready for when
    the book is scanned or the smuggler arrives.

    	John Gilmore