Cold War encryption laws stand, but not as firmly
A pioneering attempt to overturn the U.S. government's Cold War-era laws restricting the publication of some forms of encryption code ended quietly Wednesday when a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit--but only after assurances that the anticrypto laws would not be enforced.
U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel in San Francisco threw out the case after the Bush administration said it would no longer try to enforce portions of the regulations, according to parties involved in the proceedings.
Daniel Bernstein, an iconoclastic math professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, filed suit in 1995 after spending three years wrangling with the federal government over whether a simple encryption program could be freely distributed on the Internet. U.S. law at the time deemed online publication an "export" that could be punished with severe prison terms.
