The Applied Cryptography Case - Other Information

Every absurdity has a champion to defend it.
--Oliver Goldsmith

It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
--Voltaire

Newspaper and Magazine Articles

Secret Plans, The Economist. May 6-12, 1995. Also discusses the Bernstein case.

Cryptographer's Code; Passions for Privacy, Internet Prompt Suit, by Bruce V. Bigelow, San Diego Union-Tribune, 3 Oct 1995. (requires free user name and password)

Judge Shows No Respect for Legal Challenges to Encryption Export Regulations, Information Law Alert , March 29, 1996.

Rulings at Odds on Computer Coding, by Bruce V. Bigelow, San Diego Union-Tribune, 18 Apr 1996.

A Tale of Two Crypto Court Cases: Are Karn and Bernstein judges on the same planet?, Information Law Alert, May 3, 1996.

Federal Courts Split on Encryption, The Export Practitioner, May 1996.

Two rulings on encryption speak different language, by David Loundy in the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, May 9, 1996. This article refers to the very different ruling by Judge Marilyn Patel in the closely related case of Bernstein vs Department of State.

Bill Would Ease Export Curbs on Scrambling San Diego Union-Tribune, 27 Jun 1996. (requires free user name and password)

Karn Decision Summary by Stewart Baker , former NSA General Counsel and now with Steptoe & Johnson. April 2, 1996

Bernstein Litigation by Stewart Baker. April 25, 1996

The June 1996 issue of Scientific American, in its Science and the Citizen section mentions the adverse ruling in my case. It is remarkable for having two factual errors in its relatively short span:

• the State Deptartment did not issue me a license to export the book Applied Cryptography. They ruled that the book was "in the public domain" and therefore outside their jurisdiction. This is a subtle but important distinction.
• I did not lose my case on appeal, as the writer implied. I lost at the district level, the lowest of the three levels of US federal courts. The case has since been remanded to the District Court after an appeal to the Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, the court superior to the district court and just below the US Supreme Court.

Karn's Case for Freedom of Encryption, by Will Rodger, Inter@ctive Week, January 13, 1997.

Cracking the U.S. Code, by Paul Wallich, Scientific American, April 1997. This article is much more complete, accurate and insightful than the June 1996 article.

Karn vs United States [sic], by Stewart Baker, Michael Lichtenbaum and Michael Hintze. A brief report on the decision by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals remanding my case to the district court.

Two articles in the Fall 1997 issue of the Virginia Journal of Law & Technology address the broader Constitutional and legal issues surrounding the governmental regulation of cryptography. Both cite my case in passing. The first article is The Use of Encrypted, Coded and Secret Communications is an "Ancient Liberty" Protected by the United States Constitution. The second is Encryption and the First Amendment.

On February 9, 1998, the San Diego Daily Transcript ran the article Encryption Reform Urged. It mentions my case and quotes me near the end.

Other Public Forums

At the 1995 Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference in San Francisco I appeared on a panel to discuss export controls on cryptography. The panel included both the former and current General Counsels of the NSA. The recording of that session used to be available through the Internet Multicasting Service, but it is no longer there.

Links to additional information at other sites

In addition to the Bernstein case, there is also Peter D. Junger v. Secretary of State et al. This case is more recent than the other two, and is not nearly as far along.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) also has a web page on cryptography policy that you may find interesting.

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Last updated: 25 Dec 1997