The software was classed as munitions and one needed an arms dealer’s license to publish it, including online. The creator of PGP published the full source code as a book, as these are covered under first amendment rights.
The software was classed as munitions and one needed an arms dealer’s license to publish it, including online. The creator of PGP published the full source code as a book, as these are covered under first amendment rights.
Playing Devil’s Advocate - If the classification of “munitions” effectively provided all the legal protections and requirements that they wanted to apply to encryption software, it would have been a lot of wasted time and effort to create a new classification and then update all the other legal documents to include and refer to that new classification.
Like, I don’t even want to guess how many references to “munitions” exist in various laws and regulations that would have then needed to be reviewed, amended, debated in committees, and ultimately voted on.