SJ Mercury/Reuters: US lets professor put encryption on Internet

"The United States will allow a computer scientist to put instructions for writing a powerful computer data-scrambling program on his Web site, but his high-profile lawsuit challenging U.S. export restrictions on encryption may continue, his lawyer said on Thursday...."

"The move also followed a May 6, 1999 decision by a U.S. Appeals Court panel that the old rules barring University of Illinois professor Daniel Bernstein from posting instructions for his ``Snuffle'' program on the Internet were an unconstitutional violation of the scientist's freedom of speech...."

"The new rules on source code should aid software developers in the growing "open source" movement, including programmers using the Linux operating system. Such developers circulate their source code freely over the Internet, as opposed to major software vendors like Microsoft that keep their code secret."

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