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Justice Department Lets Professor Teach Encryption Class

Two cases test U.S. encryption export rules.

By Sari Kalin, PCWorld   

Last month, a California judge ruled that University of Illinois professor Daniel Bernstein did not need to get an export license to teach his course on encryption because the course materials are protected speech under the Constitution%squots First Amendment. But the judge did not say that the Justice Department should not prosecute Bernstein for teaching the class, according to Shari Steele, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Bernstein%squots lawyers were prepared to seek a temporary restraining order so he could teach his class, which was scheduled to start yesterday, Steele said. Instead, last Friday, the Justice Department agreed to allow Bernstein to teach his class this semester, even to foreign students in the classroom. He can also set up a class site on the Internet that only University of Illinois computer systems can access.

Bernstein%squots broader case, on whether he can publish an encryption algorithm on the Internet without getting a license from the U.S. government, is ongoing. His legal team will probably file a motion for a summary judgment within the next few weeks and will seek to have the ruling cover new export regulations that went into effect last month, Steele said. The new regulations are handled by the Commerce Department, not the State Department, and allow the export of stronger encryption, but are otherwise similar to the old regulations.

Meanwhile, the appeal of another case challenging the encryption export rules began Friday in Washington, D.C., Steele said. In that case, Philip Karn, a California software engineer, is seeking to export a disk of cryptography algorithms from a book that has already been published. The State Department allowed him to export the book, Applied Cryptography, but balked at his request to export a chapter from the book on disk. Last year, a district court in the District of Columbia ruled in the government%squots favor.