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Comment by vmurthy | Hacker News Reader

An interesting aside: In 1998, India tested its nuclear weapons (Pokhran-II [1]). Almost immediately, US imposed sanctions. One of the terms of the sanction? "Bar the export of certain defense and technology material" [2].

I can't find a source but I do remember that IE used to ship with reduced encryption. Perhaps we have learnt some lessons since then :-)

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pokhran-II

[2]http://edition.cnn.com/WORLD/asiapcf/9805/13/india.us/

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This is why my hair stands up every time we have the "backdoored encryption" discussion -- we had, and probably still have, people in positions of power that think of encryption as something that should be regulated on the order that guided missiles are.

As a technologist, I agree with your view. But in cases like sanctions, I think the "Let me show who has the power" mentality takes over. So, a country (say USA) can pressure its companies (like Microsoft in 1998) to stop providing some features/services/products to have some leverage over the sanctioned country. The unfortunate pattern in history has been that politics wins over rationality.

Do you have some reference to something that suggests that this is what actually happened? I don't think the US government made Microsoft put weak encryption in export versions of IE because India tested a nuke.

Sorry! I tried so bad to find it but couldn't :-( Someday ..

I think you can't find it because it just didn't happen that way and you're misremembering something. The export-crippled cryptography in browsers was a real thing but it got there before the Indian nuclear test and for other reasons.

Indeed, encryption algorithms and implementation are subject to restrictions on export similar to munitions. It used to be very strict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...

There's an interesting story about PGP author circumventing that law by publishing his code in a book.

What's the relationship between these two things? The export controls were broad, in place before 1998 and not specific to India.

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