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Article: Encryption. (legal case involving first amendment to the constitution)(Legal Reporter)
- Article from:
- Security Management
- Article date:
- December 1, 1997
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1997 American Society for Industrial Security. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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On rehearing an encryption case first decided in late 1996, a U.S. district court in San Francisco again ruled that some government encryption export restrictions violate First Amendment rights to free speech and are, therefore, unconstitutional. The court also prohibited federal officials from enforcing current export rules in this case.
In 1992, Daniel Bernstein, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California at Berkeley, developed an encryption algorithm. Bernstein drafted an academic thesis about the program and wrote a "source code" in a high-level computer language.
The Department of State informed Bernstein that the program and all documents related ...