Supercomputer export link in National Security Committee report

>From JYA's copy ("Purpose and Background" section, about
8 paragraphs down):

             (3) It would direct the Secretary of Commerce to
            allow the export or re-export of encryption-capable
            software for non-military end-uses in any country, or
            computers using such software based on considerations
            of foreign availability.
    
        Importantly, the committee notes that section 3 of H.R. 695
    would require the government to approve exports of high
    performance computers (so-called ``supercomputers'') if those
    computers contain encryption products or software that are
    commercially available. In the committee's view, this is one of
    the most serious consequences and flaws of the bill. Under this
    proposed arrangement, any company would be in a position to
    force the government to allow the export of even the most
    powerful supercomputer available in the United States, if they
    first loaded a piece of foreign-available encryption software
    on the supercomputer. As confirmed by Secretary Reinsch in his
    testimony before the committee, this provision would overturn
    the Spence-Dellums amendment to H.R. 1119, the National Defense
    Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1997, adopted by the House on
    June 19, 1997, by a vote of 332-88. That amendment would
    prevent the inadvertent export of supercomputers to
    questionable end users in countries of proliferation concern.

Are we getting screwed by a false link to supercomputers?

Ern

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

In <199709181634.JAA26324@ohio.chromatic.com>, on 09/18/97 
   at 09:34 AM, Ernest Hua <hua@chromatic.com> said:

>Are we getting screwed by a false link to supercomputers?

No we got screwed when these so-called "civil-liberties" groups got
envolved. Never has anything good come out of legislation in DC (atleast
nothing in the past 75yrs). There were several of us who warned about
this, of cource if a lobbist isn't lobbying then he is out of a job, so it
is no suprise that our warnings went unheeded.

<sigh> "those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it".

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>>Are we getting screwed by a false link to supercomputers?

Supercomputers have been part of the Export Controls for a long time.
Of course, a few years ago, "supercomputer == Cray-1" was the obvious
definition.  
Eugene Brooks's "Attack of the Killer Micros" has hit that industry hard.*
Some of the DEC Alpha machines hit that speed point, and lots of
lobbying was started that gradually moved the limit.  But now,
"Cray-1 ~~ Pentium-133" for basic number-crunching, though there 
are still applications requiring really high memory bandwidth where
the Cray-1 will outperform the Pentium, and the Crays have a much better 
I/O architecture than your basic PC (though PCIbus is no slouch, and
Ultra-Wide-Hyper-SCSI stuff keeps improving as well.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
* "Careful with that VAX, Eugene!".  The "Attack of the Killer Micros"
was Brooks's restatement of Moore's Law for the supercomputer industry,
probably 10 years ago when I was still reading comp.arch.

				Thanks!
					Bill
Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com
Regular Key PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639