Breaking News: the Commerce Department has finally figured out how the Internet works. Or, perhaps more accurately, the Commerce Department has figured out that clouds aren’t just fluffy things that float in the sky from time to time.

Readers of this blog will know that I have been arguing for quite some time that the export agencies, including the Commerce and State Departments, need to revisit their absurd position that exports of encrypted technical data are the same thing as export of the technical data in plain text. If a company puts encrypted controlled technical data or technology on a foreign cloud server, then, under current rules and policies, the company will have exported that technical data or technology and will have violated the law if a license was required to export that information to that country.

According to this report (subscription required), BIS Assistant Secretary for Export Administration Kevin Wolf has revealed that this is being rethought

Among the terms to be defined is what constitutes an “export,” and one element of that definition will be that controlled information encrypted “in a certain way” will not constitute an export for purposes of cloud computing, while the unencrypted version would be, Wolf said.

That was the good news. Now for the bad news: according to Wolf, the various stakeholder agencies have not yet been able to agree on just what type of encryption will be sufficient to prevent an “export” of the transferred data.

The irony here is that the Department of Defense itself did not engage in any hand-wringing over encryption standards when it plopped its own, and presumably highly sensitive, communications on Chinese satellite transponders, rebuffing critics by noting simply that everything was encrypted. But — to end on a positive note — Assistant Secretary Wolf, who has been one of the driving forces behind export control reform, clearly understands this issue and I am sure he will do what he can to end this pointless interagency squabbling over the comparative merits and demerits of Blowfish, Triple DES and AES-256.

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