After the uproar generated by the proposed amendments to the Export Administration Regulations to implement the Wassenaar Arrangement’s rules controlling “intrusion software,” the Bureau of Industry and Security (“BIS”) tried to calm things down by issuing some FAQs on the proposed rules. Sadly, I don’t think these FAQs are as helpful as BIS apparently thinks that they might be.
To understand the difficulty here, let’s focus on the problem I discussed in this post indicating that the new controls could reach auto-updaters, like the one in Chrome, that bypass operating system protections designed to prevent installation of new software without user interaction. The FAQs now say explicitly that auto-updaters are not covered. That is a good thing, and you (that means you, Google) can take that statement to the bank.
The problem with this analysis starts with the fact that BIS admits that an auto-updater is “intrusion software.” That’s an inescapable conclusion, of course, because the auto-updater overides operating system requirements that require user interaction to install new programs and does so to modify system data by installing the new program. But, we are told by BIS, the auto-updater doesn’t generate, operate, deliver, or communicate with “intrusion software.” Well, that might make sense if the auto-updater is a cyber-version of parthenogenesis and pops into existence completely unaided. That, of course, is nonsense. Some program, either the auto-updater itself or some other lines of code in the programbeing updated have to be specially designed to operate, deliver or communicate with the auto-updater for it to work at all. And so that code, either as part of the updater or the program itself, is covered by the ECCN. In short, an auto-updater unless accompanied by a program covered by the new ECCN is useless and will not work at all.
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