The Elephant in the Room

This here is an elephant in the womb. So cute!

Wassenaar has been a learning experience for everyone involved. Everyone, that is, except the State Department. While Commerce has reached out and been quite open that they thought the initial rule was unlikely to be good, the State Department, which negotiated it in the first place, is as opaque as possible.

Look, there's three major companies in the States that sell penetration testing products. State called none of them before negotiating the rule, and I don't know why people think we can trust them to negotiate the next iteration, other than just ripping it up. 

Because any language that goes into this agreement is going to have subtle and complex issues that affect many segments of our industry. Do you trust State to understand the implications of them enough to allow them to negotiate in realtime on our behalf? Why would you?

I'll let you know when State finally makes an effort to reach out to those of us in the industry. Their claims of "We asked our technical advisory board" run very hollow. You can't help but assume they knew for a fact their technical advisers were not experts in this area and just didn't care.