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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Original URL: The Register has an article on fiddling by the US with an agreement set to negatively impact the IT security.

The period for comments on proposed amendments to the Wassenaar Arrangement – which governs the export of guns, lasers and proper weaponry, and computer hardware and software – ends today. So far, the tweaks concerning IT security products have received an overwhelming thumbs-down from the technology community.

In May the US Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) suggested altering the Wassenaar Arrangement to include controls on the selling of state-sponsored or commercial surveillance software among the 41 countries that abide by the agreement.

But the amendments were so loosely written that they would also ban the trade in vulnerability exploits, including possibly making bug bounty programs illegal, and criminalizing many of the tools used by legitimate security researchers to test software for flaws.

The BIS called for a 60-day public comment period, which closes today, and the response from both individual researchers and companies in the field has been overwhelmingly negative. On Monday Google went public with its objections, calling the proposed changes "disastrous."

"We believe that these proposed rules, as currently written, would have a significant negative impact on the open security research community," said Neil Martin, export compliance counsel for Google and Tim Willis from the Chrome security team.