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The Export Control Bill, which is presently before Parliament (the Hansard report starts here and comes to the point here), has serious implications for academic freedom. One of its goals is to extend export controls on armaments from physical goods to intangibles such as software. However, the powers are so widely drawn that they give ministers the power to review and suppress any scientific papers prior to publication. They also give ministers the power to license foreign students - not just at British universities, but students taught by British nationals anywhere in the world.
Section 2, on `transfer controls', says that `The Secretary of State may by order make provision for ... the imposition of transfer controls in relation to technology of any description. For this purpose `transfer controls', in relation to any technology, means the prohibition or regulation of its transfer:-
But that's not all. The UK proposals are very much more severe than anything experienced in America, and they affect much more than just cryptography. The list of technologies whose export `electronically' would become subject to licensing is set out by international treaty (though the DTI could add extra items if it wished). The relevant treaty, known as the Wassenaar Arrangement, covers most of the subjects of interest to scientific and technological researchers, whether directly or through the tools we use.
There could be a severe impact on collaborative research across national boundaries, including the EU funded research which now accounts for a large proportion of our science base. Such collaboration necessarily involves many intangible exchanges of technology. In the late 1990s, for example, I worked with scientists in Norway and Israel to develop a candidate encryption algorithm which was a finalist in the Advanced Encryption Standard competition, run by the US government. This involved sending over 400 emails back and forth, many containing fragments of source code. The DTI has confirmed to me that in future such exchanges will require a licence.
The proposed regulations will also have an adverse impact on undergraduates, particularly blind and deaf students who require course materials in (controlled) electronic form. As more and more course material comes to incorporate software and other electronic components, the number of students affected will increase until it includes essentially all foreign nationals studying in Cambridge University's School of Technology.
There may well be legal challenges to the bill. Opponents will argue that it fails the test of proportionality, especially since the proposed controls were clearly not required during the Cold War. They will argue that while one may well decide to curtail long-established academic liberties because something bad has happened, it is excessive to do so because a bad thing might happen, but hasn't. (Al-Qaida isn't an excuse, unless even basic aerospace engineering is to be reclassified as a technology relevant to weapons of mass destruction. Technology is no longer the focus of the challenge to the West; our superiority at that is unchallenged since the collapse of the Soviet Union.) Even in the absence of legal challenges, requiring academics to get licenses to do their work when they had previously been left to get on with it will give rise to protests, and will lead to confrontation with government.
Unfortunately, the debate on the Bill has been dominated by attempts, sponsored by NGOs such as Amnesty, to tighten the licensing regime still further. Academic freedom has not so far found a voice. I very much fear that the only effect of these well-meaning interventions will be to harm our domestic liberties. There is no evidence that our government's `ethical foreign policy' has made it harder for large arms makers to get the export licences they seek, and there is no reason to believe that things will get any harder for them once this bill is passed. However, there is every reason to fear that universities will be a scapegoat, and that the DTI will gleefully create an empire of officials to oversee our foreign students, our international collaborations and our publications.
For these reasons, I've been promoting an amendment exempting research and teaching, which has been adopted by Universities UK and the Association of University Teachers. It was debated in the House of Lords here. The goal of our campaign is to get the government to adopt the amendment, and if they refuse, then to defeat them in a vote at the report stage of the bill.
*This article is an abridged version of Problems with the Export Control Bill. The author is Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Foundation for Information Policy Research. SGR thanks him for permission to reprint.
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