Today I submitted the following comment on the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) Proposed Rule: Wassenaar Arrangement Plenary Agreements Implementation; Intrusion and Surveillance Items.

Thank you for inviting comments on the Wassenaar Arrangement Plenary Agreements Implementation for Intrusion and Surveillance Items. As a member of the information security community, I am concerned about the effects of the proposed implementation on my industry.

I'll keep this brief by voicing support for the comments made by other prominent members of the community: Google, Katie Moussouris, Robert Graham, and Sergey Bratus et al.

My greatest concern is clarity of the proposed rule. If you must provide an answer to a frequently asked question about what a rule means, it may be because the rule was not written clearly. I was particularly troubled by the publication of the FAQ regarding the proposed rule, partly because it indicated a lack of clarity in the rule but also because the answers didn't seem much clearer. Had the answers been clear, I would still be concerned that the text of the rule would not be interpreted in the future in the same manner as your present interpretation. The text matters, and it is overbroad and unclear even to well informed members of the information security community.

Unfortunately, computer security is an unsolved problem. The people who are working to improve the state of the art of computer security are diverse members of a global community of researchers. The proposed rule directly prevents the sharing of information among those researchers, and it will have a negative impact on the security of computing systems and software for the entire world.

Software is a form of information, and control of the flow of information is very different from control of the transport of physical goods. I urge you to remove software from the scope of the Wassenaar Arrangement at the annual meeting of Wassenaar Arrangement members in December 2015.