Originally Posted by
Dubai Stu
I just received a memo from our legal department indicating that China was one of the countries where it was illegal to carry an encrypted notebook into. We were told to use a clean harddrive for China trips. I don't know how true it is.
The implication was that this ban was from China -- not the US bar on exportation of encryption
This is kind of true. This is my understanding:
The Chinese, in theory, want to be able to keep Chinese nationals from using encryption. They are much more lenient with foreign nationals, particularly those working for large corporations with a presence in China.
What they reserve the right to do is ask you (or your company, more specifically) for keys on demand. My firm does over $2 billion USD/year in China. They've never asked. If they did, or if we are unable to conduct business because of a restriction like that, we'd leave China, and they know it. I suspect this helps somewhat.
As a practical matter, the level to which the Chinese will work with a particular company is usually directly related to the amount of business a company brings to China. They've cleared us for strong encryption (network and disk based) as well as backhauling internet access out of China (and thus bypassing the "Great Firewall") for quite some time, but we are growing like a weed there. We also don't let nonprofessionals access the internet, so I guess they figure it's fewer minds being polluted with the uncensored version of the internet...