Google comments on controversial Wassenaar Arrangement
Today, Google expressed its thoughts on the controversial Wassenaar Arrangement. The company stated that “the proposal would make the world less secure.”
Shortly after making the comment above, Google posted an extended response containing all of its concerns about the security impact of the new rules. Neil Martin and Tom Willis, members from the Chrome Security Team, mentioned:
“We believe that these proposed rules, as currently written, would have a significant negative impact on the open security research community. They would also hamper our ability to defend ourselves, our users, and make the web safer. It would be a disastrous outcome if an export regulation intended to make people more secure resulted in billions of users across the globe becoming persistently less secure.”
In addition, Google recently submitted comments to the Department of Commerce demanding specific revisions to the proposed rules, seeking specific carve-outs for bug reporting as well as international development teams. It will be interesting to see how they will respond to these objections and you could expect revisions will be made given the critical comments from Google.
Martin and Willis made the following statement:
“We’re committed to working with BIS [Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security] to make sure that both white hat security researchers’ interests and Google users’ interests are front of mind.”
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