[Milsurplus] Cipher Challenge!

[Ray Fantini]

For well over twenty years the amateur satellite community has used a common algorithm to encrypt all 9.6 Kbps digital satellite traffic, the call letters of the originating station and of the satellite are transmitted in the clear but all other text is encrypted. not for any clandestine reason but to avoid having long strings of ones or zeros. the software and the encoding algorithm are all public knowledge and can be downloaded from many sites. I have done quite a bit of satellite operating and have never heard any complaints about using encryption. Everything that I  work with in digital television and radio has to be encrypted, not just to avoid long strings of similar states but also for forward error correction and I would speculate that anyone involved with modern digital communications beyond 1.2 Kbps is going to be using some form of encoding or what the outside observer would consider encrypted data. I have not worked with the DSTAR format yet but with its AMBE encoding scheme and Forward error correction is impossible to decode with out the proper software, so dose this mean ICOM is braking the law? And with  the ARRL promoting this format as the future of Ham radio are they law breakers too? 
Ray Fantini KA3EKH