Like many government policies across the globe, this directive was apparently drafted with a clear social goal in mind, but with little understanding of the use and pace of technology. Surely anyone serious about transporting intelligence information or treasonous material will use methods of encryption and obfuscation that would take more than a few hours of inspection to discover. Likewise, pornography has a way of finding its way to interested consumers no matter how it's hampered. In any case, one would think the low-wattage beacons of leadership in Khartoum would have more pressing business in Darfur.

While the Sudanese government has been on spin cycle for half a century, the country's leaders have been able to stabilize certain technology and energy-related aspects of the economy over the past few years. Recent ventures away from an otherwise solidly agrarian market have brought an increase in the number of affluent nationals and foreign businesspeople traveling in and out of the country -- each carrying little devices with lots of data. Apparently it occurred to government officials that they didn't understand what was in the devices and that the devices might be the conveyance for objectionable material.

The immediate effect of the quarantines and data inspections is sure to be a dampening of business interest in an already risk-fraught environment. Over the long term, however, silly rules regarding technology tend to be corrected by individuals' use of even more advanced technology. Governments rarely win this sort of oneupsmanship. In a bit of mild hysteria that peaked in the 1990s, the U.S. government clamped down on the export of both powerful computers and encryption software, to somewhat different and unexpected ends. Both situations are worth considering in the context of Sudan.

The U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Export Administration (BXA) maintains a formal definition of what our government considers a supercomputer, along with a few other thresholds for computing power that can be exported to hostile or politically bewildered foreign states. Relevant regulations at the time included 15 CFR Parts 770, 772, 773, 776, and 799. When Apple introduced the PowerMac G4 in the late 1990's, its capacity to process over 1 billion instructions per second (1GFLOPS) qualified it as a supercomputer. Because powerful computers can be used to do things like compute missile trajectories and simulate conflict outcomes, such machines were considered munitions under U.S. export law.

While the starched shirts of the Defense Department were deadly serious about preventing export of "munitions" technology to hostile states, Apple astutely turned this into a marketing bonanza, appealing to power-hungry computer users across the country. Other PC makers followed suit, and new versions of the Intel Pentium processor were similarly promoted as personal supercomputers. Market pressures convinced the BXA and the Defense Department to adjust the standard much more quickly in light of advancing technology and to ease export restrictions so the G4 and similarly powerful systems could be marketed overseas.