Crypto Law Question

[awilliam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Obviously anyhting below would be discussed with real lawyers before 
anyone did anything,  but since I suspect there are people familiar 
with US/Internation cryptography laws on this list I thought I'd float 
the balloon here.

I have friends who do humanitarian work in countries less tolerant 
than ours,  whose authorities are known to intercept e-mail messages.  
They almost certainly do it with the cooperation of the ISP's,as it 
may be required by law in those countries to divulge such information 
to "police".  One thought I've had would be that once connected to the 
Internet someone could (say with SSL-enabled fetchmail) get their 
e-mail from an account outside the "offending" country directly to 
their own PC.  But making crypto-enhanced connections to or from a 
server in the US from another country, beyond say 56-bit, is illegal.  
Is this true?  So, irrespective of the local laws of the far end (for 
the sake of argument),  I'm curious if such a service would be legal 
even in the US?