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EFFector Online Volume 8 Number 17
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EFFector Online Volume 08 No. 17 Oct. 18, 1995 editors@eff.org
A Publication of the Electronic Frontier Foundation ISSN 1062-9424
IN THIS ISSUE:
ALERT: Urgent CDA Action Especially for SysOps, ISPs and Businesses
Who's Using Who? Martin Rimm and the Antiporn Activists
Newsbytes
Cincinnati BBSers Fight Back
Stratton Oakmont & Porush v. Prodigy - Update
Istook Amendment a Threat to Non-Profits' Free Speech?
Administration *Still* Chants "Voluntary", Forges Onward with Escrow
"Oz Clipper" - Update
FBI Child Pornography Investigation - Update & Key Escrow Tie-in
International Online Child-Porn "Ring" Target of "Operation Starburst"
Canadian Prosecutions for Textual & Faked "Child Pornography"
Canadian Exon-alike on the Way?
Canada & Holland Ratchet-up Privacy
pgp.net - New World-Wide PGP Keyservice
Swiss Data Protection Commish Warns About Lack of Security
Bulgarian TV Censorship
Coming Next Issue...
Upcoming Events
Quote of the Day
What YOU Can Do
Administrivia
* See http://www.eff.org/Alerts/ or ftp.eff.org, /pub/Alerts/ for more
information on current EFF activities and online activism alerts! *
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: ALERT: Urgent CDA Action Especially for SysOps, ISPs and Businesses
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is a letter devised by the Stop314 Coalition (of which EFF is a
participant) to show Congress that online service providers are opposed
to the slew of Internet censorship bills that are coming closer and
closer to passage. Congress sometimes ignores non-profit "special interests",
like us, but do often listen to well-organized industry opposition
to or support of legislation. Please feel free to share this, without
"spamming", with newsgroups and list moderators (who, after all, are a form
of online service provider - the legislation in question may hold them
personally, criminally, liable for the content of others), and any other
system operators, sysadmins, forum providers, and Internet service
companies' administrators, as well as other concerned businesses and
services, and institutions.
There's a lot of talk about the evils of censorship, and on the net, no
shortage of opinions. Let's actally do something about it, and be a part
of something bigger than just general kvetching and worry.
Take the letter below and forward it to your Internet Service Provider
and ask them to sign on. Make a difference.
We all have a service provider, we can all participate in this.
_________________________________________________________________________
LETTER TO CONGRESS AGAINST INTERNET CENSORSHIP
Please pardon the interruption (and the impersonal letter),
A few months ago I put out a plea for business to sign onto a letter
that urged Congress to adopt a different tact with regards to regulating
the Internet. Congress responded, with a public response that affirmed
what we already knew, that Congress needs not enact any new legislation to
regulate the Internet. In fact, what it really needs to do is prevent
states from regulating the net.
I hand-carried this letter to Washington DC with over a dozen New York
representatives along with Ann Beeson of the ACLU (American Civil Liberties
Union), and Simona Nass of the SEA (Society of Electronic Access).
The letter opened doors for us, and was crucial in helping to sway the
opinions of many legislators considering both sides of the debate.
I'm writing to you to ask you to participate in the defense of free
speech. By signing the letter below, you can help support free speech
and good business. Please consider doing so.
The deadline for signing onto this letter is Monday October 16th. Please
send me your signon intentions as soon as possible.
Shabbir J. Safdar
Online Representative
Voters Telecommunications Watch
_________________________________________________________________________
Directions for signing onto the business letter and a copy thereof:
Read the electronic business and bulletin board letter below. You
can also find it at:
Gopher: gopher -p1/vtw/exon gopher.panix.com
WWW URL: http://www.vtw.org/cdaletter/
Email : Send mail to files@vtw.org with "send cdaletter" in the
subject line.
Send in the following information to vtw@vtw.org:
Business name
Owner or officer name
Address
Email address
Phone number
Description of business and anything else relevant
Here's an example:
$ Mail vtw@vtw.org
My business would like to signon to the business and bbs letter.
We are:
Ed's Xcellent Online Node (EXON)
J.J. Exon, Owner
2323 Decency Road, Nebraska 10000-0000
(402) 555-1212
jj@exon.net
Ed's Xcellent Online Node is based in Nebraska and provides Internet
service to many thoughtful and free-speech loving Nebraskans.
We provide Internet access to over 1,500 residents and 400
businesses. We employ 35 full time employees.
-James
^D
Mail sent!
$
___________________________________________________________________________
BUSINESS AND BBS LETTER
[For more information on this effort, contact:
Shabbir J. Safdar (VTW) at shabbir@vtw.org or (718) 596-7234]
Dear member of Congress,
Laws restricting Internet speech, such as S314, the Exon/Coats
"Communications Decency Act" and the new Title 18 language in the
Managers Amendment to HR1555, will not help parents control their
children's access to objectionable material and will over-regulate
electronic businesses out of this growing industry.
These bills are currently in the Telecommunications Deregulation
conference right now, and we urge you to provide your input to the
conference committee to remove the criminal provisions mentioned
above from the final bill.
Recently the House addressed the issue of children accessing
controversial material in cyberspace. By affirming HR 1978 (the
Cox/Wyden Internet Freedom and Family Empowerment bill) they encouraged
workable and successful solutions to helping parents control their
children's access to the Internet while showing a concern for the First
Amendment.
Unfortunately Congress also passed two measures that do nothing to help
parents control their childrens' access to controversial material on
the Internet. S314, the Exon/Coats Communications Decency Act, and the
new additions to Title 18 of the US Code were drafted without an
understanding of the technology or the business that we engage in.
This legislation imposes regulations on business so grave that many of
us wonder if we will be able to stay in business.
The great advantages of modern electronic communications--and the
reason why we can stay in business delivering these communications--are
speed and openness. In short, the new media allow millions of people
to exchange information freely at speeds approaching that of light.
The bills we object to will force many sites to screen every message
that comes across, or to shut down access. We ourselves are at some
risk of violating the law, simply because we cannot police every page
that comes across our channels.
Should the laws proposing new regulations pass, the National Information
Infrastructure will be crippled, and many fewer organizations will be
willing to purchase our services.
Let it be understood that objectionable material is available to
children right now on sites outside the United States and will continue
to be available to children if these changes to the criminal code
pass. Legislation that attempts to criminalize such information will
do nothing to affect information that sits on foreign soil, far from
the reach of US laws.
What will help parents control their children's access to the Internet
is "parental control" tools and features, such as those provided by
several major online services and available as over-the-counter
software. Unlike many other parental schemes, these solutions are here
today. No one had to mandate them, they appeared because parent
consumers asked for them. A list of them is attached for your
information.
Once again, we urge you to express your opinion to the conference
committee. The Telecommunications Deregulation bill that comes back to
the floor for a vote should contain HR1978 and exclude S314 and the new
Title 18 language from the HR1555 Managers Amendment.
Respectfully submitted,
___________________________________________________________________________
[end of alert]
More information on Internet censorship legislation is available at:
ftp.eff.org, /pub/Censorship/Internet_censorship_bills/
gopher.eff.org, 1/Censorship/Internet_censorship_bills
http://www.eff.org/pub/Censorship/Internet_censorship_bills/
------------------------------
From: Mike Godwin (mnemonic@eff.org)
Subject: Who's Using Who? Martin Rimm and the Antiporn Activists
-----------------------------------------------------------------
To those who have been investigating the scandal behind the fraudulent
Martin Rimm/Carnegie Mellon "cyberporn study" and the Time magazine cover
story that hyped it, it's long been known that there was some kind of
connection between Rimm's efforts and those of antiporn activists --
particularly those on the Religious Right.
But the precise nature of the connection has not been clear until
recently. Thanks to information provided by New York Law School professor
Carlin Meyer and others, it is now apparent that Rimm had the assistance of
antiporn activists, including Bruce Taylor of the National Law Center for
Children and Families.
Thus, at the same time Rimm, himself no fundamentalist, was using the
antiporn activists to contrive a place for himself on the national stage,
the antiporn groups were using Rimm to manufacture evidence that
"cyberporn" was out of control and needed to be regulated.
Figuring out the connection between Rimm and the Taylor gang is like
assembling a mosaic from very numerous and very tiny pieces. Still, the
whole picture begins to come together once one notes certain interesting
facts:
1) On November 5, 1994, Marty posted a message in a public Usenet
newsgroup that included the following response to Carl Kadie:
'You're a good guy, Carl. I'm the principle investigator of the study,
"Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway." It is being
refereed and had the assistance of a lawyer who has argued obscenity
cases before the Supreme Court.'
2) Footnote 93 of Marty's article includes the following text:
'Another competing
vision consists of a revised version of the Miller standard. Instead
of using community standards, the proponents of the revised Miller
standard advocate the creation of a per se list of sexual activities
which are automatically and irrevocably deemed obscene. See Bruce A.
Taylor, A Proposal for a Per Se Standard, 21 U.Mich. J.L. Ref. 255
(1987-88).'
3) The Bruce Taylor article appears in the same volume of the
U. of Mich. Journal of Law Reform that includes the Dietz-Sears
study, upon which Marty based his own study (see, e.g., Rimm
footnotes 15 and 56).
4) After ordering a copy of that volume of the Journal of Law Reform,
I discovered the following language in footnote 13 of the Bruce Taylor
article (in which Taylor also boasts of his 15 years of experience in
prosecuting obscenity):
"In all, this author has tried over 65 obscenity jury cases in several
states and has argued over 50 appeals before the Ohio Court of Appeals,
the Ohio and Colorado Supreme Courts, United States Courts of Appeals for
the Sixth and Ninth Circuits, and the United States Supreme Court."
5) Bruce Taylor is currently heading the National Law Center for Children
and Families. This means he *currently* shares a Fairfax, Va., suite of
offices with H. Deen Kaplan.
6) Kaplan, as we have long known, is a) a third-year law student at
Georgetown, b) a vice president of the National Coalition for Children and
Families (formerly the National Coalition Against Pornography, aka NCAP),
and c) a member of the Georgetown Law Journal staff throughout last year
and currently on the journal's articles-selection committee.
7) Bruce Taylor's organization, the National Law Center, formerly employed
John McMickle, who is now on the staff of Sen. Chuck Grassley and who was
the author of Grassley's net.indecency legislation. McMickle, who,
according to Danny Weitzner of the Center for Democracy and Technology,
is known to be a protege of Taylor's, was the person who had
advance knowledge of Marty's study (this is clear from a letter McMickle
sent to university administrators at Rimm's alma mater, Carnegie Mellon, in
early November of last year), and who later planned to call Marty as
a witness to Grassley's Senate hearing. A year ago at this time, McMickle
was sharing offices with Deen Kaplan in Fairfax, VA. The various antiporn
groups at that suite (The National Law Center, the National Coalition, and
Donna Rice-Hughes's group, "Enough is Enough!") apparently prefer to
office only with likeminded individuals.
8) Deen Kaplan is known to have provided Sen. Jim Exon with the "blue
book" of online porn that the Senator brandished on the Senate floor.
9) Sen. *Grassley's* indecency legislation was introduced on June 6 of
this year, at approximately the time the issue of the Georgetown Law
Journal was originally set to be published. Hearings on the Grassley
legislation were set for July 24. Coincidentally, perhaps, that was four
weeks to the day after Time's "Cyberporn" cover story hit the streets.
Or perhaps it wasn't purely coincidental -- Rimm seems to have known
in March that his study would be featured in a Time cover story.
10) Increasingly during the spring of 1995, Rimm expressed concern to many
people that his article might be perceived as anti-porn, and he redoubled
his efforts to get his legal footnotes approved by civil-libertarian
lawyers, including me, Danny Weitzner of Center for Democracy and
Technology, and Stephen Bates, then an Annenberg Fellow.
11) Perhaps in the knowledge that the source of help on the legal
footnotes could result in his study's being branded as a political,
antiporn document, Rimm stressed the following in his request to me in
April:
"In the meantime, we would
greatly appreciate an independent check of our legal notes, which the
journal helped us with. (No one on our team is a lawyer)."
12) In the December, 1994, version of the study, which had undergone no
editing by any of the law journal staff, we see the following text in
footnote 53:
'The second of the competing
visions consists of a revised version of the Miller standard. Instead
of using community standards, the proponents of the revised Miller
standard advocate the creation of a per se list of sexual activities
which are automatically and irrevocably deemed obscene. Bruce
Taylor, A Proposal for a Per Se Standard, _______ J.L. Ref. ______
(1988).'
13) Except for minor changes, the sentences from footnote 53 in the
December version are echoed in footnote 93 of the final version of
the Rimm study. The main difference is that the citation for the Bruce
Taylor article is not complete in the older draft. The most reasonable
inference from this fact is that the person who added that citation was
pulling it from memory, and left blanks so that the cite checkers at the
law journal would know to pull up the specifics. This is a strong
indication that a) the drafter of this footnote was a lawyer or law
student, and b) the drafter knew what kinds of assistance law-journal
staffs could be expected to provide. Together with the citation format,
it strongly suggests the likely background of the person who assisted
Marty with his legal scholarship.
14) In the biographical footnote to Taylor's law-review article, the
author makes a point of thanking "Len Musil, J.D. 1988, Arizona State
University, who is clerking for CDL [Citizens for Decency through Law,
the antiporn organization then headed by Taylor], and who used his skills
as editor of his university and law school newspapers to edit this work
and conform its style to proper form."
15) According to sources at the Georgetown Law Journal, the purported
timetable for Rimm's and the law journal's interactions goes something
like this:
11-18-94
Time article on the CMU censorship flap, written by Philip Elmer-DeWitt,
becomes available on America OnLine. It is also available in the 11-21-94
issue, which may have been on the stands on 11-14-94.
11-14-94 to 12-5-94
In this 21-day interval, Meredith Kolsky, articles
editor for the Georgetown Law Journal, reads about Rimm's study, gets
a copy from Marty Rimm, suggests its publication to the Georgetown Law
Journal staff, the GLJ meets and decides to accept the article, and
Carlin Meyer is selected as a probable contributor.
12-5-94
Meredith Kolsky solicits Carlin Meyer's review of the Rimm article.
12-7-94
Kolsky thanks Meyer for agreeing to write a comment on the Rimm article
and ships a copy of the then-current draft of the study to Meyer. It is
from this draft -- the words "Copyright 1994" and "DO NOT CIRCULATE!!"
appear prominently on the cover -- that I have taken the earlier version
of Rimm's obscenity/child-porn legal footnote.
Based on this breathtaking timetable (it's astonishing that the
law-journal staff members physically survived the rapid acceleration of this
editorial decisionmaking process), it's certain that Marty had legal assistance
prior to the official formal submission article to the law journal. Who
gave that assistance?
The likeliest answers to this question: Deen Kaplan, the Georgetown Law
Journal staff member and antiporn activist, is the author of
the legal footnotes and law-related text of the Rimm article, while
Bruce Taylor, who continues to spearhead the attempts to pressure
Congress into censoring the Internet, is the Supreme Court obscenity
litigator who served as a "referee" for Rimm.
If Rimm's academic fraud were a crime, Taylor and Kaplan, among others,
could easily be listed as unindicted co-conspirators. The real crime,
of course, is that, even though the Rimm study itself has been
discredited, the larger fraud -- the antiporn groups' ongoing
efforts to paint the Internet as vice den in dire need of Congressional
action -- continues unabated.
POSTSCRIPT: THE OBSCENITY FOOTNOTE
How much help did Martin Rimm receive in his legal footnotes and
research, and who helped him?
To get an idea of the assistance Marty had clearly received before his
article was checked by the Georgetown Law Journal editors, take a look at
Rimm's footnote dealing with the legal and constitutional status of
obscenity and child pornography.
The footnote appears as Footnote 2 in the Georgetown Law Journal article,
but it was Footnote 1 in the version of the article the law journal
sent to Carlin Meyer in December of 1994.
I have marked the differences between the earlier and later versions of
the footnote in the following way:
Material *deleted* from the first draft of the footnote is set off and
bracked with <<doubled angle brackets>>.
Material *added to* the first draft of the footnoate (i.e., that appears
in the final draft) is not set off, but appears in [[doubled square
brackets]].
Here's the footnote:
-------------------
The question of whether a sexually explicit image enjoys First
Amendment protection is the subject of much controversy and reflects a
fundamental tension in contemporary constitutional jurisprudence.
While this article discusses only the content and consumption patterns
of sexual imagery currently available on the Internet and "adult" BBS,
the law enforcement and constitutional implications are obvious. Thus,
it is necessary to briefly discuss the constitutional status of
sexually explicit images.
Obscene material does not enjoy First Amendment protection. See Roth
v. United States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957)
<<(opinion of Brennan, J.)>>
; Miller v. California, 413 U.S.
15 (1973). In Miller, the Supreme Court established the current
tripartite definition for obscenity.
<<Id.>>
In order to be obscene, and
therefore outside the protection of the First Amendment, an image must
(1) appeal to a prurient (i.e., unhealthy or shameful) interest in
sexual activity, (2) depict real or simulated sexual conduct in [[a]]
manner that, according to an average community member, offends
contemporary community standards[[,]] and (3) according to [[a]] reasonable
person, lack serious literary, artistic, political[[,]] or scientific
value. Id. at 25-27; [[see also]] Pope v. Illinois, 481 U.S. 497, [[500-01]]
(1987) [[(rejecting "ordinary member of given community" test, in favor
of "reasonable person" standard for purposes of determining whether
work at issue lacks literary, artistic, political, or scientific
value)]]; Pinkus v. United States, 436 U.S. 293, [[298-301]] (1978)
[[(excluding children from "community" for purpose of determining
obscenity, but allowing inclusion of "sensitive persons" in the
"community")]]; [[Ginzburg v. United States, 383 U.S. 463, 471-74 (1966)
(allowing courts to examine circumstances of dissemination to
determine existence of literary, artistic, political, or scientific
value);]] see also United States v. Orito, 413 U.S. 139, [[143]] (1973)
[[(holding that constitutionally protected zone of privacy for obscenity
does not extend beyond the home)]]
<<Ginzburg v. United States, 383 U.S. 463, 471-74]]>>
To complicate matters, all adult pornographic material
<<must be>>
[[is initially]] presumed to be nonobscene.
<<Cf.>>
Fort Wayne Books, Inc. v. Indiana, 489 U.S. 46, 62 (1989)
<<.>>
[[(requiring judicial determination of obscenity
before taking publication out of circulation);]]
<<See>>
Marcus v. Search
Warrant, 367 U.S. 717, 730-31 (1961) [[(requiring procedures for seizure
of obscenity which give police adequate guidance regarding the
definition of obscenity to ensure no infringement on dissemination of
constitutionally protected speech)]]. Accordingly, law enforcers and
prosecutors attempting to pursue an obscenity investigation or
prosecution face constitutionally mandated procedural obstacles not
present in other criminal matters. See New York v. P.J. Videos, Inc.,
475 U.S. 868 (1986). For instance, the so-called "plain view"
exception to the Fourth Amendment warrant requirement, whereby
contraband plainly visible to a law enforcement officer may be seized,
does not apply to allegedly obscene material because, prior to a
judicial determination, nothing is obscene and therefore, a fortiori,
nothing be can be considered contraband. See Lo-Ji Sales, Inc. v. New
York, 442 U.S. 319, 325 (1979) [[(requiring that search warrants contain
specific description of allegedly obscene items to be seized)]].
In addition to obscenity, one other type of sexually explicit material
does not enjoy constitutional protection. In New York v. Ferber, 458
U.S. 747 (1982), the Supreme Court explicitly removed pornography
depicting minors from the protective aegis of the First Amendment.
That is, obscene or not, visual depictions of children engaged in
sexual conduct are not constitutionally protected. Because the
government interest
<<which the Supreme Court>>
identified [[by the Supreme Court]] as justifying
removing child pornography from the protection of the First Amendment
is more urgent than the government
<<interests>>
[[interest]] which
<<justifies>>
[[justify]] denying
protection to obscenity, and because the child pornography standard is
far less vague than the obscenity standard, law enforcers and
prosecutors are not bound by any unique procedural burdens here. See
United States v. Weigand, 812 F.2d 1239 (9th Cir.), cert. denied, 484
U.S. 856 (1987).
In sum, the constitutional regime that the Supreme Court has
established for pornography creates two distinct categories of
sexually explicit imagery
<<which>>
[[that]] are not protected by the First
Amendment. While ascertaining whether a particular digital image
contains a minor is not [[a]] Herculean labor, ascertaining whether a
particular digital image is obscene in the abstract is well-neigh
impossible. Accordingly,
<<this Author>>
[[the research team]] will not attempt to pass on
the question of obscenity as it applies to the digital images that are
the subject of this
<<Article>>
[[article]].
---------
Two things are immediately clear to anyone accustomed to reading
law-review articles. The first is that Marty's footnote was scarcely
edited at all by the law-journal editors -- it was published in much the
same form as it appears in the December draft. The second is that Marty's
handling of legal citation form is amazingly good for someone who,
supposedly, doesn't have a lawyer on his research team. It is this more
than anything that makes clear that Marty had assistance from someone who
wanted to make his legal scholarship look good enough for a law journal
Finally, I suspect the transmutation of "this Author" to "the research
team" came at Marty's suggestion, and not the law-review editors'.
********
More information on the Rimm/CMU/Time "CyberPorn" scandal is available at:
ftp.eff.org, /pub/Censorship/Pornography/Rimm_CMU_Time/
gopher.eff.org, 1/Censorship/Pornography/Rimm_CMU_Time
http://www.eff.org/pub/Censorship/Pornography/Rimm_CMU_Time/
------------------------------
Subject: Newsbytes
------------------
* Cincinnati BBSers Fight Back
On June 16, 1995, members of the Hamilton County, Ohio, Computer Crimes Task
Force raided the offices of the Cincinnati Computer Connection BBS and
seized the entire computer system, including all the private electronic
mail of the subscribers. The search warrant authorized the Task Force to
seek 45 allegedly obscene files, but the police seized and examined
the entire system, including thousands of private and public messages.
Though similar in many ways to the Steve Jackson Games v. US Secret
Service case, which EFF helped bring to trial and win, this is the
first user class action suit challenging a government seizure of computer
material.
The seven subscribers represent a class of thousands of users of the
Cincinnati Computer Connection electronic bulletin board. The lead
plaintiff is Steve Guest, a 36-year old computer system analyst who runs
his own business, in large part using the Cincinnati Computer Connection
BBS. Other plaintiffs include Denise and Ben Kelley, active bulletin board
users and grandparents of seven; Nelda Sturgill, a registered nurse who
used the bulletin board to keep up with medical news and to swap recipes;
and Randy Bowling, who suffers from a speech impediment caused by a head
injury, who used CCC BBS as his primary way to communicate and to study
computer science. The users of the system claim that the wholesale
seizure of the system violated their constitutional right to free speech
and association and that the seizure of their private e-mail violated their
right to privacy and federal law.
"The Task Force used a drift net to troll for a tiny amount of supposed
'computer porn,'" said Cincinnati civil rights lawyer Scott T. Greenwood,
who represents the plaintiffs. "In the process, they netted an enormous
amount of entirely irrelevant material, and shut down a constitutionally-
protected forum for speech and association."
"We believe that the law prohibits the indiscriminate seizure of private
electronic communications," said Peter D. Kennedy, an Austin, Texas
attorney who also represents the plaintiffs, and who represented Steve
Jackson Games when that company sued the U.S. Secret Service for illegally
seizing its electronic bulletin board system in 1990. "It is a fundamental
principle of law that, even during legitimate investigations, the
government must limit its searches and seizures to things related to the
crime under investigation. Here, the Task Force took everything, including
thousands of innocent persons' private mail and public notices."
Greenwood added, "Whether the sheriff and the computer 'net police' like
it or not, the Bill of Rights is not optional just because they don't like
it or understand it. Shutting down a computer system and seizing people's
private communications makes a mockery of the First Amendment."
The lawsuit claims that Sheriff Leis and the Task Force violated the
First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, several provisions of the federal
Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, and Ohio common law privacy
rights, and seeks actual damages, statutory damages, and punitive damages
on behalf of the seven plaintiffs and the entire class.
[The above largely excerpted from plaintiffs' press release.]
For a copy of the complaint filed by plaintiffs, see:
http://www.eff.org/pub/Legal/Cases/Cincinnati_BBSers_v_Hamilton_County
gopher.eff.org, 1/Legal/Cases/Cincinnati_BBSers_v_Hamilton_County
ftp.eff.org, /pub/Legal/Cases/Cincinnati_BBSers_v_Hamilton_County
* Stratton Oakmont & Porush v. Prodigy - Update
The Commericial Internet eXchange (CIX) reports that plaintiff Stratton
Oakmont have, despite winning their case, decided to abandon the lawsuit,
which attempts (and at the pre-appeal level has so far succeeded) to hold
Prodigy liable for the defamatory posts of users. The judge agreed with
plaintiffs in the original case, and this decision did not bode well for
other online service providers. Prodigy had been building up to an appeal
(and may still need to file one) when Stratton Oakmont made their
announcement. The CIX report states: "The outstanding question is whether
the judge will let his adverse court decision stand, remove the decision
or modify it. It the judge does leave his decision in place, this could
have adverse effects for CIX members [and any other service providers in
the US] in future litigation."
For more background information on this case, see:
ftp.eff.org, /pub/Legal/Cases/Stratton-Oakmont_Porush_v_Prodigy/
gopher.eff.org, 1/Legal/Cases/Stratton-Oakmont_Porush_v_Prodigy
http://www.eff.org/pub/Legal/Cases/Stratton-Oakmont_Porush_v_Prodigy/
* Istook Amendment a Threat to Non-Profits' Free Speech?
Reps. Ernest Istook (R-OK), David McIntosh (R-IN), and Robert Ehrlich (R-MD)
are pushing what some call a censorship measure in the House
appropriations bill. Istook is also the sponsor or co-sponsor of a lot
of other questionable legislation, such as the "Personal
Responsibility", "American Dream Restoration", "Taking Back Our
Streets", "Family Reinforcement", and "National Security Revitalization"
Acts of 1995, as well as a proposed amendment to the US Consitution
allowing career politicians to remain in office longer.
The amendment in question, opposed staunchly by Senators Hatfield (R/OR)
and Jeffords (R/VT), who wish to keep the amendment out of the Senate
appropriations legislation., impose serious restrictions on political
speech by non-profits who receive federal funds. Such organizations
would be ineligible for federal grants if they spent more than 5% of
their funds on "advocacy" in the previous five years. This "advocacy" is
illdefined, and would appear to apply to simply contacting legislators or
regulators to express an opinion. Other penalities would include yearly
audits. For-profit government contractors are, of course, exempted.
EFF has no position on this legislation at present, and public opinion on
the measure seems generally somewhat hazy: Is it right for such organizations
to be getting taxpayers' money in the first place? And regardless of this,
isn't this maneuver censorious? After all, real lobbying with federal
grant money is *already* illegal. Yet even non-profts, like EFF, who
receive no government funding, have cut-and-dry restrictions on how much
activism they can perform. A not-for-profit organization called
Children's Defense Fund has issued net-wide action alerts about the
Istook amendment, labelling it the "Silence America Bill". CDF also notes
that the amendment's sponsors "may have subverted their cause when
they were caught FORGING a press release purportedly issued by the bill's
leading opponent, the Alliance for Justice, in order to attack the
Alliance at public hearings." Your tax dollars at work?
Regardless of one's position on the propriety of funding private foundations
with tax money, the bill appears rather over-broad and geared at,
probably unconstitutionally, preventing any contact between
federally-funded non-profits and policy-makers. One wonders what the
point is of funding them in the first place...
* Administration *Still* Chants "Voluntary", Forges Onward with Escrow
Despite the fact that documents obtained from the FBI *prove* that the
US Executive Branch expects to have to try to force Clipper-like key
"escrow" onto the market, and outlaw other forms of encryption, the Dept.
of Commerce's National Institute for Standards and Technology, and
representatives of the National Security Agency, recently stated
repeatedly to industry leaders, civil liberties advocates, and
cryptographers, that the plan is intended to be completely voluntary.
Maybe NIST has a bridge in Brooklyn for sale too?
Sept. 6-7, and again on Sept. 15, NIST hosted "workshops" on key escrow,
in an effort to cajole industry into supporting a government-access-to-keys
(GAK) scheme dubbed "Clipper 2" by privacy advocates. The government
continually stressed the voluntary nature of this scheme. The new
plan, such as it is, dispenses with the hardware base that turned the
computing and telecom industry away from Clipper, Capstone and Tessera,
the Administration's earlier attempts to make encryption
"wiretap-friendly". Instead, Clipper 2 simply demands that strong
encryption keys be "escrowed" with a commercial, non-government escrow agent.
As has been noted before, this is an absolute perversion of the term
"escrow". Holding your crypto keys for *you* in case you lose them, or
for your employer (assuming a work-related key) in the event of your
demise or severance of employment, would be escrow. For an organization
to hold *your* keys for the convenience of law enforcement and
intelligence convenience is not escrow, but key surrender.
The scheme is fatally flawed in numerous ways, and is not particularly
voluntary, since export will be denied for non-compliant cryptographic
products. Additionally, cryptography experts warn that the allowed key
length is far too short.
Clipper 2's larger plan includes allowing export of crypto with
key-lengths up to 64 bits - as long as it's escrowed.. This is the carrot
being held out to entrepreneurs wanting to export software and hardware
products containing encryption - the current exportable key-length limit is
much shorter.
The "workshops" took acceptance of key escrow as a given, and were aimed
at settling technical issues, such as how to certify escrow agents to
keep criminal figures out of the business, of NIST's draft FIPS (Federal
Information Processing Standard) for "Commercial Key Escrow".
Boy, was NIST in for a surprise. Voters Telecom Watch, and other
attendees confirm, that at the Sept. 6-7 meetings, industry and public
interest groups panned the plan and small working groups setup by NIST to
evaluate the criteria unhappily participated, even openly revolting in
some instances...dissent among industry and public representatives
interfered with NIST's attempts at having a discussion about the
specifics of Clipper II. Simply put, industry and the public
advocates didn't like the plan. Therefore discussions of the details
were fruitless. One smaller working group simply refused to work on
the details and issued a statement condemning the whole ClipperII plan."
Pat Farrell, an attendee at the event, states, "It is my belief that this
meeting was a staged presentation. Nearly every industry representative
said that this was a fatally flawed idea. It was 'a non-starter.' The
government representatives said that they heard the comments, but
insisted on proceeding."
Not surprisingly, proceed they did. The Sept. 15 meeting had a larger
number of government participants - including NSA employees - to keep
everyone in line, as it were.
Worse yet, NIST has already announced that it fully intends to issue
Clipper 2 as an official standard. As with Clipper, to hell with what
the public says. The Sept. 15 meeting had little in the way of dissent,
suggesting that industry representatives are getting burned out on this
issue, and feel (probably correctly) that the government simply doesn't
care what objections they raise. Some have even come out in support of
Clipper 2. Others, like Hewlett-Packard have looked for "alternative"
solutions, such as hardware encryption engines that require "policy cards"
containing the encryption algorithms (stronger versions of which could be
export embargoed), but such proposals do not address the real issue here:
The export restrictions against encryption are unconstitutional.
EFF hopes to settle this once and for all in court. The Bernstein v. US
Dept. of State case, sponsored by EFF to directly challenge the US ITAR
crypto export restrictions, goes to trial Oct. 20, and will soon be
followed by a similar lawsuit filed by Phil Karn.
As early as May 1994, NIST testified before Congress that key escrow
"is meant to be used by both the government and the private sector on a
strictly voluntary, as-needed basis -- and is not intended to be mandated
in the future". Somehow, the facts just don't let this statement ring true,
now or then.
On a lighter note, USAF Col. Mike Wiedemer, at the Inst. of Navigation GPS-95
conference, openly advocated widespread civilian use of strong encryption,
citing dangerous security holes in GPS (Global Positioning Systems),
which though originally designed for aircraft navigation, are now finding
applications in consumer and industrial goods & services. Such systems
may be open to sabotage and surveillance without cryptographic protection.
[Reported in _Aviation_Week_&_Space_Technology_, and _Information_Warfare_.]
More info is available:
KEY ESCROW, CLIPPER & THE NIST MEETINGS
ftp.eff.org, /pub/Privacy/Key_escrow/
gopher.eff.org, 1/Privacy/Key_escrow
http://www.eff.org/pub/Privacy/Key_escrow/
BERNSTEIN CASE
ftp.eff.org, /pub/Legal/Cases/Bernstein_v_DoS/
gopher.eff.org, 1/Legal/Cases/Bernstein_v_DoS
http://www.eff.org/pub/Legal/Cases/Bernstein_v_DoS/
KARN CASE
ftp.eff.org, /pub/Legal/Cases/Karn_Schneier_export/
gopher.eff.org, 1/Legal/Cases/Karn_Schneier_export
http://www.eff.org/pub/Legal/Cases/Karn_Schneier_export/
CRYPTO EXPORT & ITAR REGULATIONS
ftp.eff.org, /pub/Privacy/ITAR_export/
gopher.eff.org, 1/Privacy/ITAR_export
http://www.eff.org/pub/Privacy/ITAR_export/
CLIPPER/ESCROW-RELATED DOCUMENTS OBTAINED FROM GOVT. VIA FOIA
ftp.eff.org, /pub/Privacy/Clipper/Clipper_FOIA/
gopher.eff.org, 1/Privacy/Clipper/Clipper_FOIA
http://www.eff.org/pub/Privacy/Clipper/Clipper_FOIA/
Some of the http archives also provide pointers to off-site resources at
EPIC, CPSR, VTW, CDT, and other organizations, as well as
individual-maintained sites that have more information about these topics.
* "Oz Clipper" - Update
Last issue, we reported that an attendee, Ross Anderson, of the Queensland
U. of Tech. Cryptography Policy and Algorithms Conference in July of this
year, reports that Steve Orlowski, Assistant Director, Australian
attorney general's department, stated in a presentation, "the needs of
the majority of users of the infrastructure for privacy and smaller
financial transactions can be met by lower level encryption which could
withstand a normal but not sophisticated attack against it. Law
enforcement agencies could develop the capability to mount such
sophisticated attacks. Criminals who purchased the higher level
encryption products would immediately attract attention to themselves."
Since then, Orlowski has issued a statement counter-criticising
Anderson's critique. He corrects an error which EFFector inadvertently
perpetuated: "The paper certainly does not suggest that the
Attorney-General's Department should become a centralised interception
authority. In fact such a role would not be consistent with its role as
a source of advice to Government."
Orlowski also says that "the paper does not suggest, either directly or
by implication, that individuals should be banned from using encryption",
but admits, in effect, that it does suggest that citizens should be
banned from using strong, uncompromised encryption: "Regarding the
use of higher level encryption, the paper supports the concept of
commercial key escrow where organisations hold their own keys but may be
required to provide them in response to a court order. The same would
apply to individuals who could either hold there own keys or store them
with a commercial body."
The NIST/NSA lovechild is on the loose globally it would seem.
Orlowski attempts to dodge the issue, saying: "If individuals were to use
lower level encryption there would be no need for them to maintain copies
of any keys for ["escrow"] systems. To my mind this is preferable to a
requirement for keys to be maintained for all encryption systems, which
could be the result if universal key escrow were introduced."
This is just silly. Who has called for "universal key escrow"? Even the
NSA doesn't want that - it's not necessary in even the most paranoid
intelligence agent's imagination - weak encryption can already be cracked.
The entire debate is about whether strong encryption should be "escrowed"
for government convenience.
Fortunately Orlowski's paper is couched in fairly tentative terms, and
does not represent Australian government policy - which isn't scheduled
to settle on the crypto issue until 1997.
* FBI Child Pornography Investigation - Update & Key Escrow Tie-in
In EFFector 08.11, we reported that the FBI was investigating many (3000
to 30000) online service users for violation of anti-childporn statutes,
many (all?) of them apparently users of America Online rather the
Internet. Despite this, the mainstream media have had a field day, in
the wake of the Rimm/CMU/Time "CyberPorn" scandal, pointing fingers at
the Internet. The investigation appears to be targeting both the posters
and subsequent downloaders of the illegal materials. This would appear to
be the first large-scale case in which both alleged posters of child
pornography and those who make copies of the online materials are under
investigation. The overall investigation has been elevated to "major
case" status - the highest level - by FBI officials, "who have given the
green light to lead agents to use virtually unlimited staffing and
financial support, according to FBI records", according to the
_Cincinnati_Enquirer_. That financial support has already reached at
least $250,000 - and the FBI expects it to be "much higher" in the end.
According to _CE_, AOL is not expected to be a defendant, and is
cooperating with the FBI by laying bare AOL's user records.
The FBI has arrested several dozen US users in the course of its
investigation, ironically dubbed "Operation Innocent Images". EFF is
aware of no civil liberties violations in the course of the raids and
arrests, for once. Maybe the lesson of Steve Jackson Games v. US Secret
Service are sinking in. For more info on the SJG case:
ftp.eff.org, /pub/Legal/Cases/SJG/
gopher.eff.org, 1/Legal/Cases/SJG
http.eff.org, /pub/Legal/Cases/SJG/
According to an unconfirmed report from an EFF volunteer from Wyoming,
one raided suspect, a Wyoming elementary school teacher, committed
suicide after the FBI "visit".
The Electronic Privacy Information Center warns that FBI Dir. Louis
Freeh stated in an address at the Internationl Cryptography Institute
conference in Sept. that the FBI encountered encrypted material during
the course of the investigation. Freeh also brought up that a
Philippine investigation into alleged terrorist activities also turned up
cryptographically protected files. Privacy advocates have for some time
predicted that the FBI and other agencies would search desperately for
some, any, justification of their fears that encryption and computer
privacy will hamper law enforcement efforts. Though the "Innocent
Images" crypto material is very weak as an excuse - after all, FBI has
already arrested dozens of people, so their investigation does not appear
to have been significantly impeded - expect to hear Freeh and others tout
this "smoking gun" repeatedly in coming months as the Administration pushes
for "Clipper 2" and other violations of your privacy.
EPIC's report of the Freeh speech also notes:
The FBI Director characterized encryption as a "public safety"
issue and stated that the FBI and law enforcement agencies
around the world "will not tolerate" a situation in which the
wide availability of encryption may impede those agencies'
"public safety functions." While noting that the current U.S.
government policy is to encourage the "voluntary" adoption of
key-escrowed encryption techniques, Freeh raised the specter of
a mandated "solution." Freeh stressed that the FBI "prefers" a
"voluntary approach," but likened the encryption issue to last
year's Digital Telephony debate, where the FBI first attempted
to achieve voluntary compliance but eventually sought and
obtained a legislative mandate to assure law enforcement access
to digital communications. Freeh indicated that "if consensus
is impossible" on the encryption issue, the FBI "may consider
other approaches."
More info on these and other child-porn cases will be archived at:
ftp.eff.org, /pub/Censorship/Pornography/Child_porn/
gopher.eff.org, 1/Censorship/Pornography/Child_porn
http://www.eff.org/pub/Censorship/Pornography/Child_porn/
* International Online Child-Porn "Ring" Target of "Operation Starburst"
Associated Press reports that in July, nine people were arrested in Britain
for child pornography as a result of investigations in "Operation Starburst",
an inquiry launched in Birmingham, England, but targetting suspects as far
away as the US, Hong Kong, Canada, South Africa and Germany. The
relationship of this, if any, to the recent FBI actions against alleged
child pornography distributors on AOL is unclear at present.
* Canadian Prosecutions for Textual & Faked "Child Pornography"
The controversial Canadian anti-child-porn laws, which target even
fictional and fake representations, visual or otherwise, have already
resulted in several arrests and at least one conviction. In the
Pecciarich case, a man was found guilty of possession and distribution of
child pornography, when he posted to his private BBS a series of images
he created with image editing software that *looked like* child porn, but
in the creation which no child was sexually abused. Ironically, the
judge presiding over this case, Geraldine Sparrow, noted that defence
counsel in the case didn't even bother to argue against the claim that
the computer files in question were illegal. The judge said she certainly
would have listened to such arguments if they had been presented,
according to Electronic Frontier Canada. EFC's Prof. David Jones, who
spoke with Judge Sparrow, reported: "She also invited me to see the
evidence and judge for myself. Yup -- it's available down at the court
house. Stunned, I asked her if she appreciated the irony of the
situation: the court had found a young man guilty of a crime for
distributing this harmful material to the public, and yet, the court now
makes it available to an even wider segment of the public. Isn't there
something goofy about this? Nope, not according to Judge Sparrow."
More recently, Fergus, Ontario, provincial police seized, on Aug. 2, a
BBS, and charged the two young male system operators with distribution
of child pornography. The sysops had allegedly posted a text-only *story*
depticing sex acts with children. Electronic Frontier Canada expresses
some skepticism: "Is the 'artistic defence' only available to
card-carrying artists? Is freedom of artistic or literary expression not
so much a 'right', but rather a 'privilege' that must be earned by taking
years of courses at an Art College? What are the implications for
Internet Service Providers that carry the Usenet newsgroup 'alt.sex.stories'?"
In a similar case, two couples had their BBSs seized six months ago in
Surrey, British Columbia. On Aug. 30, charges were finally filed (15-20
counts of obscenity and child pornography). After initial indications
they wanted to proceed by indictment (possibly 2-5 years in jail), the
prosecution seems instead to be planning to proceed by summary conviction
(fine up to $2,000; up to 6 months in jail). If the defendants do not
plea-bargain, trial should begin some time fairly early next year. EFC
indicates that there's a good chance of the defendants being found
innocent, due to the child porn laws being "constitutionally defective",
and the arguable fact that BBS distribution of allegedly obscene material
does not harm society at large or violate local terrestrial community
standards (a similar argument has been made by EFF in an amicus brief in
the AABBS case, where Robert and Carleen Thomas were prosecuted in
Memphis after Tennessee law enforcement downloaded sexually-explicit
material from the the Thomases BBS in Calfornia.)
Cases like this hint that libraries carrying classic literature may become
targets of similar prosecutions, if they happen to have copies of
Nabokov's _Lolita_ on their shelves. Some suggest that such laws
rightly target promotion of sexual abuse of children, but others
counter that no child was harmed in the production of literary
and faked "child pornogrphy", and that the law is a violation of
free speech rights. Legislation similar to the Canadian law is currently
under consideration in the US legislature.
* Canadian Exon-alike on the Way?
Canadian Minster of Parliament Rey Pagtakhan has introduced a legislative
motion (M-384) to curb hate and pornography on the Internet.
More information is available at:
gopher://insight.mcmaster.ca/0R8715-11200-/org/efc/doc/efc-talk/efc-talk.9503
gopher://insight.mcmaster.ca/0R3581-6484-/org/efc/doc/efc-talk/efc-talk.9506
[I have not been able to figure out non-URL-form gopher paths for this,
unfortunately. "Traditional" gopher users will just have to surf to
these items directory by directory. - mech]
* Canada & Holland Ratchet-up Privacy
A new study released by The Ontario Information and Privacy Commission,
in collaboration with the Dutch Data Protection Authority (Registratiekamer),
"Privacy-Enhancing Technologies: The Path to Anonymity", recommends that
international infosystems standards should take into account the need to
examine whether or not a user's identity is truly requrired for various
processes in the system, collection and retention of personally
identifiable information should be kept to an absolute minimum, users
should have control over the redistribution of private information and
identity, and privacy and data security commissioners should make every
effort to educate about privacy-enhancing technologies, and encourage the
use of security and privacy measures. Switzerland already seems to be
following this model (see article below). To obtain a copy of full
report, call 1 (800) 387-0073. Ask for the publications dept, then ask
for the report by name.
Additionally, the Canadian Standards Association (CSA) has released a new
report to promote privacy standards in the private sector. It is a
comprehensive review of the development and implementation of privacy
codes, and it includes the "CSA Model Code" and describes methods for
implementation. The Model Code is based on ten principles, that
should apply to all technologies and types of businesses, elaborated in
the report: Accountability, Identifying Purposes, Consent, Limiting
Collection, Limiting Use/Disclosure/Retention, Accuracy, Safeguards,
Openness, Individual Access, and Challenging Compliance. More info about
the CSA report is available from bankj@csa.mhs.compuserve.com
[Excerpted from EPIC and EFC informational posts.]
* pgp.net - New World-Wide PGP Keyservice
The domain "pgp.net" was registered last year in preparation for
providing a simple and unified name space for PGP infrastructure such as
key servers, software distribution sites and so on. The first steps to
populate the pgp.net domain have now been taken. Many more will be
taken over the next few months. The first additions are for the email
public key server network. The key servers are presently known by a
number of different names, none of which are particularly obvious to the
uninitiated. Worse, many of them are run by students or employees
without the official backing of their host organizations. It's not
surprising that some are unreliable and/or short-lived. A recent
development, however, is that more and more servers are being run by
CERT teams. Examples include those run by DFN-CERT (Germany), CERT-NL
(Netherlands) and OxCERT (Oxford University). It is in the best
interests of the teams that the keyservers be reliable and available.
We have, therefore, set up "keys.pgp.net" as a set of equal-priority MX
records in the DNS. What this means, in practice, is that email sent to
pgp-public-keys@keys.pgp.net will be sent to a randomly chosen
keyserver. It probably doesn't matter which one, as the servers are
synchronized. If the first server your mail system tries is not
available, it should automatically try the other servers until one
works. This should give a rather more rapid and sucessful response than
the current mechanism. It is also rather easier for documentation
writers, FAQ maintainers and such like to give advice which has a long
shelf-life. We recognize that, for efficiency reasons, users of key
servers might want to be able to specify a local machine rather than be
handed a randomly selected one - the old names will continue to work.
However, we have also registered sub-domains of pgp.net.
In particular, the records for "whatever.uk.pgp.net" will only map to
machines for the United Kingdom. At the moment we have the following
records in place, with the expectation that more will follow:
keys.de.pgp.net Germany DFN-CERT
keys.no.pgp.net Norway Univ. of Tromso
keys.uk.pgp.net United Kingdom OxCERT, Oxford
keys.us.pgp.net United States MIT
Large regions, such as the US, will eventually have several servers,
each of which will be the target of equal priority MX records. We
expect the Netherlands to join in with keys.nl.pgp.net very shortly.
Allocation of key servers to the pgp.net domain is only the first step.
Plans are advanced to set up a number of other sub-domains, all with the
format <service>[.<region>].pgp.net. This structure allows for local
customization and yet preserves the uniformity and simplicity of the
naming scheme. For instance, the Web-site www.de.pgp.net would,
presumably, have the text of the pages in German and would be the site
recommended in German documentation, while ftp.no.pgp.net would be the
principal archive of PGP-related material in Norway.
So far, only ftp.pgp.net and www.pgp.net have been allocated. The URL
http://www.pgp.net/pgp has more information on the pgp.net domain as it
currently exists and will be kept up to date as the domain becomes more
populated.
Expect to see more developments along these lines later this year; all
will be reported on http://www.pgp.net/pgp
* Swiss Data Protection Commish Warns About Lack of Security
Reuters news wire reports that, on Oct. 6, Swiss Data Protection
Commissioner Odilo Guntern, saying he was prompted to speak by the rapid
growth in Internet popularity, warned that "There are no standard
international or global rules for protection of information that are
legally binding for the Internet beyond national borders...Generally
there are no obstacles to copying, altering, falsifying or delaying data
in the Internet...every person who uses the Internet should be fully
aware of the ensuing dangers and risks". The Reuters report says
Guntern noted that Internet users generally leave behind a data trail
when they browse through the system, allowing others to trace their
movements, set up profiles of user habits or even manipulate financial
data, all while remaining unseen. Guntern encouraged the use of digital
signature and firewalls - an encryption. His position is a welcome
divergence from the recent European Council anti-crypto statement.
* Bulgarian TV Censorship
ClariNet reports that Bulgarian Chief Prosecutor Ivan Tatarchev, and Ivan
Granitski of the state-controlled television service, plan to take
several tv shows off the air for for them to be "cleaned up". After the
fall of communism in Bulgaria in 1989, the two state tv channels "were
flooded with erotic and violent western films," according to the ClariNet
article. An anonymous official is quoted as saying, "Purging the screen
of programs some consider to be immoral is a complicated process as each
of these shows involves substantial advertisement contracts with major
companies." The decision to censor shows that "promote violence,
homosexuality, prostitution, gambling or drug addiction", and what shows
qualify for the dubious honor of this label, was expected to be reached
in August, but we've receive no futher news regarding these actions.
* Coming Next Issue...
Commerce Dept. IPWG Report on Online Intellectual Property Meets Resistance
(was intended for this issue, but delayed for more research)
Lobbyists Assault Public Govt. Info Online - Update
Scientology v. Critics - Update
A Look at Internet Domain Name Fees and Alternatives to InterNIC
EFC Opposes Bell Canada Trademark on "The Net"
Arthur Halavais Censored from Internet by Judge
Minnesota v. the Whole Wide World
PROFS Case - Update
Tony Davis Case - Update
Lorne Shantz Case - Update
...and more of course.
Appearance of articles conditional upon reasearch - if a piece of the
puzzle is missing, article will be punted to next issue.
------------------------------
Subject: Upcoming events
------------------------
This schedule lists events that are directly EFF-related. A much more
detailed calendar of events likely to be of interest to our members and
supporters is maintained at:
ftp: ftp.eff.org, /pub/EFF/calendar.eff
gopher: gopher.eff.org, 1/EFF, calendar.eff
http://www.eff.org/pub/EFF/calendar.eff
Oct. 19 * Library Fair 95: Information Access at the Smithsonian Institution
Libraries; Smithsonian Ripley Center, Washington DC. Speakers
include Shari Steele (EFF Staff Counsel)
Email: libem011@sivm.si.edu
Oct. 20 * Bernstein v. Dept. of State goes to trial; Judge M.H. Patel's
courtroom, Federal Building, 450 Golden Gate Ave., San Francisco,
Calif., 10:30am PST. This EFF-sponsored case challenges the ITAR
export restrictions on encryption as unconstitutional.
Nov. 3-
4 * Innovation and the Information Environment Conf.; U. of Oregon
School of Law, Eugene, Or. Speakers include Shari Steele (EFF
Staff Counsel).
Email: kaoki@law.uoregon.edu
------------------------------
Subject: Quote of the Day
-------------------------
"Technical solutions, such as they are, will only work if they are
incorporated into *all* encryption products. To ensure that this occurs,
legislation mandating the use of Government-approved encryption products or
adherence to Government encryption criteria is required."
- FBI, NSA and Justice Department secret briefing document to the
National Security Council, Feb. 1993, "Encryption: The Threat,
Applications and Potential Solutions", obtained by Freedom of
Information Act lawsuit by EPIC.
Find yourself wondering if your privacy and freedom of speech are safe
when bills to censor the Internet are swimming about in a sea of of
surveillance legislation and anti-terrorism hysteria? Worried that in
the rush to make us secure from ourselves that our government
representatives may deprive us of our essential civil liberties?
Concerned that legislative efforts nominally to "protect children" will
actually censor all communications down to only content suitable for
the playground?
Join EFF!
Even if you don't live in the U.S., the anti-Internet hysteria will soon
be visiting a legislative body near you. If it hasn't already.
------------------------------
Subject: What YOU Can Do
------------------------
* The Communications Decency Act & Other Censorship Legislation
The Communications Decency Act and similar legislation pose serious
threats to freedom of expression online, and to the livelihoods of system
operators. The legislation also undermines several crucial privacy
protections.
Business/industry persons concerned should alert their corporate govt.
affairs office and/or legal counsel. Everyone should write to their own
Representatives and Senators, asking them to oppose Internet censorship
legislation, and (when the list is available) everyone should write to
the conference committee members to support the reasonable approaches of
Leahy, Klink, Cox and Wyden, and to oppose the unconstitutional proposals of
Exon, Gorton and others. System operators, please see the alert that is
the first article of this issue of the newsletter.
For more information on what you can do to help stop this and other
dangerous legislation, see:
ftp.eff.org, /pub/Alerts/
gopher.eff.org, 1/Alerts
http://www.eff.org/pub/Alerts/
If you do not have full internet access, send your request
for information to ask@eff.org.
* The Anti-Electronic Racketeering Act
This bill is unlikely to pass in any form, being very poorly drafted, and
without much support. However, the CDA is just as bad and passed with
flying colors [the jolly roger?] in the Senate. It's better to be safe
than sorry. If you have a few moments to spare, writing to, faxing, or
calling your Congresspersons to urge opposition to this bill is a good
idea. If you only have time to do limited activism, please concentrate
on the CDA instead. That legislation is far more imminent that the AERA.
* Find Out Who Your Congresspersons Are
Writing letters to, faxing, and phoning your representatives in Congress
is one very important strategy of activism, and an essential way of
making sure YOUR voice is heard on vital issues.
EFF has lists of the Senate and House with contact information, as well
as lists of Congressional committees. (A House list is included in this
issue of EFFector). These lists are available at:
ftp.eff.org, /pub/Activism/Congress_cmtes/
gopher.eff.org, 1/EFF/Issues/Activism/Congress_cmtes
http://www.eff.org/pub/Activism/Congress_cmtes/
The full Senate and House lists are senate.list and hr.list, respectively.
Those not in the U.S. should seek out similar information about their
own legislative bodies. EFF will be happy to archive any such
information provided.
If you are having difficulty determining who your Representatives are,
try contacting your local League of Women Voters, who maintain a great
deal of legislative information.
* Join EFF!
You *know* privacy, freedom of speech and ability to make your voice heard
in government are important. You have probably participated in our online
campaigns and forums. Have you become a member of EFF yet? The best way to
protect your online rights is to be fully informed and to make your
opinions heard. EFF members are informed and are making a difference. Join
EFF today!
For EFF membership info, send queries to membership@eff.org, or send any
message to info@eff.org for basic EFF info, and a membership form.
------------------------------
Administrivia
=============
EFFector Online is published by:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation
P.O. Box 170190
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End of EFFector Online v08 #17 Digest
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