From ssteele@eff.org Sun Jul 11 23:34:49 1993 Date: Fri, 9 Jul 1993 13:31:00 -0400 From: Shari Steele To: eff-news mailing list Subject: EFFector Online 5.12 ****************************************************************** ////////////// ////////////// ////////////// /// /// /// /////// /////// /////// /// /// /// ////////////// /// /// ****************************************************************** EFFector Online Volume 5 No. 12 7/9/1993 editors@eff.org A Publication of the Electronic Frontier Foundation ISSN 1062-9424 -==--==--==-<>-==--==--==- In this issue: EFF Has Moved Online Congressional Hearing To Be at Liberty, by John Perry Barlow Announcement of Group Meeting Request for Help from Canadian Readers Job Openings at EFF -==--==--==-<>-==--==--==- ************* EFF Has Moved ************* On July 2, EFF moved. Please note our new address and telephone numbers: Electronic Frontier Foundation 1001 G Street, N.W. Suite 950 East Washington, DC 20001 202/347-5400 voice 202/393-5509 fax Our e-mail address is the same, eff@eff.org. **************************** Online Congressional Hearing **************************** On July 26 at 9:30AM EDT, the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance of the U.S. House of Representatives will hold the first Congressional Hearing ever held over a computer network. The oversight hearing on "The Role of Government in Cyberspace" will take place in the Grand Ballroom of the National Press Club at 14th and F Streets, N.W., Washington, D.C. The hearing is open to the public. An open house will be held from 3-5PM on the same day in the same location and is also open to the public. Chairman Markey has asked that this historic occasion demonstrate the potential and diversity of the global Internet. Thirty Sparcstations will be in the hearing room, allowing members of Congress, staff, and their guests to read e-mail, use Gopher menus, read testimony in WAIS databases, browse the World Wide Web, and otherwise use the resources of the global Internet as part of the hearing. Some witnesses for the hearing will testify remotely, sending audio and video over the Internet. Audio and video of the hearing will also be multicast over the Multicast Backbone (MBONE). We are hoping that C-SPAN and other traditional media will also carry the event. *MORE DETAILS ON MBONE AND OTHER WAYS TO WATCH THE HEARINGS REMOTELY WILL BE FORTHCOMING SHORTLY.* One of the primary points that we are hoping to demonstrate is the diversity and size of the Internet. We have therefore established an electronic mail address by which people on the Internet can communicate with the Subcommittee before and during the hearing: congress@town.hall.org We encourage you to send your comments on what the role of government should be in the information age to this address. Your comments to this address will be made part of the public record of the hearing. Feel free to carry on a dialogue with others on a mailing list, cc'ing the e-mail address. Your cards and letters to congress@town.hall.org will help demonstrate that there are people who use the Internet as part of their personal and professional lives. We encourage you to send comments on the role of government in cyberspace, on what role cyberspace should play in government (e.g., whether government data be made available on the Internet), on how the Internet should be built and financed, on how you use the Internet, and on any other topic you feel is appropriate. This is your chance to show the U.S. Congress that there is a constituency that cares about this global infrastructure. If you would like to communicate with a human being about the hearing, you may send your comments and questions to: hearing-info@town.hall.org Support for the Internet Town Hall is provided by Sun Microsystems and O'Reilly & Associates. Additional support for the July 26 on-line congressional hearing is being provided by ARPA, BBN Communications, the National Press Club, Xerox PARC, and many other organizations. Network connectivity for the Internet Town Hall is provided by UUNET Technologies. **************** To Be at Liberty **************** John Perry Barlow wrote this essay for an upcoming PBS special on liberty. This is the text of what will be a quarter of the show. The other three essayists include Salman Rushdie. To Be At Liberty An Essay for Public Television Text by John Perry Barlow Video production by Todd Rundgren Let me tell you where I'm coming from. I grew up on a ranch near Pinedale, Wyoming, a very free town not far from the middle of nowhere. It was the kind of place where a state legislator could actually say, "If the English language was good enough for our Lord Jesus Christ, it's good enough for our school children." Though surely a hick town, it was also a real community. There was a lot of trust. Neither the locks nor the lawyers got used much. People knew each other and tried to let one another be. After all, they'd come to that wild and remote place to be free. Liberty was a fierce practice among them. That it might also be a legal guarantee seemed irrelevant. It seems to me that elsewhere in America, liberty is far more a matter of law than practice. The Bill of Rights is still on the books, and they'd have a hell of a time putting you in jail for just saying something, but how free are we? Whatever the guarantees, I believe liberty resides in its exercise. Liberty is really about the ability to feel free and behave accordingly. You are only as free as you act. Free people must be willing to speak up...and listen. They can't merely consume the fruits of freedom, they have to produce them. This exercise of liberty requires that people trust one another and the institutions they make together. They have to feel at home in their society. Well, Americans don't appear to trust each other much these days. Why else would we employ three times more lawyers per capita than we did in 1970? Why else would our universities be so determined to impose tolerance that they'll expel you for saying what you think and never notice the irony? Why else would we teach our kids to fear all strangers? Why else have we become so afraid to look one another in the eye? We have come to regard trust as foolishness and fear as necessary. We live in terror that the people around us might figure out what we're actually thinking. Frankly, this America doesn't feel very free to me at all. What has happened to our liberty? I think much of the answer lies in the critical difference between information and experience. These days we view most of our world through a television screen. Most of our knowledge comes from information about things, not experience with them. Let me return to Pinedale for an example. Those folks killed each other pretty regularly, but there wasn't much fear. They knew each other, and if somebody got shot, it wasn't too hard to figure out why. Homicide was not abstract. It was a familiar threat, like wild horses or winter. And you also knew that today's opponent might be the only person along to pull you out of a snowdrift tomorrow. So tolerance and trust were practical necessities. Living more or less safely in a world we understood, we found liberty an easy thing to keep. But elsewhere, as I say, the average American's sense of the world has likely been derived by staring at it through the one-way tunnel of information. What the media's taught my fellow citizens is that all the world is dangerous in some irrational, non-specific way. Terrorists are everywhere. Nature is in open rebellion. Making love can kill you. Your fellow humans are liars in suits, thugs, zealots, psychopaths, and, mostly, victims who look a lot like you. Television amplifies the world's mayhem and gives you no way to talk back. No way to ask, "Is this the way the world is?" Just as right now it's giving you no way to argue with me. Why does television prefer terrifying images? Because it lives on your attention. That's what television is really selling. And scaring the hell out of you is, like sex, one of those really efficient ways to get your undivided focus. To gain it, they flood your living room with images designed to hit your fear glands like electricity. So we have erected a glowing altar in the center of our lives that feeds on our terror, and Fear has become our national religion. We ask the government to defend us against the virtual goblins that stream from the tube, and the government has obliged us. For example, in 1992, a total of two Americans died in terrorist attacks. Not what I'd call a major threat. But our fear of them is so real that we spend tens of billions a year to protect ourselves from terrorism. For many Americans, making the car payments depends on keeping this fear alive. But you cannot build a society of general trust in an atmosphere of general fear. The fearful are never free. If we are to fight back - if we are to regain the courage necessary to the practice of liberty - we are going to have to stage another kind of revolution. We need to find a new means of understanding the world that takes no profit from our fear. We need a medium that, like life itself, allows us to probe it for the truth. We need, in essence, to cut out the middlemen and speak directly to one another. Indeed, we need a place where we can share information unfiltered by the needs and desires of either Big Brother or the Marketing Department down at Channel Six. Such a medium may be spreading across the planet in a thickening web of connected computers called the "Internet." Through the Internet I can already get a personal connection with people all over the globe, learning from those on the scene what's really going on. Through the Internet I can publish my own understandings to whomever might be interested, in whatever numbers. During the War in the Persian Gulf, I was able to get minute by minute reports from the laptop computers of soldiers in the field. The picture they presented felt far more detailed, more troubling and ambiguous, than the mass hallucination presented on CNN. The Internet is also creating a new place...many call it Cyberspace...where new communities like Pinedale can form. The big difference will be that these Cyberspace communities will be possible among people whose bodies are located in many different places in the world. Direct communication should breed understanding and tolerance. Our fears will be far easier to check out. We may begin to understand that these distant and sometimes alien creatures are real people whose rights are directly connected to our own. I imagine the gathering places of Cyberspace, some as intimate as Pinedale's Wrangler Cafe, some more vast than Tienanmen Square. I imagine us meeting there in conditions of trust and liberty that no government will be able to deny. I imagine a world, quite soon to come, in which ideas can spread like fire, as Jefferson said, "expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe... incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation by anyone." If ideas can spread like fire, then freedom, like water, will flow around or over those that stand in its way. In Cyberspace, I hope that this truth will be self-evident. ***************************** Announcement of Group Meeting ***************************** Hypereal Group Meeting: The Aesthetics of Presence - towards an ethic of design Sunday, July 11 within interactive technologies 7:00 pm Sunken Room - Genesee Co-op 713 Monroe Ave Rochester, NY Free and open to the public. For more information, contact: Haim Bodek hb003b@uhura.cc.rochester.edu 716-442-6231 Hypereal Group P.O. Box 18572 Rochester, NY 14618 ************************************** Request for Help from Canadian Readers ************************************** Peter Hum, a reporter with a major Canadian newspaper called the Ottawa Citizen (circulation about 200,000 in an area of about 1 million) is interested in learning about encryption issues in Canada. Anyone with information can send e-mail to Peter at af391@freenet.carleton.ca, or call him at (613) 596-3761. ******************* Job Openings at EFF ******************* SYSTEMS ADMINISTRATOR EFF is looking for a dependable, organized, hands-on SysAdmin with 2-3 years experience to manage a cluster of Sun Sparcstations serving as our Internet host in our Washington, DC, office. The successful candidate must know UNIX applications, including sendmail, ftp archive, Gopher, DNS & WAIS. S/he must be able to customize, install & debug in C. Extensive Mac (System 7, LocalTalk, Ethernet, MacTCP) experience is also required to manage our Mac LAN & bus applications. This person will be responsible for hardware & software acquisition & maintenance & our 50-port PBX telephone system. Our SysAdmin must enjoy a high energy, interrupt-driven environment. Good communications skills (writing & speaking) & a user-friendly attitude are required. A BS in CS, EE, MIS or a related field is helpful. Interest in EFF's mission & an ability to advise EFF staff members on technical issues related to public policy is preferred. Salary negotiable with excellent benefits. Send resume, cover letter & salary requirements by 7/20 to: EFF SysAdmin 238 Main Street Cambridge, MA 02142 Attn: L. Breit by e-mail (ASCII only, please): lbreit@eff.org no phone calls ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ RECEPTIONIST EFF and its upstairs neighbors are looking for a telephone receptionist. Computer and phone experience preferred. Must be professional, personable, courteous, extremely reliable and graceful under pressure. All applicants should be content with a permanent position as a receptionist with our organizations. Competitive salary with good benefits. E-mail your resume (ASCII) to erickson@eff.org, or fax to (202) 393-5509. You may also mail your resume to: Receptionist Search 1001 G Street, NW Suite 950 East Washington, DC 20001 Attn: K. Erickson No phone calls, please. Resumes should be received by 7/20. EFF is an equal opportunity employer. ============================================================= EFFector Online is published biweekly by: Electronic Frontier Foundation 1001 G Street, N.W., Suite 950 East Washington, DC 20001 USA Phone: +1 202 347 5400 FAX: +1 202 393 5509 Internet Address: eff@eff.org Coordination, production and shipping by Shari Steele, Director of Legal Services & Community Outreach (ssteele@eff.org) Reproduction of this publication in electronic media is encouraged. Signed articles do not necessarily represent the view of the EFF. 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