========================================================================= ________________ _______________ _______________ /_______________/\ /_______________\ /\______________\ \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\/ ||||||||||||||||| / //////////////// \\\\\________/\ |||||________\ / /////______\ \\\\\\\\\\\\\/____ |||||||||||||| / ///////////// \\\\\___________/\ ||||| / //// \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\/ ||||| \//// ========================================================================= 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 <>. 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. <> 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)]] <> To complicate matters, all adult pornographic material <> [[is initially]] presumed to be nonobscene. <> Fort Wayne Books, Inc. v. Indiana, 489 U.S. 46, 62 (1989) <<.>> [[(requiring judicial determination of obscenity before taking publication out of circulation);]] <> 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 <> identified [[by the Supreme Court]] as justifying removing child pornography from the protection of the First Amendment is more urgent than the government <> [[interest]] which <> [[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 <> [[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, <> [[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]]. --------- 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 [.].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 San Francisco CA 94117 USA +1 415 668 7171 (voice) +1 415 668 7007 (fax) Membership & donations: membership@eff.org Legal services: ssteele@eff.org Hardcopy publications: pubs@eff.org General EFF, legal, policy or online resources queries: ask@eff.org Editor: Stanton McCandlish, Online Services Mgr./Activist/Archivist (mech@eff.org) This newsletter is printed on 100% recycled electrons. Reproduction of this publication in electronic media is encouraged. Signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of EFF. To reproduce signed articles individually, please contact the authors for their express permission. Press releases and EFF announcements may be reproduced individ- ually at will. To subscribe to EFFector via email, send message body of "subscribe effector-online" (without the "quotes") to listserv@eff.org, which will add you to a subscription list for EFFector. Back issues are available at: ftp.eff.org, /pub/EFF/Newsletters/EFFector/ gopher.eff.org, 1/EFF/Newsletters/EFFector http://www.eff.org/pub/EFF/Newsletters/EFFector/ To get the latest issue, send any message to effector-reflector@eff.org (or er@eff.org), and it will be mailed to you automagically. You can also get the file "current" from the EFFector directory at the above sites at any time for a copy of the current issue. HTML editions available at: http://www.eff.org/pub/EFF/Newsletters/EFFector/HTML/ at EFFweb. HTML editions of the current issue sometimes take a day or longer to prepare after issue of the ASCII text version. ------------------------------ End of EFFector Online v08 #17 Digest ************************************* $$ >> Steve Gilmore REBEL RIFFS - Makers of Mods for The 1990's! Internet: Sgilmore@Rebel.win-uk.net Compuserve: 100431,1102@compuserve.com BBS:Digital Sound Power, Anthem, Sound and Vision **** SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL BBS! ****