At 06:03 PM 3/28/96 -0500, Declan B. McCullagh wrote:
At CFP today, we heard about a new crypto bill being introduced tomorrow, which will be similar to Leahy's bill with the crypto-being-used-in-furtherance-of-crime portion removed and an explicit no-government-mandated-escrow provision added.
While this does sound like progress, I'm suspicious. Peter Junger's analysis raised serious doubt as to the ability of bill to open up the crypto export market as it purported to. And where, exactly, did this these changes come from? Who was consulted? What recommendations were NOT taken?
We have put our "List of Shame" numbers on our nametags. -Declan
You're overdoing it on this "List of Shame" thing. You don't know who actually made those anonymous postings, and it's been observed that those names seem to correspond nicely with an NSA-hate list. It would not take a great deal of imagination to conclude that the NSA was motivated to de-focus our anger at the Leahy bill and replace it with a great deal of back-stabbing commentary. (If that was the intent, it succeeded...) On the other hand, I've also noticed that there hasn't been a lot of specific analysis of the Leahy bill in the last few weeks, and my suggestion that the Leahy bill be informally re-written to address Junger's objections (as well as my own, and Tim May's, etc) has not resulted in a great deal of repair work. Now, miraculously, a replacement bill appears that includes SOME repairs. (obviously, we have to wait to hear how most of it comes out...) I get the impression that we are being sequentially offered ice cream cones with decreasing amounts of poison in them, in the hopes that at some point we'll bite. It seems to me that whoever is writing these bills should be willing to make a statement about what his goals are, and who he's talking to as he crafts them, and what changes he was UNwilling to include. Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com