On Tue, Oct 24, 2000 at 07:04:02PM -0400, Declan McCullagh wrote:
Rush,
This is a useful analysis. Thank you. I was considering doing one myself.
Let me try to answer your question about how a Libertarian rep would rank. Our rankings were explictly designed to reward "hands-off" votes, so it's a reasonable assumption that one would score highly.
But small-l and large-L libertarians disagree among themselves on what the proper role of government should be on tech issues. Consider Ron Paul of Texas. He has been the Libertarian candidate for president and has reportedly never renounced his life membership in the party.
Yet he scored just 71 percent, or 5 of 7 votes. That's because he voted against banning states from taxing the Net (probably on federalism grounds), even though libertarian groups such as Cato and Pacific Research Institute liked that tax-ban. (His other negatively-scored vote was an electronic signature law.)
That vote on the Electronic Signature law could be considered a positive. It's a really lousy law. It's not a _Digital Signature_ law-- there's no crypto involved. Under this law, "clicking on a button" is explicitly considered a digital "signature". That is very easy to forge. This law opens up whole new vistas for identy theft and abuse. Maybe Paul has a clued-in person on his staff? -- Eric Murray http://www.lne.com/ericm ericm at lne.com PGP keyid:E03F65E5 Consulting Security Architect