Stevens Miller wrote:
I simply had to pass this article along to c'punks...
I'm a computer programmer and attorney who is a member of the Committee on Technology and the Practice of Law, a task force assembled by the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. Last Friday we held a conference on "Lawyers and the Internet." Approximately 200 lawyers attended.
Speaking in favor of the Clipper proposal was Stuart Baker of the NSA.
(Stuart said:)
- The debate over the Clipper proposal is "really just a culture clash among net-heads."
- Those opposing the proposal are late-coming counter-culturists, "who couldn't go to Woodstock because they had to do their trig homework."
- Opponents envision themselves as would-be "cybernauts in bandoliers and pocket-protectors."
He has concluded that the members of that community are so beneath
his respect that it is more appropriate to make fun of them tha..
users of networks "are teenaged boys with inept social skills."
That because the popular image of the bookworm can be juxtaposed against that of Rambo in a funny way, bookworms don't have to be taken seriously.
That if you play with computers as a youngster, your community, your parents and your own brain can't save you. That the government must protect you from your own ineptitude, whether you want its help or not.
What a great letter! And what a sorry and inaccurate statement this Stuart Baker has made regarding the Net. Not only is it not peopled solely by "teenage boys with inept social skills"- the National Information Highway is gearing up to be in every home, school, hospital, etc in America. By trying to pin the anti- Clipper campaign against a group of young renegade computer hackers, Baker is trying to reduce the credibility of the arguement against Clipper as a serious threat to our rights by showing that only a few, marginalized "punk" kids are opposing this issue. The NSA is launching a smear campaign, obviously, to discredit those in opposition to its grand scheme of being able to listen to every supposedly private phone and data transmission in America. By marginalizing the opposition in this way, the NSA hopes to gain the trust and backing of the mainstream, who have bought the Image of the Net as some kind of haven for computer hackers. We obviously need to respond to this sort of tactic with some P.R. work of our own. By utilizing some of the analogies which the average person can understand, we can try to combat this serious threat to our right to privacy. Perhaps we need to make a concerted effort to get more articles published in mainstream magazines regarding this issue. I am currently completing a piece on computer surveillance and privacy issues- perhaps this summer I can put something together for the mainstream media. I am sure that plenty of you all can write- we should make sure the word gets out to the masses reagrding the true nature of the Net and regarding the Clipper isssue in particular, now that we know what tactic the NSA is going to take. Ciao for now, Julie "I am not a teenaged boy" :) __________________________________________________________________________ Julie M. Albright Ph.D Student Department of Sociology University of Southern California albright@usc.edu