At 09:18 PM 3/20/96 -0500, owner-cypherpunks@toad.com wrote:
Since someone other than Jim Bell and THE LIST OF SHAME author thought I was being serious, I thought it wise to respond.
For the record, I couldn't tell whether you were serious or not. (most other people seem to have assumed that you were serious...) Nevertheless, I replied, because I was afraid there were other people who were anxious to not take good advice merely because they didn't like the source. If anything, I would say the other notes you received make it clear that my concern was justified.
The notion that a measure of criticism from a known enemy, Dorothy Denning, corrects the many problems with Leahy's legislation is absurd.
True. But it was apparently received without negative comment by a number of people who would also have "proudly" put their name on this nameless character's "list of shame." For one, I don't really appreciate the pillorying of some of the names on that list, either, but there are a number of facts which bother me about this whole Leahy bill incident: 1. The bill seems to be without fingerprints on it. Nobody (other than Leahy, of course) has claimed that he had input into it. Denning's recent comment at least implies that either she had no input, or was strongly dissatisfied at the eventual bill. (Despite this, there are plenty of "legitimate needs of law enforcement" clauses in that bill, and it is not conceivable that she wouldn't have been consulted if the author of the bill had any sympathy for the anti-encryption side.) Likewise, nobody on "our side" has made the fact of their input known, whether or not that input did any good. The question, therefore, is "Who knew what and when?" Who was consulted? What were their objections? What objections weren't satisfied? Since the bill at least superficially addresses some of our concerns, SOMEBODY must have told Leahy what we want. Who? 2. I haven't seen any analysis of this bill other than Peter Junger's, even and especially from some people and organizations that originally came out in favor of it. If anything, those people would be expected to be defending their positions, but they've not backed up that early support with anything close to a believable position. (Most are silent.) The implication is that they had no such early analysis done, and came out in favor of the bill anyway. Worse, they aren't correcting their position based on the more detailed study that has been done subsequently. 3. Because she's a negative barometer, Denning knows that a positive review by her would be as close as she could do to give the "kiss of death" to this bill. Her putative opposition is, therefore, far more interesting to us. If anything, it gives us a marvelous opportunity to ensure the death of a bad bill. I'm waiting for somebody to explain to me why we can't simply re-write the Leahy bill, take out all the bad parts and put a number of new protections in, and send it back to Leahy and condition our support on that edited bill. If Leahy really thinks he's doing a favor for the pro-encryption people, he'll support the corrected bill wholeheartedly. If, on the other hand, it's all just a fraud, there's no hope, and in that case it's better than no bill be passed than one that contains a few booby-traps that will explode shortly after the bill is passed. As far as I can see, time is on our side. Industry will continue to insist on free export of encryption, and there will be few in Congress to oppose it. We already have the 1st amendment which SHOULD defend encryption, unless that protection is implicitly weakened by allowing a precent for the control of encryption. In other words, we're going to win in a year or so regardless of this Leahy bill, so we can afford to be hard-nosed with our support or lack of it. Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com