---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 19:46:34 -0700 (PDT) From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> To: fight-censorship+@andrew.cmu.edu Subject: HotWired -- "Third Choice" for Netizens may be Libertarian Party HotWired: The Netizen http://www.hotwired.com/netizen/ "Third Choice" -- Campaign Dispatch by Declan McCullagh (declan@well.com) Washington, DC, 8 July The nervous sweat of US voters forced to choose between character-impaired Clinton and vision-impaired Dole may distill into fuel for the Libertarian Party. At the party's ragtag convention last week, Harry Browne began to make a case that the Libertarian Party isn't just for cyberheads and conspiracy theorists. [...] It was a refreshing departure from the highly scripted 1992 Democratic National Convention - more an exercise in infotainment than anything else - where party insiders worked quietly to block a loudmouth Jerry Brown from speaking unless he signed an agreement pledging fealty to Bill Clinton... Not so with the Libertarian convention, which netizens attended in force. Phil Zimmermann, author of Pretty Good Privacy, appeared at a privacy workshop on Saturday where delegates received PGP on floppies. On Thursday, Jim Ray, a cypherpunk and Libertarian delegate from Coral Gables, Florida, introduced a motion to strengthen the party's stance on encryption by condemning "government access to keys" - a mandatory backdoor for the Feds. "Or GAK, as we call it on Cypherpunks," Ray told the other delegates, who passed the revised crypto plank unanimously. [...] The so-called Year of the Net marches on, but the Libertarian Party now stands as the only serious political party with a commitment to defending the rights of netizens. ###