At 09:13 PM 6/19/97 -0400, frissell@panix.com wrote:
Anyone mentally retarded enough to expect a congresscritter to protect one's rights deserves everything they get. "Advocacy groups" could have better spent their time litigating crypto and encouraging the use of strong crypto by themselves and their supporters.
While Duncan's mostly right about CONgresscritters, there's still a place for lobbying, as well as for litigation and coding. The EFF and other lobbying groups have bought us about 5 years, stalling bills like S.266 which would have banned most crypto, though they've also let through some things like Digital Telephony which aren't effectively implemented yet. Without the pro-freedom lobby groups, the anti-privacy groups have Freeh rein on the Hill, and can get away with labelling any privacy technology as such commie-child-porn-narcoterrorist-anti-motherhood-five-six-seven-horsemen EVIL that the average Congresscritter (who doesn't really care, and knows it) knows it's not safe to not to vote against it. Of course, there are even scarier Congresscritters (the ones who really _mean_well_), but even the heavily-compromising groups that get funded by big corporations to say things the corporations can't always say themselves have helped. Technology growth wins, gridlock is good, and delays in Congress are your friend. The 5 years they've bought us have been critical, letting us deploy more technology, and understand its limits better, as Moore's law has brought PCs into almost everyone's budget range, the Web has brought networking into 30 million Americans' homes (and WebTV and the like will reach even more couch potatoes), and the <&*&!#%> patents are running out. That Pentium 133 that you can get for the price of a fancy TV looks a lot like the Cray 1 without the air conditioner, runs faster than an IBM 370, and the 28.8 modem can carry almost as much data on your phone line as the expensive leased lines that the companies who used IBM 370s a decade ago connected them together with. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp # (If this is a mailing list or news, please Cc: me on replies. Thanks.)