While I'm not too concerned about your present state of happiness, if you read the cited article, you may find that it is less off-topic than you thought. The quote was chosen as a "text-bite" that - while echoing sentiments familiar to many people on this list - is seldom heard from within the US administration. Magaziner's often been good for politically inopportune statements. To quote from an article in a Canadian business newspaper in late July: "Ira Magaziner, Clinton's international emissary on the issue of how governments should respond to the explosive growth of business on the Net, said any attempt to regulate its content would not only be a mistake, it would be futile." Let's wish him success in his current endeavours, ;-) -----Original Message----- From: Lyle Seaman <lws@transarc.com> Sent: Tuesday, October 07, 1997 3:35 PM To: James Bugden Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com Subject: Re: Four horsemen skew Internet This is an off-topic rant. Anyone who wants to make me happy will convince the NYT to investigate the following question: How did Magaziner get to be "Clinton's Top Internet Adviser"? Last I knew, he was the Clintons' "Top Health Care Adviser". That is, after he was Rick Miller's $1k/hr "Top Wang Labs Turnaround Adviser", 1 year before they declared bankruptcy. For a guy with such a string of successes, he seems to keep popping up someplace new. At 01:33 PM 10/7/97 -0500, jbugden@alis.com wrote:
Excerpted from the following NY Times article:
http://www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/100797encrypt.html
Clinton's Top Internet Adviser Says U.S. Encryption Policy Is Unformed
Magaziner took The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal to task for what he characterized as sensationalizing negative aspects of the Internet. An analysis of the newspapers' front-page coverage of the global computer network in the last year, he said, revealed that the four most popular words or phrases in such articles were "drug deal," "stalker," "bomb maker" and "pornography." Such coverage, he asserted, had led to a popular image of the Internet that was fundamentally skewed and that made arguing for market-driven solutions difficult.