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[Forwarded with permission. --Declan]
Date: Mon, 10 Nov 1997 11:53:02 -0500 From: Nina Crowley <crowleyn@ultranet.com> Subject: Senate hearing summary
Hi, This is really long but I think everyone should get a sense of the lynch mob mentality in last weeks Senate subcommittee hearing. ...the usual Congressional moves to shred the Constitution in the "name of
At 4:22 PM -0700 11/11/97, Declan McCullagh wrote: the children and everything that is decent." This is all part of the death of a thousand cuts the Constitution is undergoing, with new laws proposed faster by the subsidized vermin in Congress than civil rights and liberty-advocating groups can respond. Mandatory voluntary self-labelling, the CDA, the Swinestein ban on bomb-making information on the Net, mandatory voluntary television ratings, jawboning the cable industry, the suit against Paladin Press for a book, the key escrow proposals, the PICS voluntary mandatory standard, Save the Children, Donna Rice and her lap dancing compatriots, regulation of Internet commerce, and Protection of the Critical Information Infrastructure. (I assume you're all familiar with these examples, and more.) The death of a thousand cuts is that even if 900 or 980 of them are struck down, overturned, derailed, or bypassed, the remaining cuts kill. "Congress shall make no law..." doesn't mean "except if saves just _one_ child's life." "Congress shall make no law..." doesn't mean "unless FEMA and Office of Emergency Preparedness issue orders to the contrary." "Congress shall make no law..." doesn't mean "Congress can threaten the music industry with unconstitutional actions which will cost lots of money to fight unless the music industry voluntary self-regulates." "Congress shall make no law..." doesn't mean a thousand local jurisdictions get to ban books, censor CD lyrics, restrict birth control information, ban certain kinds of guns, or otherwise violate the U.S. Constitution (which all states agreed to adhere to as a condition of their admittance to the Union). A lot of us are getting really tired of fighting the same battles over and over again. It's time the Supreme Court said the same thing. Perhaps if they issued a clearcut rebuke Congress might get the message, something like: "Look, free speech means you guys can't censor music, or lyrics, or books, or hymnals, or just about anything else. And you can't use the threat of passing legislation which we'll be dutybound to strike down to "pressure" writers and publishers into accepting this Orwelllian notion of "mandatory voluntary" self-regulation. Get this through your heads. " I'm not holding my breath. Sometimes I hope for a terrorist nuke in downtown Washington. --Tim May The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^2,976,221 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."