Folks, I'm not going to exhort you to fight this latest travesty, to send angry letters to your senators and representatives. Every couple of months there's been a new legislative attack on what were once basic American freedoms. (Sorry to focus on America. I'm sure you folks in the liberty-loving paradises of, say, Germany, are gloating over our hand-wringing.) We're losing the war. We can send in donations to the NRA and EFF, offer our support to the ACLU and EPIC, but the tide just keeps rolling in, washing away our efforts. The full-time lawmakers in D.C. can proliferate new repressive laws much faster than we can fight them. Our focus on this list has been on crypto, and crypto is finally coming under the massive assault we knew would come from the earliest rumblings several years ago about "key escrow." Clipper was the warning shot, the current "War on the Internet" (fed by scare stories and hysteria) is part of the propaganda war, and now this bipartisan bill to expand the RICO Act to include any non-GAK implementation of crypto is the nail in the coffin. No wonder Stu Baker and Ron Lee were so smug at the last CFP. Ordinary lobbying is probably a lost cause. The EFF tried to "work with" the government (Administration, Congress) on the Digital Telephony Bill, and got rolled (in the opinion of many, even in the governing circles of EFF). This latest assault is probably unstoppable. The co-sponsorship by Sen. Leahy, once seen as an ally of the EFF (recall the attempts to get the Leahy alternative to Exon adopted), and the enthusiastic support of Republicans, Democrats, and the intelligence community means that GAK is coming. Oh, and the use of RICO and "conspiracy" in such a central way fulfills Whit Diffie's prediction of a few years ago that the main way crypto will be controlled is through such laws, by spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt amongst users and corporations. Make the corporations so paranoid that they'll crack down on employees, adopt GAK methods, and freeze out the "street corner user" of crypto. (If the only users of PGP and other non-GAK tools are fringe groups and underground communities, then the main goals will have been achieved. The public use of PGP will have been squelched, the public use of anonymous cash will have been suppressed, and the social control goals will have been achieved. ) I think it's time to abandon all lobbying efforts...they don't appear to be working, and the government is proliferating new laws faster than we can fight them. The only hope is to more rapidly deploy crypto, to reach the "point of no return." Optimistically, we may already be there (the views expressed by many of us). Pessimistically, the application of RICO laws and civil forfeiture could put any of us who advocate crypto use and evasion of the new laws into a precarious position. This is enough to say for now. Suffice it to say I view the latest Grassley proposed legislation to be the culmination of the past several years worth of anti-liberty legislation. A much bigger threat than Clipper. In fact, it's what many of us saw implicit in Clipper. --Tim May .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@sensemedia.net | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-728-0152 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Corralitos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."