as you say, Sun Tsu (from memory): select the battleground where you are strongest and the enemy is weakest. which is good advice. i recall Tzu also saying that you need to use the enemy's momentum to your advantage, the principle of judo if you will. in parallel, revolutionaries of many stripes have found that "heightening the contrast" is necessary if you mean for real change to occur. which brings me to ask, rhetorically i suspect, how we might heighten the contrast. i'd suggest delegating to some of us a support-the-bill effort complete with a detailed description of how the transmorgrified proposal that makes illegal all sorts of now ordinary acts. * you can't talk on the phone in a language the surveillance folk don't know (witness Compuserve's prohibition of Welsh on their otherwise monitored bulletin boards) * cryptographic door locks are now illegal without escrow (witness the SecurID-equipped door knob) * contracts that are transmitted over electronic means including facsimile must not be encrypted unless the keys are made available (witness the proliferation of safe fax machines) * no end-to-end encrypting cellular telephones may be used even if you are talking to someone in an otherwise hostile country (witness the formal industrial espionage of some countries) * passwords that map directly to encryption keys must therefore be escrowed (witness nearly everything but start with all the Kerberos derivatives including new NT stuff) * banks have to ensure that encrypted materials put into their safety deposit boxes are escrowed (sue somebody for the keys in their box naming the bank co-defendant for failure to escrow) * the attorney client privilege will not apply to my whispering my key to him/her, i.e., if i tell my attorney my key they are now my escrow agent even if it means violating the sanctity of the private conversation (witness i-don't-know-what but call Kevorkian to enlist him) * outlaw anonymous trading and the firms that provide it on the grounds that these represent encryption-of-names (witness the rules requiring such trading under some circumstances and the convention for others) in other words, shift the weight of who is radical to them. wrap ourselves in the flag deep within the big-government-sucks camp. march on the capital dressed as skin heads demanding the end of privacy for some sorrowful group or other. send the kind of letters that get you into trouble with the Secret Service but send them encrypted in Bill's private key (which you can issue him whether he likes it or not). mau-mau the flak catchers... --dan