---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 15 May 1997 10:59:23 -0400 From: Barry Steinhardt <barrys@aclu.org> To: "Shabbir J. Safdar" <shabbir@vtw.org>, Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> Cc: fight-censorship@vorlon.mit.edu Subject: Re: SAFE vote and cutting crypto-deals, report from House Judiciary Declan and Shabbir, I thought it might be helpful to your dialouge to give you the ACLU's current views about SAFE. The language significantly limiting the criminalization provision was indeed drafted by EPIC and the ACLU. Don Haines and Dave Sobel did a great The language was an improvement , but it doesn't belong in the bill and we are still lobbying to have the criminalization provision removed. All of us in the cyber liberties community need to watch this legislation very carefully. It could easily get much worse as a "compromise" is reached with the Administration. In the end,the bill could be laden with amendments on issues like key recovery that defeat our purpose of making strong and secure encryption generally available. At some point, we may need to say that no bill is better than a bad bill. At 10:32 AM 5/15/97 -0400, Shabbir J. Safdar wrote:

At 7:26 AM -0700 5/15/97, Declan McCullagh wrote:

...

Shabbir,

You're mistaken. I'm not "slighting their work" -- I called it a "solid improvement."

Yeah, I know who shopped this around. I spoke with David and Don about this last week, and didn't write about it then for fear of jeopardizing their negotiations.

Then why didn't you give them credit for it in the story? They should be lauded for writing this amendment which is a solid improvement. EPIC and ACLU did great work, and deserve more credit in your story than you gave them.

-S

---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------ Barry Steinhardt Barrys@aclu.org Associate Director 212 944-9800 ext 614 (v) American Civil Liberties Union 212 354-5290 (fax) 132 West 43 Street NYC 10036 **** PGP Key available at: http://www.aclu.org/about/pgpkeys.html **** Visit the ACLU Web Site http://www.aclu.org ACLU can be found on AOL at Keyword ACLU ACLU Supports the Global Internet Liberty Campaign (GILC) http://www.gilc.org