At 9AM on December 6 in San Francisco, the 9th District Court of Appeals will finally hear the appeal of my original FOIA case against NSA. At 10AM on December 6 in San Jose, Roger Schlafly's case against RSA Data Security will hold a hearing on the validity of the Diffie-Hellman, Hellman-Merkle, RSA, and Schnorr patents. Mark your calendar! My hearing is the first (and probably only) oral arguments to the Court of Appeals. The overall issue is whether NSA is violating the law by deliberately taking six months to three years to handle ordinary FOIA requests. (And what can/will the courts do about it.) The specific issue that we appealed on is whether the lower-court judge in the case has the discretion to throw out a case in which the government is violating the law, without addressing the problem. The legal theory is that since the courts are peoples' only recourse when the government violates its own laws, the court system can't simply ignore the problem. This would mean that the people have NO recourse against a despotic government (except armed or nonviolent rebellion, which is a terrible solution). There are lots of other ramifications, since NSA has built up a formidible wall of nit-picky procedural defenses. Since the judges will steer the oral hearing, I don't know whether they'll focus on the big issue or the gritty details. I'll work on getting some of the briefs online. This case (CA No. 94-16165) is NOT at the Federal Building; the Court of Appeals is at 121 Spear Street (2 Rincon Center), 4th Floor, Courtroom 2, 9AM. I think Rincon Center is the old Post Office at Mission and Spear Streets. Spear is "0th Street", downtown between the Bay and 1st Street. It probably won't be as much fun as the Bernstein hearings. But if we win (here and in a few other hearings), it could pry NSA open to public accountability. And this would go a long way toward making some real progress in the crypto policy debate. We might actually get to see the other side's concerns! If you come, wear a "good clothes" costume. If I wasn't going to be at my own hearing, I'd be at Roger's. He has sued RSA and PKP in the hope of overturning their patents, which they have been wielding like a club over anyone trying to make progress in public-key cryptography. (RSA's idea of reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing is "How much money do you have?"). Though some companies have disputed RSA's patents, nobody has ever made a court determine whether the patents are really valid. Roger aims to fill that gap. You may even get to see Jim Bidzos ooze through the courtroom. In an earlier hearing in the Schlafly case, Jim claimed that Roger had insufficient honesty and character because he had held a joint talk with *me* at Crypto '94 about our respective lawsuits. Jim described me to the court as an avowed destroyer of intellectual property rights, and strongly implied that I had unlawfully revealed their valuable RC4 trade secret. It ain't so, on any level, and if he says something like it again, I want lots of witnesses. 10AM, San Jose federal court, Judge Williams' courtroom. I hope Roger will post more details, access info for the legal documents in the case, and directions to the building. John Gilmore