CDR: Re: Wired News tech scorecard for U.S. House of Representatives

[Eric Murray]

On Tue, Oct 24, 2000 at 07:04:02PM -0400, Declan McCullagh wrote:
> 
> Rush,
> 
> This is a useful analysis. Thank you. I was considering doing one myself.
> 
> Let me try to answer your question about how a Libertarian rep would rank.
> Our rankings were explictly designed to reward "hands-off" votes, so it's a 
> reasonable assumption that one would score highly.
> 
> But small-l and large-L libertarians disagree among themselves on what the 
> proper role of government should be on tech issues. Consider Ron Paul of 
> Texas. He has been the Libertarian candidate for president and has 
> reportedly never renounced his life membership in the party.
> 
> Yet he scored just 71 percent, or 5 of 7 votes. That's because he voted 
> against banning states from taxing the Net (probably on federalism 
> grounds), even though libertarian groups such as Cato and Pacific Research 
> Institute liked that tax-ban. (His other negatively-scored vote was an 
> electronic signature law.)


That vote on the Electronic Signature law could be considered a positive.
It's a really lousy law.  It's not a _Digital Signature_ law-- 
there's no crypto involved.  Under this law, "clicking on a button"
is explicitly considered a digital "signature".  
That is very easy to forge.  This law opens up whole new vistas for
identy theft and abuse.   Maybe Paul has a clued-in person on his staff?

-- 
  Eric Murray http://www.lne.com/ericm  ericm at lne.com  PGP keyid:E03F65E5
                     Consulting Security Architect