EFFector Online Volume 08 No. 02

• EFF Sues to Overturn Cryptography Restrictions
• EFF Opposes Scientology Censorship and Attacks on System Operators
• Jefferson Ascendant: Information Technology & Decentralization
• Newsbytes
• Calendar of Events
• What YOU Can Do

Subject: EFF Sues to Overturn Cryptography Restrictions

In a move aimed at expanding the growth and spread of privacy and security technologies, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is sponsoring a federal lawsuit filed today seeking to bar the government from restricting publication of cryptographic documents and software. EFF argues that the export-control laws, both on their face and as applied to users of cryptographic materials, are unconstitutional.

Cryptography, defined as "the science and study of secret writing," concerns the ways in which communications and data can be encoded to prevent disclosure of their contents through eavesdropping or message interception. Although the science of cryptography is very old, the desktop-computer revolution has made it possible for cryptographic techniques to become widely used and accessible to nonexperts.

EFF believes that cryptography is central to the preservation of privacy and security in an increasingly computerized and networked world. Many of the privacy and security violations alleged in the Kevin Mitnick case, such as the theft of credit card numbers, the reading of other people's electronic mail, and the hijacking of other people's computer accounts, could have been prevented by widespread deployment of this technology. The U.S. government has opposed such deployment, fearing that its citizens will be private and secure from the government as well as from other vandals.

The plaintiff in the suit is a graduate student in the Department of Mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley named Daniel J. Bernstein. Bernstein developed an encryption equation, or algorithm, and wishes to publish the algorithm, a mathematical paper that describes and explains the algorithm, and a computer program that runs the algorithm. Bernstein also wishes to discuss these items at mathematical conferences and other open, public meetings.

The problem is that the government currently treats cryptographic software as if it were a physical weapon and highly regulates its dissemination. Any individual or company who wants to export such software -- or to publish on the Internet any "technical data" such as papers describing encryption software or algorithms -- must first obtain a license from the State Department. Under the terms of this license, each recipient of the licensed software or information must be tracked and reported to the government. Penalties can be pretty stiff -- ten years in jail, a million dollar criminal fine, plus civil fines. This legal scheme effectively prevents individuals from engaging in otherwise legal communications about encryption.

The lawsuit challenges the export-control scheme as an ``impermissible prior restraint on speech, in violation of the First Amendment.'' Software and its associated documentation, the plaintiff contends, are published, not manufactured; they are Constitutionally protected works of human-to-human communication, like a movie, a book, or a telephone conversation. These communications cannot be suppressed by the government except under very narrow conditions -- conditions that are not met by the vague and overbroad export-control laws. In denying people the right to publish such information freely, these laws, regulations, and procedures unconstitutionally abridge the right to speak, to publish, to associate with others, and to engage in academic inquiry and study. They also have the effect of restricting the availability of a means for individuals to protect their privacy, which is also a Constitutionally protected interest.

More specifically, the current export control process:

• allows bureaucrats to restrict publication without ever going to court;
• provides too few procedural safeguards for First Amendment rights;
• requires publishers to register with the government, creating in effect a "licensed press";
• disallows general publication by requiring recipients to be individually identified;
• is sufficiently vague that ordinary people cannot know what conduct is allowed and what conduct is prohibited;
• is overbroad because it prohibits conduct that is clearly protected (such as speaking to foreigners within the United States);
• is applied overbroadly, by prohibiting export of software that contains no cryptography, on the theory that cryptography could be added to it later;
• egregiously violates the First Amendment by prohibiting private speech on cryptography because the government wishes its own opinions on cryptography to guide the public instead; and
• exceeds the authority granted by Congress in the export control laws in many ways, as well as exceeding the authority granted by the Constitution.

Lead attorney on the case is Cindy Cohn, of McGlashan and Sarrail in San Mateo, CA, who is offering her services pro-bono. Major assistance has been provided by Shari Steele, EFF staff; John Gilmore, EFF Board; and Lee Tien, counsel to John Gilmore. EFF is organizing and supporting the case and paying the expenses.

Civil Action No. C95-0582-MHP was filed today in Federal District Court for the Northern District of California. EFF anticipates that the case will take several years to win. If the past is any guide, the government will use every trick and every procedural delaying tactic available to avoid having a court look at the real issues. Nevertheless, EFF remains firmly committed to this long term project. We are confident that, once a court examines the issues on the merits, the government will be shown to be violating the Constitution, and that its attempts to restrict both freedom of speech and privacy will be shown to have no place in an open society.

Full text of the lawsuit and other paperwork filed in the case is available from the EFF's online archives. The exhibits which contain cryptographic information are not available online, because making them publicly available on the Internet could be considered an illegal export until the law is struck down. The non-cryptographic exhibits and other documents including the complaint, as well as a series of letters between Bernstein and various government people regarding crypto export are available at:

http://www.eff.org/pub/EFF/Policy/Crypto/ITAR_export/Bernstein_case/
ftp.eff.org, /pub/EFF/Policy/Crypto/ITAR_export/Bernstein_case/
gopher.eff.org, 1/EFF/Policy/Crypto/ITAR_export/Bernstein_case

For further reading, we suggest:

• The Government's Classification of Private Ideas: Hearings Before a Subcomm. of the House Comm. on Government Operations, 96th Cong., 2d Sess. (1980)
• John Harmon, Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel, Department of Justice, Memorandum to Dr. Frank Press, Science Advisor to the President, Re: Constitutionality Under the First Amendment of ITAR Restrictions on Public Cryptography (May 11, 1978). [Included in the above Hearings; also online as http://www.eff.org/pub/EFF/Policy/Crypto/ITAR_export/ITAR_FOIA/itar_hr_govop_hearing.transcript].
• Alexander, Preserving High-Tech Secrets: National Security Controls on University Research and Teaching, 15 Law & Policy in Int'l Business 173 (1983)
• Cheh, Government Control of Private Ideas-Striking a Balance Between Scientific Freedom and National Security, 23 Jurimetrics J. 1 (1982)
• Funk, National Security Controls on the Dissemination of Privately Generated Scientific Information, 30 U.C.L.A. L. Rev. 405 (1982)
• Pierce, Public Cryptography, Arms Export Controls, and the First Amendment: A Need for Legislation, 17 Cornell Int'l L. J. 197 (1984)
• Rindskopf and Brown, Jr., Scientific and Technological Information and the Exigencies of Our Period, 26 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 909 (1985)
• Ramirez, The Balance of Interests Between National Security Controls and First Amendment Interests in Academic Freedom, 13 J. Coll. & U. Law 179 (1986)
• Shinn, The First Amendment and the Export Laws: Free Speech on Scientific and Technical Matters, 58 Geo. W. L. Rev. 368 (1990)
• Neuborne and Shapiro, The Nylon Curtain: America's National Border and the Free Flow of Ideas, 26 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 719 (1985)
• Greenstein, National Security Controls on Scientific Information, 23 Jurimetrics J. 50 (1982)
• Sullivan and Bader, The Application of Export Control Laws to Scientific Research at Universities, 9 J. Coll. & U. Law 451 (1982)
• Wilson, National Security Control of Technological Information, 25 Jurimetrics J. 109 (1985)
• Kahn, The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing. New York: Macmillan (1967) [Great background on cryptography and its history.]
• Relyea, Silencing Science: national security controls and scientific communication, Congressional Research Service. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corp. (1994)
• John Gilmore, Crypto Export Control Archives, online at http://www.cygnus.com/~gnu/export.html

ftp.eff.org, /pub/EFF/Policy/Crypto/ITAR_export/
gopher.eff.org, 1/EFF/Policy/Crypto/ITAR_export
http://www.eff.org/pub/EFF/Policy/Crypto/ITAR_export/

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EFF Opposes Scientology Censorship and Attacks on System Operators

An Open Letter to the Church of Scientology (CoS) and the Net from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

EFF has also received a letter from CoS stating that it would not use the threat of lawsuits against sysadmins if there were any other way to deal with allegedly wrongful messages.

EFF believes there is a better way to deal with allegations of wrongful messages -- and that using the threat of litigation to shut down entire newsgroups, or to persuade sysadmins who have not originated any allegedly wrongful messages to shut down newsgroups, is itself highly inappropriate.

Electronic communications are in their infancy, and most of the providers are not big corporations with substantial funds to spend on expensive litigation, but rather small operators who cannot afford protracted litigation, even if they are in the right. The mere threat of a lawsuit could result in some sysadmins refusing to carry all sorts of contentious newsgroups simply because they could not afford to put on a case to show that they should not be held responsible for another party's alleged wrong.

Rather than attempting through threats of lawsuits to induce innocent sysadmins to censor speech, Church members are encouraged to participate in Usenet discussions to make their views known and refute erroneous posts -- in other words, to answer allegedly wrongful postings with more speech. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis articulated in 1927: "If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and the fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence." If CoS claims that a copyright violation or other wrong not remediable by speech has been perpetrated by a particular person, then it should confine its legal threats to that person -- not direct them at an innocent sysadmin who did no more than forward a message, and certainly not at the innocent participants of a newsgroup seeking to exchange views through the newsgroup channel. Even if CoS cannot determine the identity of the person perpetrating an alleged wrong against it, that provides no excuse for cutting off the free flow of information over the net.

Events like these show us how important it is to search for new paradigms for handling disputes that arise from time to time. We think the better way to handle this dispute would be to submit the claims and counterclaims to arbitration or mediation, perhaps in a proceeding conducted over the net among the parties to the newsgroup discussion. EFF offers its services to help find an appropriate mediator or arbitrator who would be available online for this purpose. Any party to this dispute that refused to participate in such a forum would, of course, have to explain why it had done so if a case were brought in a more traditional court.

Meanwhile, we urge CoS to leave the innocent sysadmins out of their fight. We urge CoS not to take actions designed to cut off the free flow of information through the net. Where there are legitimate disputes about particular messages or the wrongful actions of particular individuals, those can and should be addressed -- perhaps most efficiently through the new communications medium itself.

[end]

* Since this letter was written, CoS obtained a search warrant and raided the home of Dennis Erlich, a former CoS minister, whom CoS accuses of copyright violations. Erlich believes his rights to have been violated in several ways (e.g. CoS allegedly damaged his computer equipment and deleted files in the course of the raid). CoS also obtained restraining orders against not only Erlich but also Erlich's Internet access provider, BBS sysop Tom Klemesrud, and Klemesrud's own service provider, Netcom.

EFF sought and found pro-bono legal representation for Klemesrud, and is still seeking counsel for Erlich.

CoS has filed a lawsuit against Erlich and both service providers, seeking damages compensation of $120,000 per infringement.

In a Feb. 21 hearing, Klemesrud and Netcom were successful in having restraining orders against them lifted.

In a related incident, CoS was able to convince the Finnish authorities to present anonymous remailer operator Johan (Julf) Helsingius with a search warrant that allowed them to force Helsingius, who operates one of the most used privacy-protecing mail servers in the world, anon.penet.fi, to reveal the identity of a remailer user, also accused of copyright violation by CoS.

Documents from the legal cases referred to above are archived at :

ftp.eff.org, /pub/EFF/Legal/Cases/CoS_v_the_Net/
gopher.eff.org, 1/EFF/Legal/Cases/CoS_v_the_Net
http://www.eff.org/pub/EFF/Legal/Cases/CoS_v_the_Net/

Klemesud, who called the raid on Erlich "a stunning affront on First Amendment rights by a vile and dangerous cult masquerading as a religion", presentated a declaration at his hearing, which states, among other things:

Because of the nature of the bulletin board system and its method of operation, it is impossible for me to prevent any one from accessing the bulletin board under an assumed name...Thus I have no way of preventing Dennis Erlich, whom I know to be a subscriber to my system and a frequent user of the bulletin board, from logging under an assume name, from changing the assumed name every three weeks, etc. Not only is it physically impossible for me to do it, the technology simply does not permit it...

The daily data throughput in and out of the BBS is rather staggering...I would have to read 2,926 pages of material [every day] just from my Fidonet feed alone, to check for any L. Ron Hubbard copyrighted material assuming that I knew how to spot what is copyrighted by L. Ron Hubbard. [Counting Internet and Usenet messages -] Total printed pages of text in a 20 hour period: 36,138 Printed pages... I do not and for physical and technical reasons cannot monitor message traffic on the BBS for content.... Helena Kobrin, one of the attorney's for the plaintiffs... [said] she would not and could not provide me proof of copyright infringement, and demanded that I censor Rev. Erlich by cutting off his ability to access my BBS and post text messages there, and through my BBS, to the Internet community...This I refuse to do.

...I welcome the comments of Scientologists and non- Scientologists, and have and will continue to take every step humanly possible to protect the access of all citizens interested in this topic to my bulletin board and the opinions expressed there...

In my opinion the "Information Superhighway" cannot be built without the active participation of small BBS's ...[through which] the Internet can flourish as a tool of low or no cost citizen participation in democracy, education and information gathering. Requiring me to censor all the traffic that crosses my wires, and the wires of other small BBS operators, is a physically impossible task, and results in the shutting off of the BBS as a net access tool. Sysops like me will be simply unable to put in the non- remunerative hours, nor will they have either the insurance, or the deep pockets, to stand up to libel, copyright infringement or trade secret litigation as to which they bear no real blame or fault except for the fact that the offending message crossed the BBS wires in a nanosecond of time on the message's travel through cyberspace.

...In my opinion a real time monitoring requirement will kill every small BBS in the world...Then you'd have censorship - nothing more than a bunch of editors selecting suitable "letters to the editor" with no freedom for everyone to express themselves. This would be perfect for the Scient- ologists, as it would permit them to continue what often appears to me to be a mis-information campaign, designed to disguise from the public the true character of Scientology while allowing them to threaten to sue...if the editors did not see things their way. The result would be the elimination, or at least the chilling, of criticism of the Scientology, or any other group.

...If I am ordered to prevent Dennis Erlich from posting messages on my BBS, or if I am forced to monitor his or any other persons text messages or files for content, I will be forced to turn the power off the system, denying service to all 4,000 users, and suspend service to all 911 news groups, in order to honor the injunction. I cannot monitor the text of 15,000 to 30,000 messages, or the myriad of files, that come across the 12 lines of my system each day on a real time basis.

Erlich has noted that the raid on his home was not conducted with a US marshal present, as is the usual procedure, and challenges the legality of the seizure on several grounds, including possibly authorized alterations in pen to the writ of seizure. Erlich's declaration to Judge Whyte stated:

At 7:30, on the morning of February 13, 1995...[e]scorted by the Glendale Police Officer Steve Eggett..., six unidentified individuals entered my home and told me that I would have to cooperate with a search and seizure directed by your honor. They presented me with a stack of legal documents about six inches thick to prove their right to do so. I protested the legality of the raid, and was told in no uncertain terms, that if I resist, force would be used against me. I was not permitted to have an attorney present before they proceeded...

None of the remaining people would show me identification, despite my asking repeatedly.

I was left for the rest of the six hour search and seizure, with an in-house attorney for the scientology cult (Small), a private investigator working for the cult (Robert Shovlin), 2 armed, off-duty officers working for the scientology lawyer (Off. Mark Fronterotta and Sgt. Ed Eccles) and another dozen or so scientologists ransacking my property, including the plaintiff, Warren McShane. The scientologists went through my computer, all my papers, every closet, every drawer. They busted open a door to my garage and, I assume, searched my car. They also photographed every nook and cranny of my house.

I believe that they deliberately mislead you in obtaining the writ. They then misused your authority by executing it in such a way as to invade every bit of my privacy they had not previously stolen from me.

During the search, the files on my hard drive were deleted and the entirety of the data on my disk was copied onto two 250 mb Colorado back-up tapes the scientologists brought with them into my house. Also, after their raid, I was missing a key to my house, my current bank statement and a tape with several of my copyrighted songs recorded on it...

After several hours the press arrived and began recording the scene. At first the scientology agents said that the press was not allowed in. I invited them in anyway and the scientologists fell back and seemed to try to finish up and get out of my house more quickly. When they were ready to depart, neither they (the scientologists), nor the other Glendale Policeman, Sgt. MiKillop, whom I had summoned at the end of the raid to protect my rights, would permit me to inventory or even look at the hundreds of disks and files they had copied and were removing from my possession. I begged the officer not to allow the material and files to be taken without my examining the poorly inventoried items.

After they had departed, two of my computers would no longer boot properly. They had left me with no current back-up of the material they illegally deleted. I no longer have the material to use in my own defense, or to restore my disk to full operation.

In the course of carrying out your Writ of Seizure, the plaintiff and their paid agents deleted and copied from my computers the evidence I need to adequately defend myself against the barratrous assault on my freedom of speech and religion which they themselves have launched.

I am somehow sure that this is not what you had intended.

...Because of the obvious bad faith displayed by the plaintiff in both the manner in which the order was obtained and how it was carried out, I request that your honor lift the temporary restraining order against me, order the forfeiture of the bond and dismiss this case immediately.

A federal judge in San Jose confirmed and extended a temporary restraining order on Glendale, California resident Dennis Erlich, prohibiting him from illegal posting of copyrighted and trade secret religious materials to the Internet computer system.

The Church is seeking a preliminary injunction against Erlich which forbids him from making further unlawful postings of religious materials onto the Internet until the time of trial, violations of which will place him in contempt of court.

A means of control should exist whereby access operators and their organizations are held responsible for what is posted on the Internet.

The laws of the land apply to those who use the Internet. This valuable resource should be used for free discussion and information exchange, and not to violate the rights of others ...The Internet is too valuable a resource for us to allow criminality to flourish on it. Individuals like Erlich cannot be allowed to violate the law and threaten the freedom of all lawful net users.

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Jefferson Ascendant: Information Technology & Decentralization

When Newt Gingrich's House of Representatives recently set up its first outpost on the Internet, it chose to name it "Thomas" in honor of Mr. Jefferson -- a small but telling symbol of the ascendancy of the "Jeffersonian vision" not only in the realm of politics, but in the realm of high technology as well.

Jefferson and Hamilton remain the two great pole stars in American politics, their feud surely the longest-running in American political history. The two men staked out opposing positions and battled over most of the great issues on which the fate of the infant Republic was seen to depend -- states' rights versus a strong national authority, agriculture versus manufacturing, legislative power versus executive power, free trade versus mercantilism, yeomanry versus the elite. Their intellectual descendants continue to do battle to this day.

To be sure, theirs was a debate about means, not ends: both men were deeply committed to the republican ideal, to the legitimacy of only those governments grounded upon the consent of the governed, and to the primacy of individual liberty in the constellation of natural rights. But they held fundamentally different views about the nature and the proper exercise of governmental power and the manner in which governmental power could best be brought to bear so as to secure that liberty.

For Jefferson, power was always a corrupting force, and concentrations of power were always to be avoided lest the Republic founder:

"What has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government which has ever existed under the sun? The generalizing and concentrating all cares and powers into one body, no matter whether of the autocrats of Russia or France, or of the aristocrats of a Venetian Senate."

To Hamilton, this was all anarchy and riot, a "dance to the tune of liberty without law," put forth by "never to be satiated lovers of innovation and change." Power tends to corrupt, to be sure; but "the possibility of abuse is no argument against the thing," and "too little power is as dangerous as too much."

"History is full of examples, where in contests for liberty, a jealousy of power has either defeated the attempts to recover or preserve it in the first instance, or has afterwards subverted it by clogging government with too great precautions for its felicity, or by leaving too wide a door for sedition and popular licentiousness. In a government framed for durable liberty, not less regard must be paid to giving the magistrate a proper degree of authority, to make and execute the laws with rigor, than to guarding against encroachments upon the rights of the community. As too much power leads to despotism, too little leads to anarchy, and both eventually to the ruin of the people..."

It is hardly surprising that Jefferson has been adopted as the patron saint of the new Republican congressional majority, which invokes his spirit at every turn, but it might come as something of a shock to Jefferson himself, the great defender of the agrarian way of life, that his vision has taken root in the new technological wonderland of "cyberspace."

The decentralizing effect of information technology is one of the truly startling developments of the late 20th century. As Peter Huber observes in his book "Orwell's Revenge," Orwell got all the details right in 1984 but erred with the fundamental premise: that technology would inevitably concentrate power in the hands of the few and lead to an expansion of mechanisms of centralized, totalitarian control. Circumstances surrounding the downfall of the Soviet Union alerted us all to the alternative possibility that the widespread availability of everything from telephones, fax machines, and CNN broadcasts might make it more, not less, difficult for the State to maintain its control over information and the levers of centralized control.

And the emergence of the global Internet further illustrates, and will accelerate, this trend. On the Internet there is no centralized control of any kind, no governing authority that can impose its own vision of the good on the colonists of the new territory. Information roams freely, literally at the speed of light; because no one owns or operates this network, which anyone with a computer and access to a telephone line can hook into, no one has the power to set uniform rules of conduct.

Washington is only now discovering just how difficult imposition of its rules on a decentralized network can be. The federal government's ill-fated "Clipper Chip" initiative is symptomatic. Concerned about the possibility that powerful encryption software would fall into the hands of terrorists or other malfeasants, allowing them to shield their communication from governmental eavesdroppers, the federal government proposed a requirement that all encryption software had to use a government-approved algorithm that would allow back-door law-enforcement entry. They were persuaded to withdraw the proposal by the outcry from the Internet community itself, and from businesses hoping to serve a growing international market, and, finally, by a recognition of the futility of trying to legislate in the usual heavy-handed fashion when thousands, and possibly hundreds of thousands, of copies of the offending programs have been distributed (and continue to be available) over the Internet.

And if, as many have suggested, cyberspace metaphorically resembles the Wild West -- a place where the inhabitants set (and enforce) their own rules in the face of an inefficacious central government -- well, we have a good idea how the Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians among us are likely to react, inasmuch as their two forebears already squared off on the question of settlement of the non-metaphorical Wild West, i.e. on expansion into the "Western" territories (of Kentucky, Ohio, etc.).

For his part, Hamilton despaired of the central government's ability to maintain control over settlements in the western territories:

"The western region [is] not valuable to the United States for settlement... Should our own citizens, more enterprising than wise [!], become desirous of settling this country, and emigrate thither, it must not only be attended with all the injuries of a too widely dispersed population, but by adding to the great weight of the western part of our territory, must hasten the dismemberment of a large portion of our country, or a dissolution of the Government."

Jefferson, on the other hand, foresaw a flourishing "empire of liberty" on the western frontier, a place where the "utmost diffusion of power" could take root and where "new sources of renovation" would serve as a safety valve against the despotic tendencies of the national government, renewing the spirit of liberty "should its principles, at any time, degenerate in those portions of our country which gave them birth."

Surely, were Hamilton to log on today, he would indeed find the anarchy and "public licentiousness" he railed so frequently against -- a cacophonous international debate with a million voices on everything from copyright policy to scientology to the best ways to play Doom II, an unregulated and largely unregulatable collection of everything from the Federalist Papers to video clips of people having sex with animals. But the millions who continue to flock there are finding something that looks more like a place where Jefferson's fundamental democratic value -- "free communication among the people, which has ever been justly deemed the only effectual guardian of every other right" -- reigns without interference. The sage of Monticello, one suspects, is smiling broadly.

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Newsbytes

The bill would "restrict freedom of expression in order to protect the health and decency of the population, whatever that may mean," says activist and journalist Sigmundur Halldorsson, who also notes that the bill is being proposed during a time of Parliamentary elections, and threatens to slip through unnoticed among the many other issues on the table and in the media.

See the What YOU Can Do section of this newsletter for more details on this action alert.

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Subject: Calendar of Events

If you know of an event of some sort that should be listed here, please send info about it to Stanton McCandlish <mech@eff.org>

The latest full version of this calendar, which includes material for later in the year as well as the next couple of months, is avialable from:

ftp.eff.org, /pub/EFF/calendar.eff
gopher.eff.org, 1/EFF, calendar.eff
http://www.eff.org/pub/EFF/calendar.eff

Feb. 20-
Mar. 16 - Online Seminar Series: the Law of Electronic Commerce; conducted
          on CompuServe by the Nat'l. Computer Security Assoc. Host:
          Benjamin Wright esq. (Note: most sessions are geared toward
          management, finance and commercial transactions).
          Contact: 1 800 488 4595 (voice, US-only), +1 717 258 1816 (voice)
          Email: 75300.2557@compuserve.com

Feb. 23-
     25 - The Alliance for Public Technology Annual Conference:
          Technologies of Freedom. Washington, DC
          Contact: +1 202 408 1403 (voice/TTY), +1 202 408 1134 (fax)
          Email: Ruth Holder <holder@apt.org>

Feb. 24 - New Mexico Regional Technology Business Summit, Sweeny Conv. Ctr.,
          Santa Fe, NM. Sponsored by the New Mexico Technology Consortium,
          "this day-long event is geared toward those in both large and
          small companies active in high-tech industries."
          Contact: +1 505 983 6767
          Email: nmtc@lanl.gov

Feb. 27-
Mar. 2  - ATM Year Three: The Definitive Conference on the Technology,
          Applications and Business Issues of Asynchronous Transfer Mode
          (ATM); San Jose, Calif.
          Contact: 1 800 200 4884 (voice, US-only)

Feb. 28-
Mar. 2  - NEPCON'95, "the trade show for anyone involved in electronics
          packaging, testing, assembly, design, and CAD/CAM...pick from
          over 114 seminars".  Anaheim, Calif.
          WWW: http://www.nyweb.com/nepcon

Mar. 1  - Proposal deadline for Virtual Futures '95 (see May 26 below).

Mar. 2-
     5  - National STS Meeting & Technological Literacy Conf., Arlington,
          Virginia.
          Contact: +1 814 865 3044 (voice), +1 814 865 3047 (fax)
          Email: ejb2@psu.edu

Mar. 3-
     4  - Midwest Conference on Technology, Employment and Community,
          sponsored by the UIC Center for Urban Economic Development
          Deadline for proposals: Jan. 8, 1995
          Contact: +1 312 996 5463
          Email: jdav@mcs.com
          Conf. mailing list for discussion: listserv@uic, message body:
                "SUBSCRIBE JOB-TECH <firstname> <lastname>" (w/o "quotes")

Mar. 5-
     8  - '95 PC Forum (incl. Local-Global Creative Tension conf.), Phoenix
          Arizona.
          Contact: +1 212 924 8800 (voice), +1 212 924 0240 (fax)
          Email: daphne@edventure.com

Mar. 13-
     15 - Microcomputers in Education Conference. Arizona State University;
          Tempe, Arizona. "An opportunity to explore recent advances and hear
          about emerging technology in the educational arena."
          Contact: Pat Southwick, A.S.U., Box 870908, Tempe AZ USA 85287-0908

Mar. 14 - "Towards an Electronic Patient Record" conference, Orlando, 
Florida.
          Sponsored by the Medical Records Inst.
          Contact: +1 617 964 3926 (fax only)

Mar. 15 - Deadline for proposals, ICI'95 (see Sep. 21 for conf. details.)
          Contact: +1 800 301 MIND (voice, US-only), +1 202 962 9494 (voice)
                   +1 800 304 MIND (fax, US-only), +1 202 962 9495 (fax)
          Email: Dr. Dorothy Denning <denning@cs.georgetown.edu>

Mar. 17 - Access, Privacy, and Commercialism: When States Gather Personal
          Information; College of Wm. & Mary, Williamsburg VA.
          Contact: Trotter Hardy, +1 804 221 3826
          Email: thardy@mail.wm.edu

Mar. 27 * John Perry Barlow (EFF co-founder) seminar on "Cyberspace: the New
          Frontier",  4pm local time, NCB Auditorium, 71 Science Park Dr.,
          Singapore 0512
          Contact: Marvin Tay Eng Sin <marv@iti.gov.sg>

Mar. 27-
     30 - Geographic Information Systems '95, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
          Contact: +1 604 688 0188 (voice), +1 604 688 1573 (fax)
          Email: gis@unixg.ubc.ca

Mar. 28-
     31 * 5th Conference on Computers, Freedom & Privacy (CFP95), Burlingame
          /Palo Alto, Calif.  Sponsored by the Assoc. of Computing Machinery
          Featured speakers include EFF's Esther Dyson & Mike Godwin, plus
          Roger Wilkins of George Mason U., John Morgridge of Cisco Sytems,
          Margaret Jane Radin of Stanford, Willis Ware of of NAE, IEEE &
          AAAS, Phil Agre of UCSD, Stuart Baker ex- of NSA, David Banisar
          of EPIC, Chris Casey of Sen. Kennedy's office, Michael Froomkin
          of U. Miami, Phil Karn of Qualcomm, Jamie Love of TAP, Brock
          Meeks of _Inter@ctive_Week_ and _Cyberwire_Dispatch_, Lance Rose
          author of _SysLaw_, Dick Sclove of Loka Inst., Brad Templeton of
          ClariNet, Ross Stapleton-Gray of TeleDiplomacy, Glenn Tenney of
          Fantasia Systems, Kim Taylor-Thompson of Stanford U., Alan Westin
          of Columbia U., Mitch Ratcliffe of _Digital_Media_, Matt Blaze
          of AT&T Bell Labs, Kent Walker Asst. US Atty. of the Dept. of
          Justice, David Smith of EFF-Austin, Christine Harbs of Privacy
          Rights Clearinghouse, Peter Harter of NPTN, Barbara Simons of the
          US ACM, Roger Clark of Australian Nat'l. U., and many others.
          Contact: Carey Heckman, +1 415 725 7788, fax: +1 415 725 1861,
          Email: info.cfp95@forsythe.stanford.edu
          WWW: http://www-techlaw.stanford.edu/CFP95.html
          Gopher: www-techlaw.stanford.edu, "CFP95" menu item
          FTP: www-techlaw.standord.edu, /CFP95

Mar. 29-
     30 - ETHICOMP95 - Int'l. Conf. on the Ethical Issues of Using 
          Information Technology; DeMontfort U., Leicester UK.
          Contact: Simon Rogerson, +44 533 577475, +44 533 541891 (fax)
          Email: srog@dmu.ac.uk

Apr. 5-
     7  - National Net '95 (Net'95), Loews L'Enfant Plaza Hotel, Washington
          DC; sponsored by Educom, ALA, ARL, CAUSE, CNI, CSN, CRA, CREN,
          FARNET, ISoc, NASULGC.  Featured speakers: Ron Brown (US Sec'y.
          of Commerce), Richard McCormick (US West), Molly Broad (CSU),
          Larry Irving (NTIA), Andrew Blau (Benton Found.), Steve Cisler
          (Apple), Marty Tennebaum (EIT/CommerceNet), Peter Lyman, Marc
          Rotenberg (EPIC/PI), + others incl. "public interest
          representatives". Sessions on the underprivileged & the NII,
          net surveillance, network challenges for business, int. property.
          Contact: Elizabeth Bernhart, +1 202 872 4200 (voice),
                   +1 202 872 4318 (fax)
          Email: net95@educom.edu

Apr. 10-
     14   3rd Int'l. WWW Conference: Technology, Tools & Applications;
          Darmstadt, Germany.  Organized by Fraunhofer Inst. for Computer
          Graphics.  Feb. 15 submission deadline (for posters & demos as
          well as papers.
          Email: www95@igd.fhg.de (?), www95_webmasters@igd.fhg.de
          WWW: http://www.igd.fhg.de/www95.html

Apr. 26-
     29 - USAIN: Cultivating New Ground in Electronic Information Use of the
          Information Highway to Support Agriculture; Lexington, Kentucky.
          Proposals due by 12/31/94.
          Email: librgrf@gaes.griffin.peachnet.edu

Apr. 27-
     29 - CCUMC (Consortium of College and University Media Centers). Utah
          State U., Logan, Utah
          Contact: +1 515 294 1811 (voice)

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Subject: What YOU Can Do

Icelandic censorship threat
Activists in Iceland are seeking international online community response
in opposition to the threat to gut the intellectual freedoms guaranteed in
the Icelandic constitution.

Please help to revoke the dangerous sections by showing that the 
electronic community cares about the freedom of expression in what ever 
form it may take.

Show your feelings by sending a message where you politely state that the
second half of section 73 of the amended Icelandic constitution should be 
removed in order to promote the free and unrestricted flow of ideas vital 
to any democratic society.

E-Mail to:

bjorn@centrum.is (the chairman of the Parliamentary 
Committee on Foreign
Affairs, and supporter of change), and to dba@althing.is (the Office of 
Parliament.  Please Put: ATTN: Geir H. Haarde, the Chairman of the 
Constitutional Reform Committee before your message).

Please act now as the new constitution will be voted on before the end of
February!  There has still not been set a date for debate, but it will be 
soon.

For more information, contact:
Sigmundur Halldorsson           Radio Journalist
E-mail:simmi@centrum.is         Icelandic Broadcasting Service - Channel 2
Tel:Int+354-5693040             Efstaleiti 1
Fax:Int+354-5693678             Reykjavik, Iceland

S314

This bill could pass in a matter of WEEKS, or be added to any 
legislation pending on the Senate floor.  Business/industry persons
concerned should alert their corporate govt. affairs office and/or
legal counsel.  Everyone should write to their own Senators and ask them 
to oppose this bill.  Explain, quickly and clearly, why this bill is
dangerous, and urge efforts to stop this legislation or revise it to fix 
its numerous problems.  S314 is Sen. Exon's "Communications Decency Act".

HR830
This bill would horribly cripple the Freedom of Information Act,
one of the most important laws protecting citizen access to government 
information.  Again, alert your business contacts, and write, phone, and 
fax your Representatives asking them to remove the West Publishing 
special interest language in this bill.

How to Find Your Congressfolks
EFF has lists of the Senate and House with contact information, as well as
lists of Congressional committees. These lists are available at:

ftp.eff.org, /pub/EFF/Issues/Activism/Congress_cmtes/

gopher.eff.org, 1/EFF/Issues/Activism/Congress_cmtes

http://www.eff.org/pub/EFF/Issues/Activism/Congress_cmtes/

The full Senate and House lists are senate.list and hr.list, respectively.


"If five years from now we [the FBI] solve the access problem, but
what we're hearing is all encrypted, I'll probably, if I'm still here, be
talking about that in a very different way: the objective is the same.
The objective is for us to get those conversations whether they're by an
alligator clip or ones and zeros.  Whoever they are, whatever they are, I
need them."
  - FBI Director Louis Freeh, clarifying statements that the FBI may seek
    legislation to ban strong encryption, in an Oct. 1994 interview with
    Steven Levy.

Ensuring the democratic potential of the technologies of computer-mediated
communication requires active participation in the political processes that
shape our destinies.  Government agencies, legislatures and heads of state
are accustomed to making decisions about the future of technology, media,
education, and public access to information, with far-reaching and
long-lasting effects on citizens and their lives, but are accustomed to
doing so with little input or opposition from anyone but the largest of
corporations, and other government representatives.

Now, more than ever, EFF is working to make sure that you can play an
active role in making these choices. Our members are making themselves heard
on the whole range of issues. EFF collected over 5000 letters of support
for Rep. Maria Cantwell's bill to liberalize restrictions on cryptography. 
We also gathered over 1400 letters supporting Sen. Leahy's open hearings on
the proposed Clipper encryption scheme, which were held in May 1994.  And
EFF collected over 90% of the public comments that were submitted to NIST
regarding whether or not Clipper should be made a federal standard. 
Additionally, EFF has worked for the passage of legislation that would
ensure open access to the information infrastructure of today and tomorrow,
and continues to provide some of the best online resources on privacy,
intellectual freedom, the legalities of networking, and public access to
government representatives and information.

You *know* privacy, freedom of speech and ability to make your voice heard
in government are important. You have probably participated in our online
campaigns and forums.  Have you become a member of EFF yet?  The best way to
protect your online rights is to be fully informed and to make your
opinions heard.  EFF members are informed and are making a difference.  Join
EFF today!

For EFF membership info, send queries to membership@eff.org, or send any
message to info@eff.org for basic EFF info, and a membership form.
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Administrivia

EFFector Online is published by:


The Electronic Frontier Foundation

1667 K St. NW, Suite 801

Washington DC 20006-1605 USA

+1 202 861 7700 (voice)

+1 202 861 1258 (fax)

+1 202 861 1223 (BBS - 16.8k ZyXEL)

+1 202 861 1224 (BBS - 14.4k V.32bis)

Membership & donations:
membership@eff.org

Legal services: ssteele@eff.org

Hardcopy publications: pubs@eff.org

General EFF, legal, policy or online resources queries:
ask@eff.org


Editor: Stanton McCandlish, Online Services Mgr./Activist/Archivist
(mech@eff.org)

This newsletter printed on 100% recycled electrons.

Reproduction of this publication in electronic media is encouraged.  Signed
articles do not necessarily represent the views of EFF.  To reproduce
signed articles individually, please contact the authors for their express
permission. Press releases and EFF announcements may be reproduced individ-
ually at will.

To subscribe to EFFector via email, send message body of "subscribe
effector-online" (without the "quotes") to
listserv@eff.org,
which will add you to a subscription list for EFFector.

Back issues are available at:



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/pub/EFF$

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1/EFF/$

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To get the latest issue, send any message to
effector-reflector@eff.org
(or er@eff.org), and it will be mailed to
you automagically.  You can also get the file "current" from the EFFector
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HTML editions available at:


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