=========================================================================== VTW BillWatch #41 VTW BillWatch: A weekly newsletter tracking US Federal legislation affecting civil liberties. BillWatch is published at the end of every week as long as Congress is in session. (Congress is in session) BillWatch is produced and published by the Voters Telecommunications Watch (vtw@vtw.org) (We're not the EFF :-) Issue #41, Date: Wed Apr 3 12:41:46 EST 1996 Do not remove this banner. See distribution instructions at the end. ___________________________________________________________________________ TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction from the Editor (Steven Cherry) A tragic story about a wiretap (Shabbir J. Safdar) Subscription Information and donation policy (unchanged 2/18/96) ___________________________________________________________________________ INTRODUCTION FROM THE EDITOR by Steven Cherry, VTW Board (Wayne, NJ) COMPUTERS, FREEDOM AND PRIVACY CONFERENCE 1996 VTW travelled to snow-free Boston last week for the Sixth Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy. CFP's original intent was to get members of law enforcement, hackers, educators, and activists all under one roof to trade points of view and discuss them rationally. As wonderful as net and other remote communication is, when people meet face-to-face it is much harder to demonize them. Six years later, CFP still meets that need. A new sort of player came to CFP this year though, the Politician. First Sen. Conrad Burns of Montana joined the conference via an audio link to announce his upcoming crypto bill. VTW will have pointers and an analysis of the bill once it is available. But wait, there's more. In an announcement of great long-term significance, the next day Rep. Rick White of Washington State visited the conference, also by audio, to announce the formation of a bipartisan and bicameral Congressional Internet Caucus. The Caucus pledged to educate themselves and other members of Congress about the Internet and related technologies, and to "Open up Congress so that our constituents can have more information from, and more access to, their elected representatives." Check out the Caucus home page at: http://www.house.gov/white/internet_caucus/netcauc.html PIONEER AWARDS Nonetheless, the finest moments of the Conference came during the Friday reception, when VTW scored two of the four Pioneer awards. The Pioneer awards are bestowed by the EFF for exceptional service to the on-line world. Alongside such icons of the net as Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet and the founder of telecomm manufacturer 3Com, and Peter Neuman, of SRI International and founder of the RISKS forum, stood VTW Board Member Matt Blaze and Board Member and co-founder Shabbir Safdar. Matt was recognized for a multitude of achievements in the area of cryptography, not least of which was his discovery of a class of security failures in key escrow systems, including the infamous Clipper Chip. Shabbir's award was an even greater source of pride to our organization as it was for the founding of VTW itself. Coupled with his being named one of Newsweek's 50 People to Watch On-line in 1996, we see clear recognition of the fact that grass roots activism has come of age on-line. WHISTLESTOP 96 ON AOL TO BEGIN APRIL 8TH We would be remiss if we didn't call attention to what would otherwise be the big announcement of the week. VTW has agreed to be part of America Online's new Roadside initiative. We will be hosting a weekly chat forum, dubbed "Whistlestop 96," to be held Monday nights. We will feature Congressional candidates as often as we can, to allow direct on-line contact we, the governed, and those who would have us choose them to govern. While we love and respect the media, they don't seem to do a very good job every two or four years in setting the candidates before the electorate. Let's cut them out of the process a bit. We will also feature fellow activists, political analysts, and anyone else who can sort things out for us. We'll have a separate announcement on vtw-announce with more details. In the meantime, AOLers should look for information locally, or just check in on Roadside at 9 P.M. EST. By the way, while the real-time activity will be limited to AOL, complete transcripts will be available at http://www.vtw.org/whistlestop96/. This issue can be found in HTML form at URL:http://www.vtw.org/billwatch/issue.41.html ___________________________________________________________________________ A TRAGIC STORY ABOUT A WIRETAP by Shabbir J. Safdar, VTW Board (New York, NY) This week most of VTW's staff attended the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference in Cambridge Massachusetts. I go to the conference every year to recharge my batteries, put names to faces, and enjoy the synergy that can only come with face-to-face dialogue. This year the debate over encryption seemed focused on three panels, the only novel one being a panel which was a "moot court". Presided over by five real Federal judges, attorneys for plaintiffs and the government argued over the Constitutionality of a mock law that would require escrowing of encryption keys. Aside from this, the conference added no new material to the encryption debate. One valuable experience happened on the way home, however. I picked up the New York Times and came across a story in the New York Times Magazine about a corrupt New Orleans police chief, and how he reacted to a woman who filed a police brutality complaint against him. The story goes this way: the FBI was wiretapping a number of New Orleans police officers who were allegedly guarding a 286 pound shipment of cocaine. During that time the FBI overheard a conversation between the police chief and several other police officials that the FBI alleges was a murder plot. The intended victim had previously filed a police brutality complaint against the chief. Although the FBI had the conversation in hand, they were unable to decode the police chief's "street slang and police jargon" in time to prevent the murder. The woman who filed the complaint, a 32 year old mother of three, was shot while standing in front of her house. It's easy to be angry about this incident. One could (and should) be angry with the murderers and their conspirators. However out of this comes two important observations on the encryption policy debate. One, while wiretaps have probably been effective in other cases, they were not effective in this one. While we can grant law enforcement the benefit of the doubt in other cases, the existence of this one shows that a wiretap is not the "silver bullet" of law enforcement that we have been led to believe. Another observation that can be made is that this parallels the key escrow debate very closely. No reasonable person is objecting to the FBI's right to conduct a wiretap. However what is being debated is the extent to which individuals and law enforcement can go to accomplish their duties. The Clinton Administration is striving for a world where everyone is forced to speak in a form of encryption that is easily decoded by law enforcement. The public and industry is striving for a world where they continue to have private conversations. The situational parallel to this would be if the Administration had pushed a law that requires everyone to speak on the telephone in plain English, without slang and without any double meanings. This is the equivalent of key escrow. However, would this have really saved the person so tragically killed above? Unlikely. Individuals involved in criminal conspiracies will continue to use whatever means at their disposal to obscure their activities from the police. The corrupt police chief who allegedly ordered the murder would have still used slang and code, regardless of any laws banning such use. He was allegedly conspiring to committ a murder, why should he care? Such laws will, however, affect law abiding citizen's attempts to gain privacy. Law-abiding citizens that may be speaking to their doctors, attorneys, loved-ones, or business partners will continue to be targets of industrial espionage, private investigators, and, in a few cases, trusted individuals abusing that trust. This example from the New York Times Magazine (3/31/96, p.32) shows that while we can certainly give a little to law enforcement on their arguments about the effectiveness of wiretaps, they need to give a little in the other direction on the practicality of forcing people to speak in a law-enforcement-understandable code. Obviously, criminals don't care about such rules. Since that is the case, is it really worth handicapping all technology, and exposing individuals to privacy intrusions when such measures won't even be effective at attaining their stated goals? ___________________________________________________________________________ SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION AND DONATION POLICY We do not accept donations at this time; money creates a dependence upon money. If you want to help, you are much more valuable as someone who reads our announcements-only list and contacts their legislators whenever it is important. Please do not offer us money. You can receive BillWatch via email, gopher or WWW: To subscribe via email, send mail to majordomo@vtw.org with "subscribe vtw-announce" in the body of the message. To unsubscribe from BillWatch send mail to majordomo@vtw.org with "unsubscribe vtw-announce" in the body of the message. Send mail to files@vtw.org to learn how to receive back issues of BillWatch. BillWatch can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.vtw.org/billwatch/ and in Gopherspace at: gopher -p1/vtw/billwatch/ gopher.panix.com ___________________________________________________________________________ Copyright 1994-1996 Voters Telecommunications Watch. Permission is granted to copy and distribute this document for non-commercial purposes only, provided that the above banner and this copyright notice appear in all copies. For other uses, see our Copyright Policy at http://www.vtw.org/copyright.html ___________________________________________________________________________ End VTW BillWatch Issue #41, Date: Wed Apr 3 12:41:46 EST 1996 ___________________________________________________________________________ =========================================================================== VTW BillWatch #42 VTW BillWatch: A weekly newsletter tracking US Federal legislation affecting civil liberties. BillWatch is published about every week as long as Congress is in session. (Congress is back in session) BillWatch is produced and published by the Voters Telecommunications Watch (vtw@vtw.org) (We're not the EFF :-) Issue #42, Date: Mon Apr 15 17:38:22 EDT 1996 Do not remove this banner. See distribution instructions at the end. ___________________________________________________________________________ TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction from the Editor (Steven Cherry) Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) to chat live 4/22/96 (Shabbir J. Safdar) Subscription Information and donation policy (unchanged 2/18/96) ___________________________________________________________________________ INTRODUCTION FROM THE EDITOR by Steven Cherry, VTW Board (Wayne, NJ) US WORKERS STOLE DATA ON 11,000, AGENCY SAYS That was the New York Times headline (Saturday, April 6, 1996, p.6). The agency was the Social Security Agency and the data were social security numbers and mother's maiden names. (When you check your balance, transfer funds, or, most crucially, activate a new or renewal card, you generally provide either or both of these items. The SSA employees were confederates of other thieves who did the actual stealing of these new and replacement cards from mailboxes.) "If you are a clerk making $12,000 or $18,000 a year, and someone offers you a few hundred to a few thousand dollars every so often to look up some specific information, it's a tempting offer," the story quotes a security expert as saying. It's hard not to think of the underpaid clerks in the U.S. Justice and Treasury Departments who would be holding escrowed keys under the now-dead Clipper proposals. Eleven *thousand* social security records. Can there be any question that corporations and individuals who employ key escrow need to be able to choose their escrow agents, and that we must not compel anyone to escrow keys if they prefer not to? This issue can be found in HTML form at URL:http://www.vtw.org/billwatch/issue.42.html ___________________________________________________________________________ REP. JERROLD NADLER (D-NY) TO CHAT LIVE 4/22/96 by Shabbir J. Safdar, VTW Board (Brooklyn, New York) Tonight (4/15) at 9pm EST on American OnLine, VTW continues its Whistlestop 96 series of politically-oriented chats. If you are an AOL member, you simply need to logon and type the keyword "roadside" to join. We'll be discussing the lawsuit in which dozens of organizations and thousands of Americans are suing the Federal government. Next week at 10pm EST (4/22/96), we'll host Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), the first member of Congress to appear in WhistleStop 96, a series of electronic town hall meetings, established in a partnership between Voters Telecommunications Watch and Roadside USA, the member-run community center just launched this month on AOL. Through WhistleStop 96, AOL members will be able to meet and speak directly with national candidates for political office and current office holders. The chat will take place in America OnLine's auditorium. You can get there by typing the keyword "auditoriums" and then joining the News Room auditorium. There should also be an icon from the welcome screen to point you there. If you aren't currently an AOL member, you can obtain the software by either a) finding one of those pervasive free floppy disks, or b) by using ftp to get it from ftp.aol.com (ftp://www.aol.com/aol_win/SETUP.EXE). Note that you will have to join AOL participate in this chat. If you are not an AOL member, don't fret. You can still read transcripts from these chats. The first transcript (4/8/96) can be found at http://www.vtw.org/archive/960415_155845 ___________________________________________________________________________ SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION AND DONATION POLICY We do not accept donations at this time; money creates a dependence upon money. If you want to help, you are much more valuable as someone who reads our announcements-only list and contacts their legislators whenever it is important. Please do not offer us money. You can receive BillWatch via email, gopher or WWW: To subscribe via email, send mail to majordomo@vtw.org with "subscribe vtw-announce" in the body of the message. To unsubscribe from BillWatch send mail to majordomo@vtw.org with "unsubscribe vtw-announce" in the body of the message. Send mail to files@vtw.org to learn how to receive back issues of BillWatch. BillWatch can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.vtw.org/billwatch/ and in Gopherspace at: gopher -p1/vtw/billwatch/ gopher.panix.com ___________________________________________________________________________ Copyright 1994-1996 Voters Telecommunications Watch. Permission is granted to copy and distribute this document for non-commercial purposes only, provided that the above banner and this copyright notice appear in all copies. For other uses, see our Copyright Policy at http://www.vtw.org/copyright.html ___________________________________________________________________________ End VTW BillWatch Issue #42, Date: Mon Apr 15 17:38:22 EDT 1996 ___________________________________________________________________________ =========================================================================== VTW BillWatch #43 VTW BillWatch: A weekly newsletter tracking US Federal legislation affecting civil liberties. BillWatch is published about every week as long as Congress is in session. (Congress is back in session) BillWatch is produced and published by the Voters Telecommunications Watch (vtw@vtw.org) (We're not the EFF :-) Issue #43, Date: Mon Apr 22 10:42:03 EDT 1996 Do not remove this banner. See distribution instructions at the end. ___________________________________________________________________________ TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction from the Editor (Shabbir J. Safdar) Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) to chat live 4/22/96 (Shabbir J. Safdar) Subscription Information and donation policy (unchanged 2/18/96) ___________________________________________________________________________ INTRODUCTION FROM THE EDITOR by Shabbir J. Safdar, VTW Board (Wayne, NJ) ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT Things are relatively peaceful this week, with Congress and the civil liberties community doing most of its net-policy work behind the scenes. We anticipate some big announcements this week, both from us and the Hill, and therefore this is a thin BillWatch. I cannot stress enough though, that you should take a moment and endeavor to join VTW on AOL tonight for Whistlestop96, our online political chat series. Tonight's guest is Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), the only member of the House to have turned his pages black during the Black Page Protest and a legislator who brings impeccable free speech credentials to the Internet censorship debate. Visit AOL's auditorium tonight and chat live! This issue can be found in HTML form at URL:http://www.vtw.org/billwatch/issue.43.html ___________________________________________________________________________ REP. JERROLD NADLER (D-NY) TO CHAT LIVE 4/22/96 by Shabbir J. Safdar, VTW Board (Brooklyn, New York) Tonight at 10pm EST (4/22/96), we'll host Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), the first member of Congress to appear in WhistleStop 96, a series of electronic town hall meetings, established in a partnership between Voters Telecommunications Watch and Roadside USA, the member-run community center just launched this month on AOL. Through WhistleStop 96, AOL members will be able to meet and speak directly with national candidates for political office and current office holders. The chat will take place in America OnLine's auditorium. You can get there by typing the keyword "auditoriums" and then joining the News Room auditorium. There should also be an icon from the welcome screen to point you there. If you aren't currently an AOL member, you can obtain the software by either a) finding one of those pervasive free floppy disks, or b) by using ftp to get it from ftp.aol.com (ftp://www.aol.com/) Note that you will have to join AOL participate in this chat. ___________________________________________________________________________ SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION AND DONATION POLICY We do not accept donations at this time; money creates a dependence upon money. If you want to help, you are much more valuable as someone who reads our announcements-only list and contacts their legislators whenever it is important. Please do not offer us money. You can receive BillWatch via email, gopher or WWW: To subscribe via email, send mail to majordomo@vtw.org with "subscribe vtw-announce" in the body of the message. To unsubscribe from BillWatch send mail to majordomo@vtw.org with "unsubscribe vtw-announce" in the body of the message. Send mail to files@vtw.org to learn how to receive back issues of BillWatch. BillWatch can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.vtw.org/billwatch/ and in Gopherspace at: gopher -p1/vtw/billwatch/ gopher.panix.com ___________________________________________________________________________ Copyright 1994-1996 Voters Telecommunications Watch. Permission is granted to copy and distribute this document for non-commercial purposes only, provided that the above banner and this copyright notice appear in all copies. For other uses, see our Copyright Policy at http://www.vtw.org/copyright.html ___________________________________________________________________________ End VTW BillWatch Issue #43, Date: Mon Apr 22 10:42:03 EDT 1996 ___________________________________________________________________________ This file provided by: Voters Telecommunications Watch *** Watching out for your civil liberties *** Email: vtw@vtw.org (preferred) Gopher: gopher -p1/vtw gopher.panix.com URL: http://www.vtw.org/ Telephone: (718) 596-2851 (last resort) Copyright 1994-1996 (commercial use without permission prohibited) =========================================================================== þ