Re: [EFGA] WE won our court case!! (fwd)

["Robert A. Costner" <pooh@efga.org>]

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At 09:05 PM 6/20/97 -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
>Well, in some places, it's an expression of excitement, and it was intended
>as such here.  I guess some things don't translate well to ASCII,
>given that you seem to think I was picking on you?
>
>The Georgia law was a bad one, and needed overturning.
>I hadn't realized you were running EFGA on that small a scale, 
>so I'm even more impressed that you succeeded.

OK.  I misread your intentions.  It's just my first couple of postings on 
cyberpunks were not received well.  I finally attributed it to the apparent 
mistaken belief that EFGA was something more than smoke and mirrors.  Of 
course some of it is the fact that I am still learning about this stuff.

Remailers is a very appropriate mail group.  Our press release stated that 
with the law out of the way, we can now set up an anonymous remailer, which 
we have done.  (anon.efga.org)  EFGA has just won a censorship lawsuit, set 
up a PGP keyserver, started a remailer and nym server, and have a lot of 
things on our plate.  I almost long for the days when we sat around 
complaining how powerless we were.  Now that the people in charge are 
listening to us, I'm not sure we know the answers any longer.

The battle against this law was a difficult one.  At first we had the 
standing issue.  Since it was such a ridiculous law, and for various other 
reasons, we were told we would never get into court with it.  Though almost a 
year has passed since we filed the case, I was still wondering if the judge 
would throw this out as of yesterday.

When EFGA was first formed, we had public meetings at the local ACLU offices. 
 We had hoped they would mount a legal challenge to the law for us.  I don't 
have the exact numbers, but the local ACLU gets about 300 requests per month, 
and only is able to work on about three cases each month.  Ours just wasn't 
strong enough according to them.  Mitchell Kaye, one of the co-plaintiffs in 
the suit is an elected Georgia House of Representatives member who had spoken 
out against the law, so we invited him to a meeting at Denny's.

Mitchell did some checking and found an attorney who would talk to us.  We 
had a series of meetings, and became the first group to sign on as a 
plaintiff.  In fact, we incorporated just so we could become a plaintiff.  
Also, after Scott McClain of Bondurant, Mixson, and Elmore had done some pro 
bono work, we were able to take this back to the ACLU and get them involved.  
Later the national ACLU got involved, then the lawsuit finally got real.

We really had some good breaks along the way, but we put a lot of hard work 
into it as well.  If the ACLU hadn't been willing to take it on and 
underwrite the cost, we never would have gotten anything done.

Now we have taken on the task of pushing strong crypto and privacy on the 
State.  I've demo'ed PGP at various places and we have some gov't agencies 
thinking about using PGP as a cost savings business tool.  If we can't win 
the crypto debate in congress, will win by going in through the back door.


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  -- Robert Costner                  Phone: (770) 512-8746
     Electronic Frontiers Georgia    mailto:pooh@efga.org  
     http://www.efga.org/            run PGP 5.0 for my public key