Re: FC: Responses to Tim May's criticism of SAFE, and a rebuttal (fwd)

[Declan McCullagh <declan@vorlon.mit.edu>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 1 May 1997 19:43:07 -0400
From: Jonah Seiger <jseiger@cdt.org>
To: Charles Platt <cp@panix.com>, fight-censorship@vorlon.mit.edu
Cc: Charles Platt <cp@panix.com>
Subject: Re: FC: Responses to Tim May's criticism of SAFE, and a rebuttal

At 6:44 PM -0400 5/1/97, Charles Platt wrote:

>From: Jonah Seiger <jseiger@cdt.org>
>> Congress needs to stand up to the Administration and say, with a strong
>> voice, "your policy is a failure - we need a different solution".  That's
>> what SAFE, Pro-CODE, and ECPA II do.
>
>For some reason I have difficulty trusting Congress to protect my rights
>in this matter, or in any other matter. Those who seek help from
>government should recall Barry Goldwater's famous quote, which went
>something like this: "When you have a government big enough to give you
>everything you want, it's big enough to take it all away."

This is exactly the point.

The Administration continues to push for a government-designed global
key-recovery encryption policy that would, in the words of Grover Norquist
(head of the conservative Americans for Tax Reform and supporter of SAFE),
"force all Americans to go to bed at night with their doors unlocked and
their car keys in the ignition".

It's been 4 years of it - in various forms, the most recent being the first
serious proposal in history to impose DOMESTIC RESTRICTIONS on the ability
of American Citizens to protect their privacy on American soil.

The FBI, NSA, DOJ and the Clinton Administration want guaranteed law
enforcement access to private encryption keys.  That's what we are fighting
against.

All of us have been screaming (rightly) about Clipper and it's various
mutant offspring from the beginning. Congress has at last gotten the
message and is aggressively taking the lead -- 3 bills designed to relax
government regulation of encryption technologies and prohibit the
government from imposing key escrow or key recovery inside the US.

I too share your skepticism about trusting Congress to solve all our
problems.  They didn't give us much reason to when they passed the CDA. And
even in the best of circumstances, legislation is rarely "perfect". But in
this case I honestly believe the sponsors of SAFE (78) and Pro-CODE (21)
have got it basically right.

The administration clearly has it totally wrong.

We have a long way to go yet before this debate is over, and I suspect the
Administration has a few more tricks left up its sleve. We owe it to our
allies in Congress, and to the issues we say we believe in as participants
on this list, to give this our best effort.

Call that 'pragmatism' if you want.  We have never considered that to be a
derogatory term.

Jonah

--
Jonah Seiger, Communications Director                  (v) +1.202.637.9800
Center for Democracy and Technology                 pager: +1.202.859.2151
<jseiger@cdt.org>

http://www.cdt.org                                      PGP Key via finger
http://www.cdt.org/jseiger/

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