EFFector Vol. 11, No. 12 Sep. 16, 1998
editor@eff.org
A Publication of the Electronic Frontier Foundation ISSN 1062-9424
IN THE 140th ISSUE OF EFFECTOR:
* ALERT: House Hearing on CDA II: Contact Legislators ASAP!
+ ACTION
+ MESSAGES
+ COMMITTEE CONTACT INFO
+ SUMMARY
* ALERT: Letters to Senators on database and WIPO bills needed now
+ ACTION
+ MESSAGES
+ SENATOR CONTACT INFO
+ SUMMARY
* Minor Changes to US Crypto Policy Miss the Real Issue: Privacy
* Other Headlines at http://www.eff.org
* Administrivia
See http://www.eff.org for more information on EFF activities &
alerts!
_________________________________________________________________
ALERT: House Hearing on CDA II: Contact Legislators ASAP!
Electronic Frontier Foundation Alert, Sept. 16, 1998 (partially
expires Sept. 17, 1998; please do not redistribute after Oct. 1, 1998;
check Web site for update.)
(This is an unfortunately short-notice alert; sometimes Congress acts
rapidly and with little warning.)
ACTION:
Please IMMEDIATELY call and fax the House Commerce Committee (contact
info below), and urge the members of the Telecommunications
Subcommittee to REJECT the Internet censorship bill known as the
"Child Online Protection Act" (a.k.a. "CDA II"), H.R. 3783.
Next visit the alert page of the Blue Ribbon Campaign for Online Free
Speech:
http://www.eff.org/br
and follow the instructions to contact your own legislators to oppose
this and related legislation (you can send your legislators a free fax
via the Web!)
___________________________________
MESSAGES:
When contacting the Committee, if you wish to elaborate on why the
Subcommittee should reject this bill, here are some basic talking
points:
1. This legislation contains most of the unconstitutional flaws of
the original CDA.
2. Though the sponsors of this bill claim it is intended to address
only commercial pornographers intentionally targeting minors, the
actual language of the bill is vague and overbroad, and will sweep
in much more than explicit for-profit visual materials. The bill
will censor a wide variety of legitimate, protected expression,
for adults as well as children.
3. Congress's own posting of the Starr report would likely violate
H.R. 3783.
4. It is the responsibility (and right) of parents, not the federal
government, to decide what is or is not appropriate for minors to
have access to, and to supervise minors. In the classroom, this is
a local, not federal, issue.
5. What is appropriate for a 5-year-old is not the same thing as what
is appropriate for a 16-year-old, and this bill fails to take
account of this basic fact.
6. Intentionally providing a minor with "harmful matter", online or
offline, is already illegal under general obscenity and
harmful-to-minor statutes. Congress cannot expand this to a ban on
all online publication (which the bill amounts to; the Supreme
Court has already found that the kind of age verification this
bill, like the CDA, calls for is impractical.
Feel free to use your own wording of course. The last point can be
skipped when contacting the Committee by voice phone, since it is long
and rather technical. Other points can be shortened for voice calls,
e.g., "The bill will censor a lot more than the commercial
pornographers it aims at," for point 2.
___________________________________
COMMITTEE CONTACT INFO:
The House Commerce Committee
* Phone: +1-202-225-2927 (say you are calling about markup in the
Telecommunications Subcommittee)
* Fax: +1-202-225-1919 (attn: Telecommunications Subcommittee)
* E-mail: commerce@mail.house.gov (you may wish to also e-mail your
comments, attn: Telecommunications Subcommittee, for good
measure.)
There is insufficient time to contact individual legislators' offices.
The markup is likely to be completed by early afternoon at the latest.
More information on contacting Congress is available at:
http://www.eff.org/congress/
___________________________________
SUMMARY:
The Subcommittee on Telecommunications, Trade, and Consumer Protection
of the House Commerce Committee will meet tomorrow morning (Thu., Sep.
17, 1998) to examine legislation intended to establish restrictions on
online publication of content deemed "harmful to minors" on the Net.
The untitled bill, which many refer to as "CDA II", would block many
adults from receiving or posting a wide variety of legitimate material
online that falls under vague harm criteria and includes many of the
same constitutional defects as the original Communications Decency Act
(CDA).
In the name of protecting young users of the Internet, CDA II is
intended to enact a wide-ranging ban on Web posting of material deemed
"harmful to minors." The bill number is H.R. 3783, and it is a
companion bill to the Senate's S. 1482, passed as an amendment to an
appropriations bill that cleared the Senate over the summer. H.R. 3783
was introduced by Rep. Michael Oxley (R-OH-5).
_________________________________________________________________
ALERT: Letters to Senators on database and WIPO bills needed now
Copyright clashes likely to define final weeks of 105th Congress
Electronic Frontier Foundation Alert, Sept. 16, 1998 (expires Sept.
28, 1998).
(This is a modified version of a Digital Future Coalition alert; the
full text, with background information and a sample letter to
Senators, is available at:
http://www.eff.org/Alerts/19980916_dfc_alert.html
EFF is a member of the Digital Future Coalition.)
ACTION:
Please write or call your Senators this week to urge: (1) no Senate
action on controversial database protection legislation; and (2)
strong support for including the House's version of fair use
protection in any final version of WIPO copyright treaty legislation.
Please write to both of your Senators this week in support of
preserving the critical balance between protecting information and
affording reasonable access to it as key Committees struggle with two
intellectual property bills: the "Collections of Information
Antipiracy Act" (H.R. 2652/S. 2291, and Title V of H.R. 2281) and the
"Digital Millennium Copyright Act" (H.R. 2281/S. 2037). If you are
uncertain who your Senators are, you can look them up by entering your
ZIP code into the Senator search form at:
http://congress.nw.dc.us/cgi-bin/alertpr.pl?dir=dfc&alert=dfc1
___________________________________
MESSAGES:
Please ask both of your Senators to write, and speak personally, to
Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Ranking Member
Patrick Leahy (D-VT), contact info below, requesting that they:
1. DEFER Senate action until the next Congress on any special
interest database protection legislation, including the
"Collections of Information Antipiracy Act" (S. 2291/H.R. 2652),
AND that they remove this controversial legislation from the
"Digital Millennium Copyright Act" (H.R. 2281) with which it was
merged by the House early last month; AND
2. NOT ACCEPT any version of fair use protection weaker than that
adopted in the House version of H.R. 2281 when the House and
Senate meet to reconcile their different versions of the "Digital
Millennium Copyright Act" in the next few weeks.
SPECIAL NOTE:
Because of their leadership roles, it's especially important that
(using the contact info provided below):
* UTAH and VERMONT residents write directly to Mr. Hatch and Mr.
Leahy; and
* MISSISSIPPI and OKLAHOMA residents contact Senate Majority Leader
Trent Lott (R-MS) and Deputy Leader Don Nickels (R-OK); and
* ARIZONA and SOUTH CAROLINA residents reach Sens. John McCain
(R-AZ) and Ernest Hollings (D-SC).
___________________________________
SENATOR CONTACT INFO:
Postal letters may be addressed to your Senator like so:
Hon. [full name here]
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510
Phone and fax information for the legislators mentioned above:
Party Name Phone Fax
State
----------------------------------------------------------------
R UT Hatch, Orrin G. 1-202-224-5251 1-202-224-6331
D VT Leahy, Patrick J. 1-202-224-4242 1-202-224-3595
R MS Lott, Trent 1-202-224-6253 1-202-224-2262
R OK Nickles, Don 1-202-224-5754 1-202-224-6008
R AZ John McCain 1-202-224-2235 1-202-228-2862
D SC Ernest Hollings 1-202-224-6121 1-202-224-4293
More information on contacting Congress is available at:
http://www.eff.org/congress/
___________________________________
SUMMARY:
With the passage of WIPO treaty implementing legislation (the "Digital
Millennium Copyright Act", H.R. 2281 and S. 2037), Congress is moving
to resolve differences between the House and Senate-passed versions in
conference committee. A serious problem remains with the legislation.
The dreadful "Collections of Information Antipiracy Act" (H.R. 2652
and S. 2291, better known as the database protection bill), was
amended into the House WIPO bill (H.R. 2281) as Title V of that bill,
in somewhat moderated form. H.R. 2652/Title V is extremely problematic
and has not been passed by the Senate. With its inclusion in the House
WIPO bill, H.R. 2652/Title V will now be considered in conference
(without having to pass the Senate separately) unless the Senate
conferees strip it from the House WIPO bill they will be merging with
the "clean" Senate WIPO bill. The House and Senate hope to finalize
the legislation within the next two weeks, thus the request for
immediate action.
_________________________________________________________________
Minor Changes to US Crypto Policy Miss the Real Issue: Privacy
Inadequate White House Crypto Policy Changes
(Sep. 16, 1998)
A new change to US Administration encryption export policy appeases
some particular industry segments, but completely fails to address the
heart of the encryption export debate - individual privacy rights -
and continues to sacrifice privacy and security for law enforcement
and intelligence agency convenience. The new minor improvement to the
policy, announced Sep. 16, 1998 in a White House press release, would
allow US companies in certain countries to use strong encryption to
protect trade secrets, and would add US-based insurance and medical
corporations to the industry segments allowed to export and use strong
encryption overseas for internal security use, in most countries.
On the negative side, the new policy implies that only such
institutions are "legitimate" users of strong encryption, and further
advances law enforcement's demanded "key recovery" scheme by making it
easier for key recovery-weakened encryption systems to receive more
generalized export approval. (Key recovery, also known as "key escrow"
or "trusted third party" systems, are encryption systems in which the
government, or a party trusted by government, has access to the
plaintext of all users' encrypted messages - analogous to all
individual's house keys being "escrowed" with local police, "just in
case" they ever want to search your home.)
Despite the Administration's claim that the new policy "meets the full
range of national interests: promotes electronic commerce, supports
law enforcement and national security and protects privacy," EFF
believes that these minor reforms do nothing at all to address the
core issue of end-user privacy. Moreover, in encouraging key recovery
it actually undermines privacy and computer security, at a time when
major improvements in both areas are desperately needed. Though the
changes would ease the burden on handful of industry concerns, the
general policy continues to harm US competitiveness in the software
industry, since foreign competitors are under no such market
restrictions and can supply the demand for strong encryption in ways
their US counterparts cannot.
The new policy fails to address any of the issues raised by two EFF
projects. Beginning in 1995, we have supported a series of (ongoing)
lawsuits, including Bernstein v. Dept. of Justice, challenging the
constitutionality of the entire crypto export regime. In 1998, our DES
Cracker Project proved that the US government's Data Encryption
Standard (DES) is woefully insecure, yet this is the level of
encryption encouraged and allowed for general export and use by even
the revised regulations.
Additional problems with the new regulatory policy:
* The new regulations still lack due process and provide the
Administration with full discretion to suppress free expression in
cryptography without judicial involvement;
* they unconstitutionally require a "one-time review" by the
government of almost any publication or private transaction in
encryption software; and,
* the real details of this latest development remain secret - the
Administration has only released a vague statement, not actual
regulations. The devil, as always, is in the details.
For more information on this controversy see:
* White House encryption policy update press release (full text)
http://www.eff.org/pub/Privacy/ITAR_export/1998_export_policy/HTML/19980916_admin_statement.html
* New York Times article
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/98/09/cyber/articles/16encrypt.html
* Wired News article
http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/15037.html
* EFF Encryption Export Policy Archive
http://www.eff.org/pub/Privacy/ITAR_export/
* EFF Key Escrow/Key Recovery Policy Archive
http://www.eff.org/pub/Privacy/Key_escrow/
_________________________________________________________________
Other Headlines at http://www.eff.org
Visit our web site to see what else is hot in online civil liberties.
* "Cryptography is not a weapon": ACLU, EFF, and EPIC join an
international call to remove controls on cryptography under the
Wassenaar Arrangement (Sept. 15, 1998)
http://www.eff.org/pub/Privacy/Foreign_and_local/Multinational/HTML/19980915_gilc_wassenaar_statement.html
* EFF and other members of Internet Free Expression Alliance testify
against Net censorship bills in Congress (Sep. 11, 1998)
http://www.ifea.net/joint_statement_9_98.html
* EFF opposes vague & overbroad California anti-spam bill (Sep. 9,
1998)
http://www.eff.org/pub/Social_responsibility/Spamming_and_net_abuse/Foreign_and_local/CA/HTML/19980909_eff_ab1629_letter.html
* Fed. court holds that online materials cannot be censored until
ruled illegal (Aug. 17, 1998)
http://www.eff.org/pub/Legal/Cases/Sheehan_v_Experian/HTML/19980817_dwyer_order.html
* "Your papers please..." - EFF comments on US Dept. of
Transportation's troubling national ID proposal (Aug. 7, 1998)
http://www.eff.org/pub/Privacy/ID_SSN_fingerprinting/HTML/19980807_eff_dot_comments.html
* EFF criticizes House passage of anti-fair-use online copyright &
database protection legislation (Aug. 5, 1998; Inter@ctive Week
article)
http://www.zdnet.com/intweek/daily/980805b.html
* EFF letter to legislators opposing misguided anti-spam bill HR
3888 (July 29, 1998)
http://www.eff.org/pub/Social_responsibility/Spamming_and_net_abuse/HTML/19980729_eff_hr3888_letter.html
* EFF re-launches Blue Ribbon Campaign to combat censorship of the
Internet - Four online new media groups join the Campaign by
exhibiting the Blue Ribbon on their Web sites (June 15, 1998)
http://www.eff.org/blueribbon/relaunch_br_pr_061598.html
* More headlines & information
http://www.eff.org/more.html
_________________________________________________________________
Administrivia
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