[12032] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Fwd: Short substantive EFF policy question
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bruce Fancher)
Mon May 2 22:58:11 1994
From: bruce@phantom.com (Bruce Fancher)
To: mech@eff.org (Stanton McCandlish)
Date: Mon, 2 May 1994 19:07:31 -0400 (EDT)
Cc: bruce@phantom.com, karl@mcs.com, frezza@radiomail.net,
farber@central.cis.upenn.edu, djw@eff.org, com-priv@psi.com,
stahlman@radiomail.net, dbuck@world.std.com, ggilder@mcimail.com,
gbolles@radiomail.net, rre-maintainers@weber.ucsd.edu,
Sam_Boyle@mcimail.com, brodsky@radiomail.net, of@phantom.com
In-Reply-To: <199405022127.RAA04639@eff.org> from "Stanton McCandlish" at May 2, 94 05:27:47 pm
[Stanton McCandlish] has written:
|
| > The only worthwhile thing the EFF has done is to provide legal support to
| > people like Craig Neidorf and Steve Jackson. Putting Mike Godwin on the
|
| I beg to differ. Ever heard of Big Dummy's Guide to the Internet? Ever
| seen our work on ISDN? Even Stahlman appreciated that. Ever noticed that
| EFF worked to get the sentencing guidelines for "computer crimes" amended.
| Etc. Please, don't simply trust what you read on the net as the be-all
| and end-all of the facts. I find it a shame that you'd condemn our
| organization as a one-hit wonder, when you appear to me to have not looked
| at much of the work we've done, but simply listened to the rhetoric flying
| about one issue, and concluded that those spouting it are 100% correct and
| that their opinion of one of our missions accurately describes all the
| rest of our work.
|
The Big Dummy's Guide to the Internet is well-written and informative.
But so are the 20 or so how-to-use-the-Internet books which are available
from the local bookstore. Actually, I rarely read the "flying rhetoric"
on the net, the only reason I followed this thread is because Bill Frezza
started it.
I didn't have any reason to feel burned by the EFF until I hosted Godwin
and Figallo in my home so they could encourage a bunch of people who had
gathered to start the "New York EFF" about three weeks before the EFF board
said forget it, get lost.
| [...]
| > As much as I appreciate that, it didn't stop me from cutting my
| > membership card in half and mailing it to Mitch when he moved the shop
| > down to DC. We've got enough "smart guys" lobbying the Government to
| > tell us what's good for us. The EFF should have stuck to their
| > (publicly stated) original purpose of ensuring that civil liberties
| > extend into Cyberspace.
|
| 1) Would you rather have "dumb guys" do the the lobbying? Lobbying WILL
| BE DONE. This is a fact of life. You can have the law-n-order types and the
| social-program wheedlers and so forth do all the lobbying if you like. See
| how you like the world then.
I'd rather that no one did any lobbying, PAC donations were made illegal,
congress was subject to the same laws and regulations they impose on the
rest of us and government spending was cut by about half.
I'd rather that the telecommunications industry were deregulated and the
market allowed to sort things out. I'd rather that no congressman ever
utter the words "Information Superhighway" and I'd rather that Al Gore mind
his own fucking business.
| 2) on what grounds do you base the assumption that EFF can only protect
| civil liberties when residing in a city in Massachusetts? ACLU and CPSR
| have offices in DC too. Does that suddenly mean they no longer support
| civil rights? If you were a civil liberties organization in the UK, would
| you base your operations in Inverness, or in London? If in France, would
| you pick Rennes or Paris? The national capital is where the action is,
| where a difference is made.
For all I care the EFF could move to Pigs Knuckle, Idaho. What's
relevent is what you do once you get there.
In the Neidorf and Jackson cases, the EFF got involved to make sure that
the Bill of Rights applied to individuals who had been denied protection.
Educating a judge on issues of where electronic speech should fall under
the protection of the 1st and 4th ammendments is very different from
policy work.
| 3) on what grounds do you base the assumption that all EFF does is lobbying?
| As a matter of fact, very little of what we do is lobbying; that's the law.
| If we exceed that quota, we lose 501(c)(3) status.
Uh huh.
| 4) on what grounds do you base the assumption that getting involved in the
| political processes that actually MAKE the laws we have to live with is
| somehow antithetical to the goal of protecting civil liberties?
|
| --
| Stanton McCandlish * mech@eff.org * Electronic Frontier Found. OnlineActivist
| "In a Time/CNN poll of 1,000 Americans conducted last week by Yankelovich
| Partners, two-thirds said it was more important to protect the privacy of
| phone calls than to preserve the ability of police to conduct wiretaps.
| When informed about the Clipper Chip, 80% said they opposed it."
| - Philip Elmer-Dewitt, "Who Should Keep the Keys", TIME, Mar. 14 1994
>From Open Platform 2.0:
"We must act now to ensure that the information highway is more than just
10,000 more channels of what we have today--what Newton Minow might have
called 'a vaster wasteland.'"
The Open Platform Initivate refers to itself as "Jeffersonian" in the
same paragraph it proposes meddling with new and potentially burdensome
regulations. Are we talking about the same Jefferson?
The Open Platform Initiative is just plain wrong and misguided and I'm
still waiting to hear you respond Bill's points.
