From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
Date: Thu, 15 May 1997 23:30:38 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: SAFE vote and cutting crypto-deals, report from House Judiciary
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.3.95.970515080632.7217B-100000@well.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain




---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 15 May 1997 10:59:23 -0400
From: Barry Steinhardt <barrys@aclu.org>
To: "Shabbir J. Safdar" <shabbir@vtw.org>,
    Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
Cc: fight-censorship@vorlon.mit.edu
Subject: Re: SAFE vote and cutting crypto-deals, report from House  Judiciary

Declan and Shabbir,

I thought it might be helpful to your dialouge to give you the ACLU's
current views about SAFE. The language significantly limiting the
criminalization provision was indeed drafted by EPIC and the ACLU. Don
Haines and Dave Sobel did a great 

The language was an improvement , but it doesn't belong in the bill and we
are still lobbying to have the criminalization provision removed. 

All of us in the cyber liberties community need to watch this legislation
very carefully. It could easily get much worse as a "compromise" is reached
with the Administration. In the end,the bill could be laden with amendments
on issues like key recovery that defeat our purpose of making strong and
secure encryption generally available.

At some point, we may need to say that no bill is better than a bad bill.


At 10:32 AM 5/15/97 -0400, Shabbir J. Safdar wrote:
>At 7:26 AM -0700 5/15/97, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>>Shabbir,
>>
>>You're mistaken. I'm not "slighting their work" -- I called it a "solid
>>improvement."
>>
>>Yeah, I know who shopped this around. I spoke with David and Don about
>>this last week, and didn't write about it then for fear of jeopardizing
>>their negotiations.
>
>Then why didn't you give them credit for it in the story?  They should be
>lauded for writing this amendment which is a solid improvement. EPIC and
>ACLU did great work, and deserve more credit in your story than you gave
>them.
>
>-S
>
>
>
>

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Barry Steinhardt			Barrys@aclu.org		
Associate Director			212 944-9800 ext 614 (v)
American Civil Liberties Union		212 354-5290 (fax)
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