From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Sat, 21 Jun 1997 12:23:20 +0800
To: "Robert A. Costner" <pooh@efga.org>
Subject: Re: [EFGA] WE won our court case!! (fwd)
In-Reply-To: <3.0.2.32.19970620165723.00756920@popd.ix.netcom.com>
Message-ID: <3.0.2.32.19970620210534.00752d60@popd.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



At 11:14 PM 6/20/97 -0400, you wrote:
>>Yee-hah!  If you ignore CONgress, we've had a good week, between
>>this court and the New York CDA courts doing the right thing
>>and the DES crack finishing.

>"Yee-ha"?  Is this meant to be a derisive comment?  No money.  No legal 
>training.  Not a lawyer to support us.  What were we to do?  We went to the 
>ACLU and they told us the case had no standing - they couldn't help us with 
>the Georgia law.  We got no better treatment from EFF.

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.  
Similarly, the New York court's decision on the NY version of the CDA
was quite welcome, and the distributed internet project to crack
the DES Challenge key succeeded on the day that the Senate committee
was trying to tell us that 56kbps should be plenty for anybody.
It's been a _Good_Week_!

>This message was not sent to this list - cyberpunks or remailer operators.  
>It was only sent to an internal EFGA list of people who made a claim that 
>they wanted to find out more about EFGA.

It got forwarded to remailer-operators, and was an obvious enough match
with Cypherpunks interests that I copied my reply there as well.
We're interested in privacy and anonymity, and in using cryptography
to build tools that will protect and advance these things.

Good court precedents are important as well; there are other people
in the movement doing lawsuits on the crypto export issues and
on free speech.  

>Yee-ha?  Meet in Underground Atlanta wearing masks?  
>What kind of comments are these?  
OK, so it was a lame attempt at humor, but a decision in favor
of anonymity is a Good Thing, and it seemed to be in character
for getting together to celebrate.

>Are you, like others on this list implying that you can't afford 
>the three dollars or you just don't know how to dial the phone?

It's not the three dollars in parking that's keeping me from joining you
in celebrating; it's the $600 airfare I'd need to get to Atlanta...

#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp
#   (If this is a mailing list or news, please Cc: me on replies.  Thanks.)