From: Mark Hedges <hedges@sirius.infonex.com>
Date: Fri, 19 Sep 1997 10:30:50 +0800
To: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
Subject: Re: politics aren't all or nothing
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.95.970918182839.3957O-100000@well.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.3.96.970918183742.12752B-100000@sirius.infonex.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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On Thu, 18 Sep 1997, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>Yeah, well, you probably got a form letter( they have lots of form
>letters). If it was an original reply, a middle-level or senior-level
>staffer okayed it.

I think the latter was the case. I got lots of the form responses. This
came 10 hours later and appeared hastily written. I feel special! Gosh,
democracy really works! (I'm not saying it was a big deal.) 

>No, it indicates they want to appear to be friends of the Net so they can
>pick up some bucks from lobbyists and high tech firms.
>Votes count more than 10K GIFs.

This is why I invited y'all to call me a naive idiot --- it's this cynical
stereotyping of politicians which I think more than anything obstructs
one's own attempts to talk to them and induce change rationally. If you
walk up to some random person in a bar supposing they're probably going to
knock you flat, they probably will. If you walk up to them thinking
they'll provide entertaining discussion on Heidegger, well, wait, umm...
Anyway, you see my point. Of course, you're the guy who talks to the
political community on a regular basis. Maybe they really are all clones
programmed by the government...but I doubt that. It's a novel experience
for me, so perhaps I haven't become jaded (realistic?). 

(Jade is (a) pretty (plant), though.) 

Question yourself, all y'all revolutionaries, what does the hopeless
attitude get you? Adrenalin while you get mad and hop up and down? An
excuse to use your A-K and pop a couple feds before they do the natural
thing and shoot you down? "It was a very good day ... I didn't even have
to use my A-K."

Still, I bet the lobbyists and funders who spent so much time, effort, and
coins on pushing SAFE and the rest of the (even somewhat) pro-crypto bills
are feeling pretty hopeless right now. I don't blame them. I also don't
want to sound sappy like little orphan Annie, shining with hope in the
face of the end of the world, but there's always tomorrow.

>> I think a good tactic is to say to them "it's more difficult to vote
>> against the vast majority of your constituents" and use examples like
>> public opinion polls (are there any?) and California Legislature's SJR-29
>> (unanimous memorialization of Clinton and Congress to relax export
>> controls). 
>
>As many have pointed out it depends on the way the polls is phrased.
>"Should convicted child molesters have unbreakable crypto?" Ban it now! As
>for the SJR-29, your do have a good point. The tide is turning. But it'll
>take years, and the battle is happening in Congress now. Defeat for
>crypto-proponents is at hand...

"Who writes the goddamn polls?" comes to mind. Yes, this is extremely
unfortunate. I have been wondering if the unhealthy and unwholesome spam
might be useful for this --- it would be cheap, and easy to collect survey
information. Alternatively, there might be away to do that from a web
page. Of course, people would have to go read the page. That would take
some advertising. My guess is that banner ads on the Anonymizer probably
are _too_ selectively biased --- we'd need a wide distribution.

There's always spam for sending out "the real dirt" on stuff like Panama,
Grenada, Iraq, CIA & money laundering & crack, the silent black
helicopters, Santa Cruz Island, Waco, Ruby Ridge, illegal wiretaps,
missing submarines, accidentally sold nuclear facilities, the memetics
programming, and how much money gets spent on this stuff, then
justification for either more extensive checks and balances or an
unempowered, minimal government, and finally, a plan for how to collapse
and rebuild the system without people getting hurt. I guess I would
appreciate that more than spam selling spam software.  Still, there's a
question as to whether it would hurt or help "the cause" of informing the
masses what's really going on. "National Security"? Do most people really
have any idea about who and what is to be kept "secure"? 

Has anyone ever taken a poll which has questions stilted both one way and
the other, just to see people say "I want X and not-X"?

(ubergovernment)
>I'm working on a long-term article about this so I won't post
>anything now. 

I look forward to reading that piece.

Mark Hedges