The transcript of yesterday morning's NPR program on the Exon bill follows. Yours truly (Mark Rotenberg) and EPIC Advisory Board member Eli Noam went at it with Senator Exon. The program went very well. The bill is obviously in trouble. - - - On another civil liberties front, we could really use your help with the $500,000,000 for the FBI wiretap program. With the folks in Washington falling over one another to see who can put together the most draconian terrorism legislation, the money for the national surveillance plan remains the key to the bills. The Clinton administration just proposed raising all civil fines by 40% (!) to fund the payoff to telephone companies so the FBI can wiretap more phones. Also, Dave Banisar just finished going through the wiretap reports for 1994. Here are the key numbers (Some of this will be in a Newsweek story on the stands later this week): -- wiretapping reached an all-time high in 1994, 1,154 taps authorized for federal and state combined up from 976 in 1993. -- 75% of all taps were authorized for narcotics investigations, 8% for gambling, and 8% for racketeering -- Not a single tap was authorized for investigations involving "arson, explosives, or weapons" in 1994. In fact, such an order hasn't been approved since the late 1980s. Keep that in mind when people say wiretapping is necessary to prevent tragedies like Oklahoma City. -- Only 17% of all conversations intercepted were deemed "incriminating" by prosecutors. That figure is at an all-time low (in the early '70s it was closer to 50%), and it means that the FBI is gathering far more information through electronic surveillance unrelated to a criminal investigation than ever before. -- Also, the duration of the taps is way up, now around 40 days on average. Twenty years ago, it was closer to 18. We really need the help of civil liberties and free expression groups with this campaign. For those who are sympathetic but think wiretapping is not a First Amendment issue, take a look at Herbert Mitgang, _Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America's Greatest Authors_ or recall the FBI's "Library Awareness Program" of the 1980s. The FBI's claim that new technologies are frustrating wiretap is completely without support. But if the $500,000,000 to make the network wiretap ready is appropriated, the current trends will be amplified: more surveillance, longer duration, less well targeted --> less privacy for all Americans. Check out our web page http://epic.org/terrorism/ or send a message to wiretap@epic.org. We even set up an 800 number for folks who want to send mailgrams. And send comments to me if you have suggestions. Thanks, Marc. --------- Copyright 1995 National Public Radio NPR SHOW: Morning Edition (NPR 6:00 am ET) May 5, 1995 Transcript # 1600-3 TYPE: Package SECTION: News; Domestic LENGTH: 788 words HEADLINE: Senator Wants to Police Internet Porno GUESTS: Sen. J. JAMES EXON (D NB); ELI NOAM, Tele-Information Institute, Columbia University; MARC ROTENBERG, Electronic Privacy Information Center BYLINE: JOHN NIELSEN HIGHLIGHT: The Senate telecommunications reform bill will now include an amendment to ban materials considered lewd and lascivious on the Internet. Some critics fear the government would become Internet police. BODY: BOB EDWARDS, Host: Some senators are concerned about sexually oriented communication on the Internet, the global network of computers. An amendment to the Senate's telecommunications reform bill would ban materials considered indecent, lewd, or lascivious. Supporters say the idea is to protect children. NPR's John Nielsen reports. JOHN NIELSEN, Reporter: Democratic Senator James Exon of Nebraska says he marvels at the Internet. With it, people all over the world can now meet and interact, they can talk privately, they can talk in groups, they can look at pictures, and they can sell each other information. Exon considers it the biggest advance in communications technology since the invention of the printing press. But Exon also thinks the Internet has one gigantic failing. He says there's an awful lot of pornography on this system and it's almost all accessible to everyone who goes online. A child with basic computer skills easily can stumble into the equivalent of a pornographic bookstore, Exon says, and he doesn't think that should be legal. Sen. J. JAMES EXON (D-NB): I cannot imagine that the framers of the Constitution intended that pornography, in and of itself, would be protected under the First Amendment. Certainly not for kids. JOHN NIELSEN: That's why Exon and Washington Republican Slade Gorton recently attached an anti-smut amendment to the Senate's telecommunications reform bill. It would punish people who transmit 'obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, or indecent materials' with fines of up to $100,000, or jail terms of up to two years. Anti-smut organizations have applauded the broadly worded amendment; so has South Dakota Republican Larry Pressler, author of the telecommunications reform bill. But critics say these anti-smut rules are dangerously vague. Eli Noam, of Columbia University's Tele-Information Institute, says they're tougher in some ways than telephone smut laws, which allow consenting adults to say or hear anything they want to each other. ELI NOAM, Tele-Information Institute, Columbia University: What the Exon-Gorton amendment would do, in effect, would make such conversations potentially illegal and, furthermore, would apply a very vague standard to it. JOHN NIELSEN: Marc Rotenberg, of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, has a different concern. He fears the new law will turn prosecutors in conservative parts of the country into a kind of Internet police. For instance, these prosecutors might argue that paintings and books from out-of-town libraries and museums violate community norms. Rotenberg says that could keep those libraries and museums off the Internet completely. MARC ROTENBERG, Electronic Privacy Information Center: You may have to stop and think for a moment. I mean, in your art collection you got to wonder about some of those Impressionists. Can we put everything that we've got currently hanging on the walls, can we put that stuff online? JOHN NIELSEN: Now, Senator Exon's staff has tried hard to answer criticisms of the anti-porn bill. They've dropped language that would have held online carriers like CompuServe and America Online responsible for the actions of their customers, and they've added language restricting the government's right to monitor Internet conversations. But that last change may have created as many problems as it solved. In a letter released this week, the Justice Department said restrictions on digital wire-tapping could cripple government efforts to catch computer hackers and to track suspected terrorists. Spokesmen for Senator Exon say they don't think that's true, but the senator says he's perfectly willing to hear his critics out. He'll also consider more revisions. Sen. J. JAMES EXON: And I don't mind taking the hits from some people that accuse me of wanting to be a censor because all of that has fed interest in the story and millions of people know about it now that had no idea of the magnitude of the problem before I first introduced the bill. JOHN NIELSEN: Right now the bill's future is uncertain. When the Senate telecommunications bill comes up for a final vote this month, Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont will try to push the anti-smut debate aside for at least six more months. That would give the Justice Department time to develop an alternative to Exon's anti-smut plan. I'm John Nielsen in Washington. The preceding text has been professionally transcribed. However, although the text has been checked against an audio track, in order to meet rigid distribution and transmission deadlines, it may not have been proofread against tape. ================================================================= _________________________________________________________________________ Subject: NPR Segment on Exon _________________________________________________________________________ Marc Rotenberg (Rotenberg@epic.org) * 202-544-9240 (tel) Electronic Privacy Information Center * 202-547-5482 (fax) 666 Pennsylvania Ave, SE, Suite 301 * ftp/gopher/wais cpsr.org Washington, DC 20003 * HTTP://epic.digicash.com/epic -- Stanton McCandlish
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