>From Jim Warren, via his GovAccess newsletter:

Mitnick for EFF Pioneer Award?  [joke with a point]

Housemate Jay Thorwaldson just pointed this out:

The "Evil Empire's" Sputnik was the spark that lit the U.S. roman candle of
science and math education renovation in the late '50s and '60s, as well as
fueling the costly rockets of the competitive U.S. space race.

Perhaps the Evil Kevin Mitnick - the FBI's favorite Devilish Computer
Cracker - will end up fueling a similar wake-up call across the nation,
among citizens, businesses and industry leaders.

Perhaps the Evil Computer Cracker will finally empower the nation's
general-circulation press to give high profile to matters of technology
policy that are and will have pervasive impact on citizens and civil
liberties - even in the news and features sections beyond the business
pages.  Perhaps, gawd forbid!, they might even give it 1/100th of the
coverage of O.J.'s posturing attorneys.

In particular, more and more of us are realizing our absolutely-unnecessary
danger and demanding that --

* The Clinton-Gore administration must reverse its arrogant, myopic
opposition to deploying standardized, by-default, end-to-end communications
and file encryption - nationally and globally - to protect all of the
world's innocent citizens and businesses, as well as incidentally shrouding
the tiny criminal minority.

* The Clinton-Gore administration must reverse its arrogant, myopic
systematic refusal to permit U.S. companies to compete in the global
marketplace by exporting crypto software that implements *long-published*,
*world-known* encryption techniques - *especially* when our foreign
competitors, including those in former Eastern Bloc countries, are peddling
such software on the open market.

* The FBI must reverse its arrogant, myopic, self-serving efforts to
protect and radically-enhance the power and convenience of its electronic
crime investigation - after the fact and no matter how much the public is
unnecessarily-endangered in the process, and instead, focus on crime
PREVENTION and citizen and corporate PROTECTION against crime - before the
act.

* The NSA must reverse its arrogant, myopic, self-serving efforts to
protect its convenient covert surveillance ability - no matter what the
unnecessary cost and risk to citizens and corporations, and instead, focus
on enhancing SECURITY FOR CITIZENS AND BUSINESSES.

If such citizen and corporate security, and enhanced global
competitiveness, finally derives from the publicity surrounding Mitnick's
arrest by the FBI that so diligently aided and abetted his activities, then
perhaps Mitnick should be given an award for helping us all.

[end fwd]

--
<A HREF="http://www.eff.org/~mech/">          Stanton McCandlish
</A><HR><A HREF="mailto:mech@eff.org">        mech@eff.org
</A><P><A HREF="http://www.eff.org/">         Electronic Frontier Foundation
</A><P><A HREF="http://www.eff.org/1.html">   Online Services Mgr.   </A>