From declan@eff.orgThu Aug 15 13:06:53 1996 Date: Sat, 10 Aug 1996 20:02:13 -0700 (PDT) From: Declan McCullagh To: fight-censorship@vorlon.mit.edu Subject: Global crypto and Senate net-restriction showdown coming, from WSJ [This is a good roundup of the issues we've been talking about lately on fight-censorship: OECD, G-7, Canadian provincial authorities, call for censorship from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, "anti-terrorism" net-censorship legislation in Congress. From the online edition of the Wall Street Journal; read the full piece at the URL below. --Declan] // declan@eff.org // I do not represent the EFF // declan@well.com // http://interactive4.wsj.com/edition/current/articles/Online.htm August 9, 1996 After Dhahran, TWA, and Atlanta: Who's Afraid of the Big Bad 'Net? By VIVIENNE WALT THE WALL STREET JOURNAL INTERACTIVE EDITION At 15, Frank Sayre isn't old enough to vote in Canada. Yet, his knack for Internet coding has already earned him some powerful enemies. Last month, Mr. Sayre launched a private protest against Web censorship from his home in Smithers, British Columbia. After hearing that a white supremacist site had been ejected from an Internet service provider, the teenager posted the site's entire contents in a compressed "mirror" file... Incensed, the province's Attorney General, Ujjal Dosanjh, dispatched a task force to investigate the Web's proliferation of hate speech -- something the Canadian government, like its allies in Western Europe, has laws against. [...] One day after a bomb in Saudi Arabia killed several U.S. servicemen and virtually flattened a military base, Sen. Joseph Biden (D., Del.) pushed his proposal to make posting bomb-making information on the Internet a felony, punishable by up to 20 years in jail. "I think most Americans would be absolutely shocked if they knew what kind of bone-chilling information is making its way over the Internet," he told the Senate on June 26. "You can access detailed, explicit instructions on how to make and detonate pipe bombs, light-bulb bombs, and even -- if you can believe it -- baby-food bombs." [...] In a last-minute maneuver on Aug. 2, House members dropped the Internet controls and wiretapping provisions from their Anti-Terrorism Act, approved it by 389-22, and went home for the rest of the summer, leaving the Senate in a quandary about what to do after Labor Day. "We just couldn't come up with a bipartisan bill," says Sen. Feinstein's press secretary Susan Kennedy. Like Washington, Paris empties out in August for la vacance. But on Sept. 26, the fight picks up in the French capital at a top-level meeting of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Justice Department officials, and 'Net activists, are set to travel to Paris to argue about key escrow... "This is an example of the Justice Department trying to dictate foreign policy," says Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, who sits on the OECD's advisory panel on encryption. [...] "They might be the lunatic fringe, but they've embraced this technology. A subculture is emerging," says Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Weisenthal Center in Los Angeles, who recently presented President Clinton with a disk of extremist Web sites, and whose Cyberwatch project monitors extremism on the Web. Rabbi Cooper and others have lobbied Internet providers to expel the extremist sites. "Will they eventually find somewhere else? Probably. But that still makes it a worthwhile thing to do," he says. [...]