[00:00.800 --> 00:02.780]  I need my outer space.
[00:16.900 --> 00:19.600]  Check out the places you want to be.
[00:23.860 --> 00:25.860]  Check out the newest technology.
[00:30.000 --> 00:31.540]  Get out of my rockets.
[00:44.730 --> 00:46.010]  I need my space.
[00:46.370 --> 00:47.850]  I need my college space.
[00:47.850 --> 00:49.530]  I need my space!
[00:49.790 --> 00:51.390]  I need my outer space!
[00:58.330 --> 00:59.150]  Space!
[01:00.130 --> 01:00.130]  Space!
[01:06.010 --> 01:06.830]  Space!
[01:18.790 --> 01:27.190]  Space, space, space, space, space.
[02:18.740 --> 02:20.140]  Hello.
[02:21.560 --> 02:25.100]  This is the dangerous legislation panel.
[02:25.780 --> 02:34.920]  And we're going to talk about some of the legislation that's passed and has been proposed that is potentially dangerous to everyone sitting here.
[02:35.140 --> 02:35.660]  Potentially.
[02:37.720 --> 02:39.520]  I guess we'll introduce ourselves individually.
[02:39.780 --> 02:42.780]  I'm Ed Cummings, also known as Bernie S.
[02:50.260 --> 02:56.900]  I spent... I have the unfortunate distinction of being the first person in the country charged with violating a new federal statute.
[02:59.440 --> 03:10.020]  Without going into all the details yet, I was not charged with accessing any systems without permission or with committing any fraud, anything that is correct.
[03:10.140 --> 03:13.540]  Just having in my possession things that could have been misused.
[03:13.940 --> 03:18.880]  And I'll talk about that legislation and a couple of other pieces of legislation along those lines.
[03:19.400 --> 03:21.280]  And we also have to my right...
[03:25.100 --> 03:25.680]  All right.
[03:25.860 --> 03:26.560]  I'm Steve Barber.
[03:26.700 --> 03:34.080]  I'm a legislative counsel with a group called Voters Telecommunications Watch, which is a grassroots civil liberties activism group.
[03:34.460 --> 03:37.400]  That's led by this gentleman over here, who will now introduce himself.
[03:38.580 --> 03:39.740]  I'm Shabir Safdar.
[03:40.000 --> 03:43.100]  And if all the people in the back of the room can sit down, we can start.
[03:44.260 --> 03:48.040]  I am... I'm the founder of the Voters Telecom Watch.
[03:48.260 --> 03:54.740]  As far as I know, the only New York-based internet public interest group looking out for free speech and privacy.
[04:03.670 --> 04:05.310]  I think Bernie's going to go first.
[04:06.110 --> 04:06.950]  He's earned it.
[04:07.170 --> 04:07.290]  Okay.
[04:08.590 --> 04:11.450]  Well... Okay.
[04:12.110 --> 04:17.190]  I should give you folks a little bit of a legislative history on this new statute that I was charged with violating.
[04:17.390 --> 04:22.450]  And ended up spending 14 months in five different maximum security prisons for having violated.
[04:23.890 --> 04:35.470]  In late October of 1994, something finally got pushed through Congress that a lot of people here were somewhat aware of.
[04:35.710 --> 04:43.730]  It had previously been called the Digital Telephony Bill, which provided for, I think, initially 500 million dollars.
[04:43.730 --> 04:46.670]  That's half a billion dollars of your money.
[04:47.310 --> 04:56.910]  So that the FBI could basically install tens of thousands of simultaneous wiretaps in this country.
[04:57.090 --> 05:00.130]  Far, you know, orders of magnitude more than they've ever used before.
[05:00.650 --> 05:04.410]  And we all get to pay for it and have the cost tacked onto our phone bills.
[05:04.410 --> 05:11.990]  But this legislation went through various versions.
[05:12.210 --> 05:12.550]  It died.
[05:12.810 --> 05:14.070]  It came back to life again.
[05:14.210 --> 05:14.690]  It was killed.
[05:14.850 --> 05:15.630]  It came back again.
[05:15.970 --> 05:37.330]  And it was quietly passed in October of 1995 with some urging in the smoke-filled rooms by Mr. Free, head of the FBI, and also the head of the National Security Agency, who visited the last two holdouts in the Senate.
[05:38.150 --> 05:44.210]  Two senators were holding out on, you know, they thought there were some serious privacy issues pertaining to this bill.
[05:44.770 --> 05:45.990]  Anyhow, the bill got pushed through.
[05:46.210 --> 06:03.690]  And at the last minute before it was pushed through, an amendment was tacked onto it, which amended Title 18, Section 1029, which is a piece of federal legislation that passed probably 15 or 20 years ago that addressed more or less credit card fraud.
[06:03.690 --> 06:11.550]  And it was entitled, Fraud and Related Activity in Connection with Access Devices.
[06:12.170 --> 06:23.670]  And an access device for those who haven't done the research is any, I'll paraphrase here, any card, code, plate or account number or other means of account access.
[06:24.830 --> 06:27.070]  So, a lot of things.
[06:27.170 --> 06:33.230]  A MetroCard could be considered an access device, for instance, those who just heard the MetroCard panel.
[06:34.970 --> 06:54.190]  A couple things that would not be classified as an access device under some federal case law that I found would be a blue box or a red box, which are devices that can be used to manipulate the telephone network into making it do things that you're not supposed to do.
[06:56.230 --> 07:02.290]  The reason that they wouldn't be classified as an access device is because they do not provide a means of specific account access.
[07:02.690 --> 07:14.930]  You wouldn't be charging, for instance, if you were to use a blue box or red box to route calls in such a manner that they went around the billing mechanisms of the phone company, it wouldn't bill another person or account.
[07:15.750 --> 07:23.090]  A call would just go through and there wouldn't be any outstanding charge on a specific account.
[07:23.410 --> 07:37.270]  So red box or blue boxes and similar devices are not classified as access devices, which prevented anyone up until October of 94 from being charged with this federal law for possession of a red box or a blue box.
[07:37.670 --> 07:41.210]  Well, this legislation was tacked on.
[07:41.450 --> 07:45.890]  Most of these bills in Congress have all these little amendments tacked on at the last minute that nobody gets a chance to read.
[07:46.690 --> 07:58.590]  And what this amendment, Title 29, said was that the added 1029 Section A5 goes like this.
[07:59.610 --> 08:16.550]  Whoever knowingly and with intent to defraud produces, uses, traffics in, has control of, or custody of, or possesses a telecommunications instrument password.
[08:16.550 --> 08:33.470]  Here is the säger that is very specialized matter of wordgarage that has been modified or altered to obtain unauthorized use of telecommunications services, or whoever knowingly and with intent to defraud uses, produces, traffics in, has control or custody of,
[08:33.550 --> 08:46.410]  or possesses hardware or software used for altering or modifying telecommunications instruments to obtain unauthorized for telecommunications ?
[08:47.130 --> 08:49.190]  So it doesn't say hardware and software.
[08:49.530 --> 08:50.770]  Hardware or software.
[08:51.190 --> 08:54.990]  For instance, if you have a computer, that is hardware.
[08:55.470 --> 09:14.770]  If you have software and a disk that has a program, that would allow you to access a, say, computer system that you don't have permission to access, that would be, under the statute, considered software that could be used in conjunction.
[09:20.890 --> 09:23.490]  I'm not going to talk specifics about my case.
[09:23.630 --> 09:27.170]  We'll talk about that tonight at 7 o'clock at the prisoner's panel.
[09:27.550 --> 09:33.930]  But I was guilty of this new statute.
[09:36.030 --> 09:37.310]  There was no way around it.
[09:37.410 --> 09:46.990]  I possessed a touch tone dialer that had been modified with a 6.5 megahertz quartz crystal.
[09:47.310 --> 09:52.590]  You can buy either of these parts at any RadioShack store or dozens of mail order companies.
[09:53.890 --> 09:57.010]  Everybody who had purchased those in the past didn't think they were illegal.
[09:57.730 --> 10:02.130]  But apparently, just the possession of these now is a federal felony.
[10:03.170 --> 10:03.850]  I'm sorry?
[10:04.910 --> 10:11.690]  If you put them together, yes, that would consider... if you put them together, it would fall under A5.
[10:12.950 --> 10:19.930]  Possession of a telecommunications instrument that has been modified or altered to obtain unauthorized use of telecommunications services.
[10:20.250 --> 10:34.350]  If you did not put them together, it would still be... could be considered a felony in that it constitutes hardware used for altering or modifying telecommunications instruments to obtain unauthorized access to telecommunications services.
[10:34.610 --> 10:40.230]  I guess it could even go as far as saying a soldering iron or a screwdriver could be used to modify a telecommunications instrument.
[10:40.450 --> 10:43.830]  But it depends on how far the government wants to stretch the
[10:54.750 --> 11:01.910]  I have no way to get out of the fact that I did indeed possess this stuff.
[11:03.490 --> 11:13.110]  I was never charged or alleged with having sold a red box to anybody or given one to anybody, or ever used one to manipulate the telephone network in any way.
[11:15.770 --> 11:21.250]  But it was clear fact, I had one of these in my home and couldn't get around that.
[11:21.450 --> 11:25.530]  So I made what was called a Zudick plea.
[11:25.670 --> 11:52.570]  It's a very little used plea in the federal courts that says basically if there's no, if there's potential for the statute that you were charged with is going to be appealed on its being potentially unconstitutional, you can make a conditional plea and withdraw that plea and then challenge the constitutionality of that statute.
[11:53.770 --> 11:58.630]  Since I had never been charged with this new law before, I was the first person in the country charged with it, I went that route.
[12:00.910 --> 12:03.870]  And pled guilty, the next day withdrew my plea.
[12:04.090 --> 12:07.270]  Generally in federal court, once you make a guilty plea, that's set in stone.
[12:07.410 --> 12:08.750]  You can't withdraw it.
[12:08.990 --> 12:12.090]  But this conditional Zudick thing that let me do that.
[12:12.370 --> 12:39.870]  So I served my whole federal sentence and then filed an appeal saying that basically the terms, what are called the terms of art in this statute were unconstitutionally vague, specifically the terms telecommunications instrument, unauthorized use, and modified or altered were all terms that were not really specified in the statute at all,
[12:40.030 --> 12:40.530]  what they meant.
[12:41.150 --> 12:43.530]  And people can say, well, everybody knows what those things mean.
[12:43.870 --> 12:49.010]  And I say that there's a lot of gray areas with those terms.
[12:50.310 --> 12:52.130]  For instance, modified or altered.
[12:52.450 --> 13:09.890]  Every time you use any type of computer or telephone that has digital circuitry in it, specifically like a microprocessor or something, just punching numbers on that keypad, or really is modifying or altering the contents of the memory of that phone.
[13:10.050 --> 13:21.430]  Every time you run a computer program, you're modifying or altering information on the hard drive, in the RAM, registers, everything that's going on in that computer is constantly being modified or altered.
[13:22.030 --> 13:36.610]  If you use a modem to call another modem, you are sending AT commands, ostensibly, to that modem, which are modifying or altering the S registers in that modem.
[13:38.450 --> 13:42.730]  So people can modify or alter things without even being readily aware of it.
[13:43.350 --> 13:48.990]  And there were no exceptions provided in this bill for these things.
[13:49.390 --> 13:50.670]  It left it pretty vague.
[13:51.710 --> 13:58.550]  One of the other terms I had a problem was with the term unauthorized use or unauthorized access to telecommunication services.
[13:59.670 --> 14:00.370]  Excuse me.
[14:02.290 --> 14:15.830]  I was, in addition to possessing a red box, I was charged with possessing a computer software that would allow you to program cellular telephones, electronic serial number, and alter its phone number also in the phone.
[14:16.030 --> 14:18.410]  I gave this software away at HOPE three years ago.
[14:18.930 --> 14:22.730]  And it was put on HOPENet and lots of people got copies of it.
[14:22.930 --> 14:26.930]  And I also sold a little book explaining how to make the cables to modify your phone.
[14:28.890 --> 14:38.330]  What a lot of people misunderstood about this software is it did not allow you to... did not enable you to go out and charge phone calls to other cellular customers.
[14:38.510 --> 14:42.250]  It didn't give you the ability to obtain other people's electronic serial numbers.
[14:42.430 --> 14:50.150]  It simply allowed you to change the serial number and phone number in your phone to one that you already had.
[14:50.310 --> 14:52.630]  Say another ESN that you had.
[14:52.810 --> 14:53.950]  Say you had a phone in your car.
[14:55.030 --> 14:56.830]  You wanted to have a portable phone also.
[14:57.050 --> 14:59.430]  You didn't want to have to pay two separate bills and two separate numbers.
[15:01.130 --> 15:02.970]  I came up with this package.
[15:03.190 --> 15:03.970]  I didn't write the algorithms.
[15:04.170 --> 15:10.710]  I got them from someone else and put them together with some other utilities on a disk and put together people and gave it away at HOPE.
[15:11.410 --> 15:16.230]  So that people could basically roll as many extensions as they wanted on their phone.
[15:16.350 --> 15:18.170]  Just like you could have five phones in your house.
[15:18.470 --> 15:20.550]  You could have five cellular phones all on your phone number.
[15:20.930 --> 15:25.990]  Software didn't let you steal anybody else's electronic serial numbers which you need specialized equipment to do.
[15:26.150 --> 15:27.310]  And I was never charged with having.
[15:28.030 --> 15:43.230]  But anyway, the government's argument was that since the cellular carriers do not authorize you specifically to do this, that it constituted an unauthorized access to their telecommunication service.
[15:43.430 --> 15:46.750]  In other words, that second phone would not be authorized to access the system.
[15:47.030 --> 15:48.990]  And that was the government's argument in my case.
[15:49.890 --> 15:59.690]  It didn't say anywhere in the legislation who had the permission or the power to say what is authorized or not authorized.
[16:01.650 --> 16:05.510]  Ostensibly you could assume that it meant that telecommunications carrier, but it could really be anyone.
[16:05.670 --> 16:11.430]  I mean, if any one of us said, well, I don't authorize that, it's still unauthorized.
[16:11.510 --> 16:12.850]  So that was kind of left vague too.
[16:14.210 --> 16:18.650]  So I filed my federal appeal and this is after I had served my time.
[16:18.770 --> 16:21.410]  I really had nothing to gain as far as getting time back in my life.
[16:21.970 --> 16:27.850]  I couldn't turn back the clock and get that time that was taken away from me while I was in prison.
[16:28.210 --> 16:45.310]  But I felt it important to challenge the statute because I didn't want a precedent set whereby really anybody who possessed hardware or software that could potentially be used for unauthorized access to telecommunication services, I didn't want anybody else to go to prison for that.
[16:45.750 --> 16:49.390]  Now, I'll talk about my case tonight as far as why I was really charged with this.
[16:49.530 --> 16:59.570]  I don't believe that everybody sitting here is going to be charged with violating this law because it has been and probably will be used very selectively.
[16:59.830 --> 17:04.550]  In my case, the Secret Service, I believe, had their own reasons for using it selectively in my case.
[17:05.750 --> 17:36.110]  But bottom line is we have a federal statute on the books now that was passed without any hearings or committee deliberations that makes it a federal felony punishable by up to five years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine for possessing hardware or software that could be used in a manner to access telecommunication services in a way that those companies or whoever says it is unauthorized.
[17:38.050 --> 17:39.370]  I don't think this is good.
[17:40.070 --> 17:47.210]  Unfortunately, the federal court in the third district decided that those terms were not unconstitutionally vague.
[17:48.430 --> 17:59.010]  The prosecutor in my case dug up an old FCC ruling that defined what a telecommunications device was, not instrument, but device.
[17:59.210 --> 18:09.450]  And that definition said that any apparatus that emits any sound or signal is considered a telecommunications device.
[18:10.530 --> 18:17.690]  And, well, I guess there's a lot of things that emit sounds or signals that could be considered a telecommunications device.
[18:17.970 --> 18:19.550]  So that left a pretty broad definition.
[18:20.050 --> 18:39.870]  I think in a country where people really value their liberties, we shouldn't have a lot of vague laws on the books that allow really the prosecutors and the law enforcement agencies to define it as they go along, as they did in my case.
[18:40.070 --> 18:42.070]  It's kind of like making up the rules in the middle of the game.
[18:42.470 --> 18:50.390]  So it may sound like a sour grapes thing with me, but I spent a lot of money after my conviction, after I served my time trying to fight this thing.
[18:50.390 --> 19:02.590]  Unfortunately, the court's previous judgment was affirmed, and now we have federal case law that says that this terminology is not vague.
[19:02.790 --> 19:05.450]  And I don't agree with that, and probably most of us here don't agree with that.
[19:05.790 --> 19:16.910]  But I do firmly believe we should have legislation that makes it a crime to steal telecommunications services or to trespass on other people's systems.
[19:16.910 --> 19:21.890]  I think there should be some penalties provided for that, depending on the circumstances.
[19:22.330 --> 19:39.890]  But in situations where the defendant is not even alleged to have accessed any system without anyone's permission or have used any hardware or software to obtain unauthorized access to telecommunications services, just having something that could be used in that way,
[19:40.130 --> 19:40.630]  i.e.
[19:40.630 --> 19:49.590]  a computer, software, a touch tone dialer, a blue box, or any other contraption that somebody would happen to make.
[19:50.370 --> 19:55.870]  Just having that, with the knowledge that it could be misused, that's where the intent comes in.
[19:57.730 --> 19:58.130]  Sorry?
[20:00.410 --> 20:02.490]  A gentleman here just said a tape with the tones.
[20:04.070 --> 20:04.650]  Conceivably, yes.
[20:04.750 --> 20:12.990]  In fact, there was a piece of music that came out a couple years ago, some label where the song had red box tones on it.
[20:13.170 --> 20:19.030]  So I guess that CD could be considered to violate, possession of that CD could land you in hot water.
[20:19.170 --> 20:21.230]  Again, I don't think people are going to be charged with that all over the country.
[20:21.670 --> 20:24.550]  But we have what I think is dangerous legislation.
[20:24.750 --> 20:25.750]  It's on the books now.
[20:26.030 --> 20:27.390]  There's not much we can do about it.
[20:27.590 --> 20:32.950]  You can't really challenge this unless you're in a position to show that you've been harmed by it.
[20:33.050 --> 20:37.270]  And that's why I was really the only person that had the ability to challenge this legislation.
[20:37.430 --> 20:38.590]  I was the first person charged with it.
[20:38.710 --> 20:43.810]  And I could show that I had been harmed by it because I served seven months in federal prison for it.
[20:45.690 --> 20:48.870]  But I could have taken it one step up to the Supreme Court.
[20:49.010 --> 20:53.750]  But at that point I was exhausted financially and physically and emotionally.
[20:54.310 --> 20:55.930]  And I wanted to get the whole thing behind me.
[20:55.970 --> 20:57.710]  So I ran out of steam.
[20:58.290 --> 21:08.030]  So if anybody else gets charged with it, they're going to have to fight the precedent that I unfortunately set by having my appeal turned down.
[21:09.070 --> 21:11.050]  And they might win.
[21:11.190 --> 21:15.170]  But they're going to have to have a lot of money and good lawyers to do that.
[21:16.590 --> 21:19.390]  There's a lot of stuff I want to cover about my case that I'll talk about tonight.
[21:19.690 --> 21:22.730]  This may seem kind of like I've left some holes in all this.
[21:23.630 --> 21:27.590]  But I'll fill those holes in tonight because I don't want to go into the specifics of my case.
[21:27.890 --> 21:33.270]  This legislation I just mentioned is not the only new legislation that pertains to these things.
[21:33.530 --> 21:51.410]  Pennsylvania, the state I live in, also has a new law that basically makes it a serious misdemeanor, subject by up to three years in prison, for simply possessing as little as plans for making any one of these devices.
[21:51.510 --> 21:53.890]  I'll read the text for that and then I'll let these other gentlemen speak.
[21:54.590 --> 22:22.210]  Section 910 and 3926 of Title 18 of the Pennsylvania consolidated statutes makes it a crime to make or possess any instrument, apparatus, equipment or assembles an unlawful telecommunications device or modifies, alters, programs or reprograms a telecommunications device which is designed,
[22:22.390 --> 22:39.490]  adapted or which can be used for the commission of a theft of telecommunications service or to acquire or facilitate the acquisition of telecommunications service without the consent of the telecommunications service provider or, and this is an interesting one,
[22:39.930 --> 22:56.490]  or to conceal or to assist another to conceal from any telecommunications service provider or from any other lawful authority the place of origin or existence or destination of any Any telecommunication.
[22:56.830 --> 23:07.570]  In other words, if you use an anonymous remailer, for instance, this law in Pennsylvania could land you in prison.
[23:10.450 --> 23:11.370]  Let's see.
[23:12.710 --> 23:41.650]  Anyone also who possesses plans or instructions for making or assembling the same, under circumstances evidencing an intent of the law, to use or employ such, or knowing or having reason to believe that same is intended to be so used, or that a foreset plans or instructions are intended to be used for making or assembling such a device,
[23:41.910 --> 24:01.750]  including the material, including hardware, cables, tools, data, computer software or other information or equipment, knowing that that person or a third person intends to use the material in the manufacture of an unlawful telecommunications device is guilty of a felony in third degree.
[24:02.090 --> 24:05.070]  And that provides for a three-year prison sentence in Pennsylvania.
[24:05.410 --> 24:07.450]  This hasn't been challenged to my knowledge yet.
[24:07.530 --> 24:12.870]  I don't know if anybody has been charged with it, because it passed after I was released from prison, which wasn't too long ago.
[24:13.290 --> 24:39.590]  But this stuff is getting passed, and people have to get involved in the legislative process somehow, keep up on what's going on, because conceivably anyone here who would be a target of a federal or state agency, maybe for other reasons, could have this law thrown at them and they could end up having their life seriously detoured for a year or two or maybe longer.
[24:40.510 --> 24:54.810]  I could go into some other pieces of legislation that have passed, but I don't want to take into the time of these other two gentlemen who have been actively involved in trying to shape this legislation so that it's less onerous before it actually gets pushed through.
[24:55.490 --> 24:58.970]  So let me let Steve Barber address some of those other issues.
[24:59.150 --> 25:00.090]  We're going to switch the order.
[25:00.290 --> 25:00.930]  Oh, I'm sorry.
[25:01.070 --> 25:01.570]  We're going to let you...
[25:01.570 --> 25:02.150]  We're changing the order on you.
[25:02.370 --> 25:04.710]  Do we want to take questions individually or after we're all done?
[25:04.850 --> 25:05.170]  Let's take them after.
[25:05.390 --> 25:05.590]  Okay.
[25:05.590 --> 25:06.170]  Alright.
[25:36.890 --> 25:38.610]  You'll have to imagine that straight up and down.
[25:59.020 --> 26:00.980]  You know, my printer doesn't print straight anyway.
[26:11.180 --> 26:12.080]  Alright, this is me.
[26:13.180 --> 26:14.940]  I downloaded the graphic this morning.
[26:15.080 --> 26:16.240]  It printed out pretty cool, I think.
[26:18.460 --> 26:20.720]  If you need to send me encrypted mail, that's my fingerprint.
[26:20.940 --> 26:22.620]  You can get the key off most of the key servers.
[26:23.440 --> 26:27.620]  And I have Eudora and the PGP plug-in, so it rocks.
[26:28.460 --> 26:41.600]  The Voters Telecommunications Watch is a New York based internet advocacy group that we started probably about three and a half years ago here in New York.
[26:41.700 --> 26:43.060]  God, it doesn't fit on one page.
[26:44.940 --> 26:47.600]  What we wanted to do was to lobby on internet issues.
[26:47.940 --> 26:57.080]  We were afraid that there was not enough work being done to do sort of grassroots direct lobbying, people calling Congress before votes.
[26:57.240 --> 26:59.460]  So we started working on a couple issues.
[26:59.720 --> 27:02.300]  We did encryption for Maria Cantwell.
[27:02.540 --> 27:05.560]  When she had her bill running around, we were getting people to call on that.
[27:05.720 --> 27:08.880]  We did digital telephony, which is something that Bernie talked about.
[27:09.300 --> 27:18.120]  We did the CDA, that heinous piece of trash which got jerked around in the Supreme Court thanks to folks like the SEEK coalition run by the Center for Democracy and Technology.
[27:18.120 --> 27:21.280]  And we also are doing crypto now.
[27:21.720 --> 27:22.920]  I'll talk about that in a second.
[27:23.180 --> 27:24.340]  So we fought the CDA.
[27:25.320 --> 27:27.320]  There was a New York State censorship bill.
[27:27.440 --> 27:28.380]  I don't know if you know about that.
[27:28.720 --> 27:30.660]  The ACLU filed a challenge.
[27:30.660 --> 27:35.600]  We raised money for it, found plaintiffs, expert witnesses, and they kicked ass.
[27:36.540 --> 27:39.040]  We also helped create democracy.net.
[27:39.460 --> 27:44.180]  And that's an online site where you can go and you can check out congressional hearings.
[27:44.740 --> 27:53.240]  In fact, there's a very recent briefing on human rights folks in other countries who use encryption to protect themselves from oppressive regimes.
[27:53.880 --> 27:58.020]  Now, Bernie's paid his dues in spades.
[27:58.160 --> 28:07.460]  But there are other countries where if people can get to what's on your hard drive and what you're collecting is very sensitive information on human rights abuses, you don't go to jail, you just get killed.
[28:07.860 --> 28:19.440]  And so if you go to democracy.net, you can hear about an hour and a half briefing on people who use cryptography in places like Cambodia and so forth and use it to protect themselves from the military regimes.
[28:20.760 --> 28:22.900]  Most recently, there's two things we've been doing.
[28:25.380 --> 28:37.800]  We've been organizing people in individual states like New York and New Jersey to go and meet with a member of Congress to talk about the importance of encryption, the importance of privacy, why it is that you should have a right to have a private conversation that should be very,
[28:37.880 --> 28:40.400]  very private, secure and strong, encrypted.
[28:40.700 --> 28:47.300]  And we've also been working with the Federal Trade Commission, folks that send you pyramid schemes in the email, right?
[28:47.400 --> 28:50.480]  They post the stuff to Usenet groups and send it in email.
[28:50.700 --> 28:52.560]  And spam is a problem to begin with.
[28:52.980 --> 29:00.440]  When it's something that's already illegal, we're helping them to find it and then they're going to go after and prosecute those people and hopefully lessen the spam problem.
[29:05.660 --> 29:21.980]  Now, if you want more information about that, you should go to a site which is run by us and the folks at Center for Democracy and Technology called www.junkemail.org.
[29:22.560 --> 29:25.980]  All right, now every talk has to have a hack, so this is my hack.
[29:45.680 --> 29:46.760]  All right, check it out.
[29:47.020 --> 29:52.320]  For a free T-shirt, what is New York City's greatest natural hacking resource?
[29:53.080 --> 29:53.460]  Us.
[29:57.500 --> 29:59.260]  Besides hope, you guys are not natural.
[30:01.220 --> 30:01.600]  People.
[30:01.600 --> 30:01.880]  People.
[30:02.240 --> 30:02.500]  All right.
[30:03.080 --> 30:03.820]  What is this?
[30:03.920 --> 30:04.460]  Does anybody know?
[30:09.770 --> 30:11.630]  I'm going to have to give it to this guy in the front row.
[30:12.910 --> 30:14.250]  It's a street sweeper bristle.
[30:17.270 --> 30:19.170]  How many folks here are carrying lockpicks?
[30:20.690 --> 30:21.790]  Half of you are lying.
[30:22.890 --> 30:24.190]  Everybody's carrying lockpicks here.
[30:25.990 --> 30:27.350]  You walk out on the street.
[30:27.350 --> 30:28.330]  The streets of New York.
[30:28.490 --> 30:30.430]  You can find yourself a street cleaner bristle.
[30:30.730 --> 30:32.050]  You find a second one.
[30:32.330 --> 30:33.190]  You bend one in half.
[30:33.550 --> 30:34.910]  Now you've got a torque wrench.
[30:35.270 --> 30:37.490]  This makes a great instant lockpick.
[30:37.790 --> 30:38.710]  Try it at home.
[30:39.130 --> 30:40.090]  This stuff is free.
[30:40.610 --> 30:43.070]  The city of New York pays for this for you to have it.
[30:43.250 --> 30:43.990]  You should take some.
[30:52.400 --> 30:54.720]  You should not leave this conference without one of those.
[30:57.260 --> 30:57.840]  All right.
[30:57.960 --> 30:58.940]  Let's talk about privacy.
[30:59.100 --> 31:00.480]  Let's talk about encryption for a second.
[31:02.460 --> 31:05.900]  Do you have the right to take steps to protect your privacy?
[31:06.080 --> 31:07.060]  And the answer is you do.
[31:07.960 --> 31:08.440]  Absolutely.
[31:08.680 --> 31:10.820]  Bruce Schneier talked yesterday about encryption.
[31:11.720 --> 31:14.160]  You are allowed to hide documents in your house.
[31:14.260 --> 31:15.840]  There's no law that says you can't do that.
[31:16.420 --> 31:21.920]  You're allowed to bury them in a 55-gallon drum in the middle of the woods if you're really concerned about it.
[31:22.480 --> 31:26.040]  You're allowed to speak with your friends in any language.
[31:26.040 --> 31:31.460]  If you speak Navajo, for example, there's nothing that says you have to speak a language that law enforcement can understand.
[31:32.100 --> 31:34.100]  You're allowed to have secret meetings in your home.
[31:34.180 --> 31:36.120]  You want to have them in your closet where no one can find you.
[31:36.200 --> 31:36.620]  That's fine.
[31:37.420 --> 31:43.300]  As the folks who are taking care of the cash today know, you're allowed to buy a really big safe or rent one if you can't afford it.
[31:44.360 --> 31:49.500]  You're allowed to use cash except when companies can strong arm you to not to like renting cars.
[31:49.700 --> 31:52.200]  But you can go and pay for most things in cash.
[31:52.700 --> 31:54.960]  And finally, you're allowed to hide stuff on your person.
[31:55.080 --> 31:56.780]  You're allowed to sew extra pockets in your code.
[31:57.640 --> 32:04.240]  Now, what is the one thing which we should all be thinking of that I did not mention that you can do to take measures to protect your privacy?
[32:05.640 --> 32:06.100]  Encryption.
[32:06.320 --> 32:06.780]  Encryption.
[32:06.780 --> 32:07.120]  Absolutely right.
[32:07.940 --> 32:08.400]  Encryption.
[32:09.280 --> 32:12.520]  Encryption technology is the locks and the keys of the information age.
[32:13.160 --> 32:17.660]  And that's why all these people you're seeing have stickers and buttons that say my lock, my key.
[32:18.080 --> 32:18.540]  Right?
[32:18.780 --> 32:21.960]  You have the right to use encryption to protect your privacy.
[32:22.200 --> 32:27.660]  I have the right to communicate with Ed if I want to without having anyone else here have the right to listen.
[32:28.200 --> 32:31.420]  Now, law enforcement has the right to try, but they're not guaranteed.
[32:31.420 --> 32:36.560]  I have the right to fight, to use strong protection, and they have the right to try and wiretap me.
[32:37.100 --> 32:43.320]  Well, since we are talking about heinous, dangerous legislation, here is some.
[32:44.620 --> 32:48.020]  There's a bill going through Congress right now in the House called SAFE.
[32:48.460 --> 32:59.020]  And the SAFE bill, the Security and Freedom Through Encryption Act, would do a lot of things including set up the market a little different so my mother and my grandmother could use encryption.
[32:59.560 --> 33:02.060]  I can get PGP, but my mom can't use it.
[33:02.300 --> 33:03.700]  My mom's not very computer savvy.
[33:04.180 --> 33:04.620]  Right?
[33:04.840 --> 33:06.080]  So it's got to be built into stuff.
[33:06.200 --> 33:07.620]  It's got to be a mass market element.
[33:07.860 --> 33:08.700]  It's not today.
[33:09.540 --> 33:14.340]  Well, everybody in this room can get PGP, but we're a small fraction of the population.
[33:14.600 --> 33:18.340]  So really get encryption out there, it's got to be mass market products.
[33:18.340 --> 33:23.500]  Well, what this bill was, it's got a little bit of opposition in Congress, as you can imagine.
[33:24.280 --> 33:30.380]  It makes people very nervous, especially law enforcement, to have a lot of us running around with strong encryption that is not easily breakable.
[33:30.620 --> 33:34.100]  And so they proposed this amendment, which never got brought out.
[33:34.300 --> 33:39.080]  They wrote the amendment, they sort of waved it around, but it never was actually attached to any legislation.
[33:39.440 --> 33:43.560]  And it's still waiting, I assume, for an opportune time.
[33:43.560 --> 33:55.100]  And what it says is that it's unlawful for anyone to manufacture, distribute, sell, or import any product that does encryption that does not have real-time decryption capability.
[33:55.620 --> 33:56.140]  Right?
[33:56.320 --> 33:58.440]  Basically, no strong encryption.
[33:58.680 --> 34:06.400]  Anything that you would really use because it protected your privacy, you can't if the law enforcement folks can't decode it in real-time.
[34:06.400 --> 34:08.100]  We'll say that's 24 hours or less.
[34:08.660 --> 34:13.100]  Now, 24 hours or less, if law enforcement can do it, the bad guys can do it.
[34:13.100 --> 34:15.740]  And if the bad guys can do it, it's not doing what I need.
[34:15.980 --> 34:17.820]  It's not strong or secure encryption.
[34:18.200 --> 34:20.560]  And, of course, the penalty for this is $100,000.
[34:21.800 --> 34:29.400]  There's no reason to believe that things like PGP and Netscape's strong browser don't fall under this.
[34:30.040 --> 34:32.860]  And this would be the end of strong encryption and privacy.
[34:36.180 --> 34:37.340]  We can all hiss now.
[34:40.220 --> 34:40.800]  All right.
[34:41.180 --> 34:43.920]  There is hope in more ways than one.
[34:45.180 --> 34:52.620]  One of the things we're doing is we're trying to get people to go and talk to the members of Congress and educate them.
[34:52.720 --> 35:01.720]  There's an incredible lack of understanding about encryption and privacy and the Internet in general, and how computers work on the part of Congress.
[35:02.220 --> 35:04.680]  And so you can explain these things to them.
[35:04.760 --> 35:07.140]  In fact, you can explain them a lot better than anybody else.
[35:07.620 --> 35:09.880]  To do it, there's a couple ways you can participate in.
[35:09.960 --> 35:11.880]  Once again, this is my lock, my key.
[35:12.940 --> 35:17.340]  If you go to our website at crypto.com, you can do what's called adopting your legislator.
[35:17.700 --> 35:19.880]  You don't have to know who your legislator is.
[35:20.240 --> 35:22.640]  And this doesn't mean that you're going to care and feed for them or anything.
[35:22.640 --> 35:26.600]  What it means is that you type in your ZIP Code and you type in your email address.
[35:26.940 --> 35:31.080]  And we absolutely do accept, like, anonymized email addresses.
[35:31.920 --> 35:37.120]  And you can type it in and then we'll send you an email when your member of Congress is about to have a vote.
[35:38.240 --> 35:40.520]  Right before they're going to have a big vote, we'll let you know.
[35:40.640 --> 35:42.300]  Or if there's a town hall meeting, we'll let you know.
[35:42.840 --> 35:45.040]  So you can go and you can call them and you can talk to them.
[35:46.420 --> 35:50.080]  You should also register to vote, even if you have no intention of voting.
[35:50.520 --> 35:51.500]  It always helps.
[35:51.820 --> 35:54.080]  Members of Congress do have listings of addresses.
[35:55.180 --> 35:59.760]  And if you're either in New York or Massachusetts, I have voter registration forms.
[35:59.940 --> 36:01.080]  You don't even need a stamp.
[36:01.360 --> 36:02.600]  You don't have to spend any money.
[36:05.340 --> 36:07.300]  If you're a felon, you can't vote, I'm really sorry.
[36:09.600 --> 36:11.180]  Call and write Congress when it's appropriate.
[36:11.380 --> 36:15.520]  And most importantly, it just happens that during August, a lot of members of Congress are home.
[36:15.940 --> 36:19.060]  And so there's town hall meetings which we'll mail you about.
[36:19.460 --> 36:21.680]  But you can also go and have an appointment with them.
[36:22.020 --> 36:23.500]  You know, you live here.
[36:23.680 --> 36:24.900]  You're a computing professional.
[36:25.500 --> 36:25.820]  Right?
[36:26.120 --> 36:27.660]  They don't know what you do for a living.
[36:27.900 --> 36:29.260]  You may not do anything good for a living.
[36:29.360 --> 36:30.540]  Maybe you do something good for a living.
[36:30.640 --> 36:34.400]  But if you're a very technical person, you have an opportunity to educate them.
[36:34.520 --> 36:38.720]  You have an opportunity to lobby them and explain to them that strong encryption is really necessary.
[36:39.180 --> 36:54.860]  And that if an encryption that you and I can use is so weak that it can be broken in a day by law enforcement, then it can probably also be broken in a day by rogue nations and organized crime, and people who don't have your best interests at heart, and criminals looking to defraud you.
[36:55.640 --> 36:57.480]  That... it's equally bad.
[37:03.620 --> 37:05.140]  Alright, so here's some information.
[37:06.740 --> 37:12.620]  If you're interested in encryption, more information on encryption and the legislation, check out this website, crypto.com.
[37:13.300 --> 37:15.920]  Junk email, I mentioned, go to junkemail.org.
[37:16.120 --> 37:17.320]  We're at vtw.org.
[37:18.280 --> 37:20.960]  The Democracy Net site is there.
[37:21.240 --> 37:34.420]  If you want to read the decision for the Communications Decency Act that the Citizens Internet Empowerment Coalition was a party to, and read nine Supreme Court justices kick the government's ass, you might want to go there.
[37:35.240 --> 37:37.720]  The New York State law that was overturned.
[37:37.760 --> 37:41.720]  If you want to read the transcripts from the trial, you can go to our nonprofit site there.
[37:42.220 --> 37:46.740]  And finally, the one that got cut off, we run what we call the Big Board.
[37:46.860 --> 37:50.540]  It's a place where we try and keep pointers to all the current legislation that affects the Internet.
[37:51.140 --> 37:52.920]  And this is our pointer to it.
[37:53.240 --> 38:00.540]  And from there, it's got jumping off points to the Library of Congress and to Thomas, so you can actually read the legislation as well as our opinion of it.
[38:01.220 --> 38:02.360]  And I think that's it.
[38:03.040 --> 38:04.940]  I'll leave it over now to Steve Barber now.
[38:05.120 --> 38:08.100]  He's a lawyer, the only lawyer on this panel.
[38:08.260 --> 38:12.020]  And he'll talk about some of the more interesting pieces of legislation in Congress right now.
[38:17.610 --> 38:18.550]  One more thing.
[38:19.410 --> 38:21.390]  The most intelligent question gets a t-shirt.
[38:22.110 --> 38:25.590]  This is the gag me with a flag t-shirt.
[38:41.430 --> 38:41.790]  Hello.
[38:42.190 --> 38:42.250]  Okay.
[38:47.580 --> 38:48.520]  Thanks a lot, Shabir.
[38:49.760 --> 38:52.200]  I just wanted to talk about a few of the...
[38:52.200 --> 38:52.720]  Wait, are we on?
[38:52.920 --> 38:53.300]  We're not on.
[38:53.740 --> 38:54.360]  This works.
[38:54.440 --> 38:54.840]  What's the matter?
[38:56.580 --> 38:57.640]  No, I like this.
[38:57.700 --> 38:59.680]  This is kind of a fun thing to play with.
[39:02.100 --> 39:15.760]  But five years ago when we started kind of looking at what it would mean to have civil rights in cyberspace, basically my colleagues and I who were interested in this started talking up the idea and found out that no one knew what the hell we were talking about.
[39:16.800 --> 39:23.920]  We spent a lot of our time kind of explaining to legislators and law enforcement officials what the internet was.
[39:26.180 --> 39:28.240]  Now things have changed quite a bit.
[39:28.600 --> 39:33.920]  Now the kind of things that used to be introduced used to have effects on computers inadvertently.
[39:34.960 --> 39:38.460]  Effects on networks that would screw them up when people weren't thinking about them.
[39:38.740 --> 39:44.040]  The difference between then and now is now they're really thinking about it and now they're intentionally trying to screw it up.
[39:45.460 --> 39:47.380]  So vigilance is kind of even more important.
[39:48.740 --> 39:52.680]  Fortunately, since the internet is now kind of mainstream, you know, like my grandmother's on there now.
[39:53.800 --> 39:56.140]  There's plenty of organizations that are taking a look at this.
[39:56.260 --> 39:59.600]  The ACLU jumped in a couple of years ago and has really been doing a bang up job.
[40:00.060 --> 40:05.880]  But I think it's up to groups like VTW to keep trying to be on the front edge, trying to look at what no one's really looking at.
[40:06.080 --> 40:09.880]  And pull that out and get everybody out and talk to their congressmen to really do that.
[40:10.880 --> 40:15.180]  Here's a couple of areas that you want to get up to date on.
[40:15.580 --> 40:18.340]  For example, there's encryption, which Shabir talked a bit about.
[40:18.620 --> 40:19.820]  He talked about one bill.
[40:19.900 --> 40:26.080]  There's like four or five other bills already introduced in congress with various degrees of reasonableness and various degrees of horribleness.
[40:27.400 --> 40:31.440]  Shabir was talking about the safe bill, which I guess most people think is the most reasonable.
[40:33.440 --> 40:35.740]  But he didn't talk too much about the process.
[40:35.740 --> 40:39.800]  And what happens after these things get introduced and passed and something reasonable happens?
[40:40.160 --> 40:45.520]  There's all these committee meetings and conference things where you can introduce things at the last minute without hearings.
[40:45.600 --> 40:48.560]  And that's where groups like VTW come in and try to jump in.
[40:49.560 --> 40:52.780]  CTT, ACLU try to jump in and say, hey, this shouldn't be happening.
[40:52.920 --> 40:54.340]  You've got to make this open at least.
[40:55.180 --> 40:56.800]  So there's encryption things happening.
[40:57.040 --> 40:59.420]  There's still some First Amendment legislation being introduced.
[40:59.960 --> 41:04.480]  You probably know that the Communications Decency Act got overturned by the Supreme Court a couple of months ago.
[41:04.480 --> 41:14.820]  Well, all the people that wanted to see that happen have gone and introduced some bills into congress to see what the boundaries of that are and maybe get some decency restrictions back into congress.
[41:15.000 --> 41:17.380]  Again, some of that, you know, maybe you do want to keep porn from kids.
[41:17.520 --> 41:18.800]  Maybe people think that's a good thing.
[41:19.300 --> 41:21.480]  But you really got to look at the boundaries of those things.
[41:23.640 --> 41:26.380]  Junk email legislation, there's three or four bills happening.
[41:27.920 --> 41:29.420]  It's even hard to tell them apart.
[41:29.680 --> 41:32.000]  And, again, look at the junkemail.org website.
[41:32.200 --> 41:37.580]  There's a fantastic table that kind of outlines what's going on and what the differences between them are.
[41:39.520 --> 41:45.320]  There's bills on election information, how election information is going to be made public or not made public by the way.
[41:45.360 --> 41:50.600]  And there's all kinds of fights around that, mostly having to do with funding and who gets to know what when.
[41:50.600 --> 41:55.320]  And lots of intriguing political stuff that only politicians really care about, but it affects us all.
[41:56.580 --> 41:57.940]  There's also taxation internet.
[41:58.160 --> 42:04.840]  You might have heard Bill Clinton say, come out and say, well, you know, internet commerce ought to be fairly free.
[42:04.920 --> 42:13.880]  And there's a couple of bills to make it, not that you can't ever tax things that happen on the internet, but make it so that you can't have a lot of extra special taxes.
[42:14.340 --> 42:19.520]  And then, finally, there's a piece of legislation on internet gambling, and I'll get into some detail in a while.
[42:19.520 --> 42:27.860]  And you might wonder why internet gambling is interesting to hackers, but it's kind of interesting to everybody and what they're trying to criminalize there.
[42:28.860 --> 42:30.080]  What are we looking at here?
[42:30.740 --> 42:31.640]  I don't think we're looking at anything.
[42:31.900 --> 42:32.000]  Oh.
[42:34.580 --> 42:36.400]  www.junkemail.org.
[42:40.940 --> 42:41.380]  Okay.
[42:41.640 --> 42:47.360]  I want to say a couple of things about privacy, because Shabir touched on rights of privacy and encryption and things like that.
[42:47.920 --> 42:59.760]  One of the things that most people that aren't lawyers don't think about too much is that the right of privacy in the United States is kind of an iffy thing.
[43:00.060 --> 43:01.060]  If you look at the U.S.
[43:01.160 --> 43:03.740]  Constitution, you won't see the word privacy mentioned there anywhere.
[43:04.200 --> 43:09.220]  It took about, I don't know, 150 years for the Supreme Court to come out and say there is a right of privacy.
[43:09.620 --> 43:12.400]  And they kind of said, well, there is one.
[43:12.580 --> 43:13.540]  They don't mention it.
[43:13.680 --> 43:21.600]  We kind of found bits and pieces of it in the 14th Amendment and the 9th Amendment and all those things that say that, you know, you need a warrant and you can't quarter troops in your house.
[43:21.640 --> 43:23.360]  Well, it seems to have something to do with privacy.
[43:23.360 --> 43:28.080]  So the Supreme Court said, yes, there is some right of privacy, but nobody really knows what the contours are.
[43:30.040 --> 43:34.940]  There's two kinds of privacy that come out when you talk about privacy in a legal sense.
[43:35.100 --> 43:42.320]  There's privacy that has to do with maintaining your independence to make really important personal decisions, like the right to abortion or contraception.
[43:44.120 --> 43:50.040]  There's also what gets talked about, what we've been talking about, which is the right to avoid disclosure of personal matters.
[43:50.040 --> 43:54.620]  That's where encryption comes in the most usually.
[43:57.080 --> 44:10.020]  A lot of times this is simplified as not just privacy, but they call it data privacy because there's an aspect of it that has to do with disclosing your personal information, like with cookies using Netscape and things like that.
[44:11.120 --> 44:17.700]  That's a particular area where the United States is fantastically weak in protecting an individual's privacy to that kind of information.
[44:17.700 --> 44:27.920]  If you go over to Europe, there's a whole lot of laws that protect an individual's privacy, where if you're doing business with someone, you have to explicitly opt to have that information released.
[44:28.180 --> 44:31.660]  There are certain things that have to be complied with for that data to cross state borders.
[44:32.180 --> 44:35.080]  None of that exists, well, a little bit of it exists in the United States.
[44:35.180 --> 44:37.620]  It's like a law that's 20 years old that's intensely lame.
[44:38.180 --> 44:41.440]  And there's a couple of bills in Congress now that will strengthen that.
[44:43.680 --> 44:45.040]  It can be both good and bad.
[44:45.180 --> 44:46.500]  Like everything, it cuts both ways.
[44:46.660 --> 44:48.920]  Maybe you want people to know you're interested in certain things.
[44:49.520 --> 44:55.280]  But in general, people can buy and sell your personal information.
[44:55.280 --> 44:56.700]  There's not a lot you can do about it.
[45:00.420 --> 45:10.060]  It's also important to notice that when you're talking about privacy and releasing information, you have to distinguish between government action and private action.
[45:10.060 --> 45:15.080]  You might be able to get a pretty strong bill having the government protect the rights to your personal data.
[45:16.400 --> 45:19.960]  The problem is most of the disclosing that goes out there isn't done by the government.
[45:19.960 --> 45:24.660]  It's done by private corporations like TRW and all the credit check corporations.
[45:25.020 --> 45:28.700]  So there's kind of a limit as to how much the government can actually protect what's going on.
[45:32.140 --> 45:32.580]  Okay.
[45:32.580 --> 45:36.120]  A couple of... I'll leave that into the quick discussion of the SAFE bill.
[45:36.220 --> 45:37.780]  I think Shabir talked about it pretty well.
[45:37.940 --> 45:39.900]  But he talked about having a right to encryption.
[45:40.120 --> 45:42.900]  Well, yeah, maybe you have a right to encryption.
[45:43.200 --> 45:44.880]  That's not... that's solidly established.
[45:44.900 --> 45:45.720]  I think you do.
[45:46.460 --> 45:48.160]  But what is the limits of that right?
[45:48.580 --> 46:00.520]  SAFE kind of goes out and says that the Congress will say, fine, there's a certain limited right to encryption in the sense that we're not going to have mandatory key escrow.
[46:00.660 --> 46:01.280]  That's terrific.
[46:01.480 --> 46:02.320]  That's a huge step.
[46:02.560 --> 46:05.620]  That's one of the reasons why I think a lot of people support that bill.
[46:05.980 --> 46:08.040]  But there's something that SAFE doesn't do.
[46:08.420 --> 46:17.780]  SAFE doesn't say that there's absolutely no right to ever say give over your encryption key if you've been suspected of committing a crime or there's a warrant or something like that.
[46:17.780 --> 46:26.160]  If the law enforcement officers can do that today, and there's some argument about whether they can or they can't, they'll be able to have those same rights after SAFE as before SAFE.
[46:26.340 --> 46:27.960]  So there's still things to talk about there.
[46:31.800 --> 46:34.120]  I'm just kind of jumping around to a few different topics.
[46:34.340 --> 46:36.300]  Let's talk about internet gambling for a second.
[46:36.380 --> 46:37.860]  It's kind of a random topic.
[46:38.080 --> 46:44.700]  But before the panel, we were sitting down saying, what's the unifying theme of this topic, of this panel?
[46:44.700 --> 46:47.560]  And the unifying theme of this panel is bad legislation.
[46:49.360 --> 46:50.700]  All of it related to the internet.
[46:50.980 --> 46:55.840]  If you look at any bill, you'll find pieces of things that weren't all that well thought out.
[46:56.060 --> 47:01.720]  You know, a lot of the process of legislation is kind of random or a lot of interests are in there that you don't want to have in there.
[47:02.860 --> 47:17.700]  The Internet Gambling Act, which is a Senate Bill 474, in general has a bunch of language that basically makes it more clear that it's illegal to do gambling kind of things online as it was to do offline.
[47:18.580 --> 47:23.220]  It's kind of really hard to argue with that from any principled way except it's annoying.
[47:25.660 --> 47:30.940]  So most of it is just kind of going down that path, extending communications and telecommunications and things like that.
[47:33.880 --> 47:37.340]  But there's a couple of things that are worth talking about in terms of internet freedom.
[47:37.340 --> 48:00.520]  Like, for example, there's a duty for a common carrier today, if they find out their services are going to be used for facilitating betting and wagering, to, if the federal authorities or law enforcement authorities notifies them that their facilities are going to be used or have been being used for illegal gambling activity,
[48:00.600 --> 48:05.060]  they have to immediately stop providing service to the person that's doing that.
[48:05.340 --> 48:07.980]  They have to give them notice, but they basically have to comply.
[48:08.380 --> 48:19.500]  Now, this new bill extends that obligation from common carriers, which are typically phone companies, to any internet computer service provider, which would be, you know, your local ISP.
[48:20.180 --> 48:22.240]  Probably a lot of you are local ISPs.
[48:23.420 --> 48:25.840]  Because almost anybody can be an ISP these days.
[48:25.840 --> 48:35.080]  If you were on a website, you know, you could probably be, if you have a web server on your machine, you could probably be caught under this act and you would have to comply with a government order like that.
[48:35.620 --> 48:40.700]  It does kind of give you a little bit of a safe harbor if you comply with the order.
[48:40.860 --> 48:45.180]  You would be immune for any problems you cause people by complying with the order.
[48:45.580 --> 48:52.560]  But it doesn't solve the tricky question of, well, this thing was on my website and I didn't know about it, and somebody else did it.
[48:52.620 --> 48:55.200]  You might still be liable under that, under this act.
[48:55.200 --> 48:57.520]  There's no safe harbor there.
[48:58.720 --> 49:07.540]  Just a random thing that the Gambling Act does is actually expands the range of activities in all media that are considered gambling.
[49:07.720 --> 49:12.540]  It used to be pretty narrow, betting on sports or sports events or contests.
[49:12.760 --> 49:16.380]  Now it's kind of anything that doesn't fall into a few different categories.
[49:16.680 --> 49:28.100]  So anything that you might want to have a contract that bets on the outcome of something that isn't a stock and isn't an insurance contract, that would be considered gambling under this new law.
[49:28.300 --> 49:30.000]  And there's a lot of things that could fall under that.
[49:30.820 --> 49:33.240]  Finally, there's a First Amendment problem with this bill.
[49:34.960 --> 49:40.880]  The existing gambling legislation already criminalizes providing information to assist in the placement of bets and wagers.
[49:40.880 --> 49:46.700]  But this new act, to me there's a First Amendment problem with that right there.
[49:46.820 --> 49:48.440]  I don't know if that's been challenged seriously.
[49:50.040 --> 49:57.780]  Because providing information that isn't used obviously in an existing crime, that's free speech as far as I'm concerned.
[49:58.320 --> 50:06.880]  And the new act kind of recognizes a piece of that by providing an explicit exception for news reporting about the placing of bets as not being criminalizable under this law.
[50:07.360 --> 50:14.140]  That just kind of begs the question, well what about everything that isn't news, that isn't clearly involved in the crime?
[50:14.380 --> 50:17.360]  That's a broad range of free speech and that's a problem with this bill.
[50:19.200 --> 50:25.260]  So we could probably go down the list of all the 20 or 30 bills and find particular constitutional problems with them.
[50:25.980 --> 50:31.780]  The point is, you need to take a look at these things and get involved when you find things that concern you.
[50:31.780 --> 50:40.220]  And go out and contact your legislators and work with groups like VTW, CDT, ACLU and make sure that things happen in the right way.
[50:40.360 --> 50:42.260]  So you don't end up going to jail for things that you shouldn't be.
[50:42.740 --> 50:43.460]  Thanks a lot.
[50:51.150 --> 50:52.530]  We're taking questions now, right?
[50:53.650 --> 50:54.210]  All right.
[50:54.430 --> 50:55.550]  Best question gets a t-shirt.
[51:01.620 --> 51:03.580]  There's a microphone by the slide projector.
[51:03.800 --> 51:05.600]  Hey, can we put up junk email dot org please?
[51:07.000 --> 51:08.300]  It's got the best art.
[51:08.940 --> 51:10.180]  Yeah, you can go into that in more detail.
[51:12.840 --> 51:15.880]  If we put a picture of a spam cam we would have been sued by Hormel.
[51:17.760 --> 51:19.180]  We thought about that.
[51:22.900 --> 51:23.740]  First question.
[51:24.520 --> 51:28.860]  Do any of the present bills address the issue of steganography directly?
[51:29.980 --> 51:31.000]  Yes, I am.
[51:32.340 --> 51:33.300]  That's a good question.
[51:33.300 --> 51:39.860]  Steganography actually for everybody that doesn't know is the art of hiding a message inside something else so it doesn't look like the message.
[51:40.960 --> 51:44.700]  Programs like Stego and so forth actually hide your message inside a graphic.
[51:45.580 --> 51:48.720]  And what most people consider fuzziness or white noise.
[51:48.960 --> 51:55.900]  So you send a graphic to somebody and people who are observing the transmission from you to the other person, all they see is a graphic.
[51:56.080 --> 52:00.520]  But the person at the other end actually can extract a message from the noise in the picture.
[52:00.520 --> 52:02.460]  The answer is I don't know.
[52:02.820 --> 52:04.640]  Steganography is one of the...
[52:04.640 --> 52:06.600]  Encryption is sort of straight encryption.
[52:06.680 --> 52:08.560]  It's been the focus of all legislation.
[52:08.740 --> 52:10.940]  And I don't remember if steganography comes under that.
[52:11.120 --> 52:11.260]  Do you know?
[52:11.680 --> 52:15.080]  Well, I don't think any of the bills specifically mention it.
[52:15.180 --> 52:21.620]  But the definition of encryption that's being used in these bills is clearly broad enough to cover steganography.
[52:22.200 --> 52:25.360]  Steganography is encryption and they define encryption fairly well.
[52:25.360 --> 52:27.920]  Do you have a favorite steganographic program?
[52:28.660 --> 52:29.640]  Probably S-Tools.
[52:29.940 --> 52:30.580]  S-Tools.
[52:30.780 --> 52:31.080]  Alright.
[52:34.660 --> 52:36.020]  That was informative, wasn't it?
[52:36.280 --> 52:37.260]  That was a pretty good question.
[52:37.560 --> 52:38.520]  He's in line for a t-shirt.
[52:38.660 --> 52:39.180]  Alright, alright.
[52:39.760 --> 52:40.080]  Next.
[52:41.060 --> 52:54.900]  Does the Pennsylvania law, any use of any crypto above, let's say, 128-bit RC4 is just hiding your data and just using that.
[52:55.060 --> 52:56.440]  Can you be hosed under that?
[53:02.990 --> 53:09.190]  The Pennsylvania bill that I quoted some excerpts from doesn't specifically address encryption.
[53:09.530 --> 53:09.810]  Hiding.
[53:09.970 --> 53:22.510]  It addresses basically hardware, software or information or plans related to anything that could be used for the unauthorized access to telecommunication services.
[53:22.510 --> 53:24.270]  That's pretty broad and vague.
[53:24.590 --> 53:25.570]  Well, vague at least.
[53:26.090 --> 53:31.310]  And so it doesn't address that, encryption at all.
[53:31.910 --> 53:57.230]  As far as I know, while it does address, while it doesn't address specifically encryption, it does provide criminal penalties for anyone, let me find anything here, pertaining to basically concealing the originator or receiver of an electronic communication.
[53:57.850 --> 54:27.690]  So, if you encrypted a file that had your identity in it and passed that file to someone, and law enforcement found that file and was using it in part of a criminal investigation, the fact that you used software to encrypt your identity in that file could conceivably use to build a case against you.
[54:27.810 --> 54:31.410]  So, if these all sound like logical stretches, you're right.
[54:31.670 --> 54:38.390]  But I learned from experience in my case that prosecutors are masters at stretching these definitions.
[54:38.610 --> 54:43.850]  Even though they're really vague, they'll stretch them even beyond the realms of that vagueness.
[54:44.110 --> 54:48.190]  So, don't say, well, that's so vague, who's going to come to that kind of a stretch of imagination?
[54:48.550 --> 54:50.010]  These people are masters at that.
[54:50.710 --> 54:55.210]  So, don't put it past them for trying something like that.
[54:56.950 --> 54:57.830]  Thank you.
[54:58.030 --> 55:00.130]  Anti-crypto legislation is already on the books.
[55:00.350 --> 55:00.490]  Great.
[55:01.870 --> 55:08.750]  You can generally expect everything that shows up in these federal laws to be introduced in many of the states as things go forward.
[55:11.850 --> 55:12.430]  Yes.
[55:12.870 --> 55:29.790]  The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania already has privacy laws versus, like, when you get arrested for DUI, you have the option not to take the test that's considered your personal privacy, but then they automatically consider you guilty of the crime.
[55:31.630 --> 55:36.810]  And you end up getting worse than if you'd just taken the test and failed it.
[55:37.430 --> 55:54.490]  What's to keep them from doing the same thing if they pass a privacy law saying that they can't read our encrypted stuff, and we won't give them the key, but by doing that, we automatically say we're guilty of whatever they want to charge us with.
[55:54.690 --> 55:58.790]  Steve and I, actually, three of us were arguing about this this morning.
[55:59.650 --> 56:06.210]  I had read, I had thought that I had read in one of the versions of the SAFE legislation.
[56:06.230 --> 56:10.130]  Can you bring that paragraph up you have on your laptop, Steve?
[56:11.310 --> 56:11.750]  Sure.
[56:11.750 --> 56:29.690]  I seem to remember reading something in at least one of the incarnations of the SAFE legislation that criminal penalties, in other words, a federal felony, is a federal felony to refuse to provide your encryption keys to a law enforcement agency if they had a warrant for,
[56:30.630 --> 56:31.670]  you know, a search warrant.
[56:33.110 --> 56:36.230]  Apparently, it's a little more specific.
[56:36.530 --> 56:37.650]  Why don't I read it?
[56:38.350 --> 56:44.370]  It says, unlawful use of encryption, this is Title 18, I assume, Section 2805?
[56:44.750 --> 56:46.690]  United States Federal Criminal Statutes.
[56:47.330 --> 56:50.370]  Title 18, United States Code, Title 18, Section 2805.
[56:50.490 --> 56:51.110]  This is a bill.
[56:51.270 --> 56:51.790]  It's not a law.
[56:51.970 --> 56:52.450]  Ah, okay.
[56:52.510 --> 56:53.610]  This is a proposed bill.
[56:53.930 --> 56:57.730]  So we have a chance to keep this thing from getting enacted.
[56:58.030 --> 56:59.570]  Do you know when the votes, when this is going to go?
[56:59.570 --> 57:00.790]  Well, I can talk about that.
[57:01.390 --> 57:05.810]  The SAFE bill has had, for a long time, a provision like that.
[57:05.970 --> 57:08.950]  And it was worked on and narrowed by the ACLU.
[57:10.530 --> 57:11.270]  The SAFE bill.
[57:11.410 --> 57:12.150]  This is the SAFE bill.
[57:12.190 --> 57:12.310]  Yeah.
[57:13.230 --> 57:13.910]  I'm thinking of the history.
[57:14.890 --> 57:15.530]  Legislative history.
[57:15.670 --> 57:16.350]  Legislative history.
[57:16.790 --> 57:24.290]  The ACLU, you know, did a good job at trying to narrow it as much as possible while still keeping the bill from getting scuttled.
[57:24.990 --> 57:26.830]  And what's left is there.
[57:26.950 --> 57:30.870]  You can actually go to the website at www.crypto.com and read it.
[57:32.070 --> 57:34.810]  And find out, you know, learn more about it and make the call yourself.
[57:35.710 --> 57:38.490]  Let me read Section 2805 as proposed.
[57:38.910 --> 57:43.070]  It's entitled, Unlawful Use of Encryption in Furtherance of a Criminal Act.
[57:43.750 --> 57:46.310]  And it doesn't say, it doesn't limit that criminal.
[57:46.370 --> 57:47.410]  It could be any criminal act.
[57:48.530 --> 57:59.010]  Any person who willfully uses encryption in furtherance of the commission of a criminal offense for which the person may be prosecuted in a court of competent jurisdiction, which I assume that means any court.
[57:59.090 --> 58:00.170]  Does that limit it to federal courts?
[58:00.330 --> 58:01.190]  I don't think it does.
[58:01.990 --> 58:02.050]  Yeah.
[58:02.610 --> 58:04.670]  Jonah's saying no, so I'll go with what Jonah says.
[58:06.510 --> 58:09.090]  So they'd have to bring a separate prosecution.
[58:09.490 --> 58:09.930]  Oh, yeah.
[58:10.170 --> 58:10.470]  Yeah.
[58:10.710 --> 58:18.370]  If you were charged with some crime, it doesn't seem to even limit it to federal offenses or, or, or, or Fennelian offenses.
[58:18.530 --> 58:25.250]  If you were charged with any crime the way I read it, and I may be wrong because I'm not a lawyer, and a search warrant, you can say your house is raided.
[58:25.350 --> 58:27.230]  Let's come down to a practical situation.
[58:27.550 --> 58:28.450]  Your house is raided.
[58:28.510 --> 58:29.130]  They're a warrant.
[58:29.250 --> 58:29.970]  They raid your house.
[58:31.730 --> 58:32.730]  They go through your hard drive.
[58:32.870 --> 58:34.750]  The law enforcement officers go through your hard drive.
[58:34.890 --> 58:36.030]  They find an encrypted file.
[58:37.270 --> 58:50.730]  If you've been charged with any other criminal, if you've been charged with a criminal offense, and they find an encrypted file on your hard drive, if you do not, if you use encryption on any file on that hard drive, and... In the furtherance of the crime.
[58:50.970 --> 58:51.750]  In the furtherance of the crime.
[58:51.890 --> 58:58.770]  However, if you refuse to provide, yeah, they'd have to show that the information in there was used in furtherance of the commission of that crime.
[58:58.890 --> 59:17.250]  However, you can bet, you can bet your ass that if you do not provide them with the encryption keys for that file on your hard drive, they will say that that information And the fact that you didn't provide them with the keys almost proves that fact.
[59:17.610 --> 59:21.650]  If that sounds like a stretch to you, you haven't dealt with these people before.
[59:22.930 --> 59:23.510]  Go ahead.
[59:24.110 --> 59:26.350]  We should move on to the next question, but I do want to answer that.
[59:26.450 --> 59:38.010]  The goal of that is to take people that, for example, would encrypt information relating to the criminal act that they are committing and use it to try and avoid prosecution.
[59:38.350 --> 59:42.990]  And I think it's unnecessary, to be honest, but... Yes?
[59:45.450 --> 01:00:01.210]  Okay, it's great that they're doing all this talking about making these laws and that kind of thing, but in the days when any 2-bit wares puppy with a decent computer connection can get a $350 copy of Photoshop for free, how are they planning to enforce all this stuff?
[01:00:02.010 --> 01:00:05.390]  So you're saying, like, how is copyright enforceable on the Internet?
[01:00:05.810 --> 01:00:12.570]  No, I'm saying that copyright obviously isn't enforceable on the Internet, so how are these laws going to be enforceable on the Internet?
[01:00:12.850 --> 01:00:13.890]  Very selectively.
[01:00:14.570 --> 01:00:14.750]  Right.
[01:00:14.990 --> 01:00:16.250]  Same as any other law.
[01:00:16.350 --> 01:00:18.230]  How many farebeaters do they catch on the subway?
[01:00:21.690 --> 01:00:29.330]  The, I mean, copyright is a very hard issue for a lot of people to figure out how it translates to the net.
[01:00:29.330 --> 01:00:32.790]  And what you point out is exactly why.
[01:00:33.070 --> 01:00:44.130]  Because it's not clear that in a world where you can make an exact duplicate of anything millions of times and have it cost you no more than the first copy, it's not clear if copyright works the same way or not.
[01:00:44.390 --> 01:00:55.190]  And the counterside of this is that, you know, if Bernie writes a piece of software for reprogramming his cell phone and he wants to make some money off it because he maybe, you know, spent a couple of years...
a01:00:55.190 --> 01:00:56.070]  Or give it away at HOPE.
[01:00:56.490 --> 01:00:56.810]  Yeah.
[01:00:57.130 --> 01:01:03.630]  If he doesn't want to give it away, if he wants to sell it for 50 bucks a copy, he's probably got a right to be compensated for it.
[01:01:03.750 --> 01:01:05.130]  But, you know, how does that work?
[01:01:05.730 --> 01:01:06.470]  It's not clear.
[01:01:07.490 --> 01:01:08.170]  Next.
[01:01:08.590 --> 01:01:11.090]  Just a small comment on what Bernie said.
[01:01:11.730 --> 01:01:25.990]  As an example to selectiveness where the internet laws are applied, the Republican... the People's Republic of China does not allow anybody an access to the out-dat hierarchy of these news groups.
[01:01:26.630 --> 01:01:27.030]  Right?
[01:01:27.910 --> 01:01:29.330]  Just want to point that out.
[01:01:29.850 --> 01:01:30.430]  It's the truth.
[01:01:30.430 --> 01:01:31.030]  Yep?
[01:01:32.930 --> 01:01:40.970]  Yeah, I read about legislation that's trying to be enforced on gambling on the internet.
[01:01:43.870 --> 01:01:59.930]  By jurisdiction, by according to where you live, like if you're in a state that doesn't allow gambling, that it would be illegal for you to gamble in, say, Guam or Vegas or wherever it is legal.
[01:02:01.810 --> 01:02:03.930]  But it's the World Wide Web.
[01:02:04.750 --> 01:02:11.870]  So, wherever you go, I mean, how do they plan to enforce this?
[01:02:11.950 --> 01:02:20.570]  That's about as stupid as trying to censor the internet using the, you know, Communications Decency Act.
[01:02:20.690 --> 01:02:21.530]  That's exactly right.
[01:02:21.670 --> 01:02:39.830]  In fact, if you look at one of our websites, www.vtwctr.org, you'll see we did a rundown of a particular case in Minnesota where they actually tried to drag the owner of a gambling website in Belize into court in Minnesota.
[01:02:40.170 --> 01:02:41.870]  They had no assets in Minnesota.
[01:02:42.150 --> 01:02:43.890]  The owners had never been to Minnesota.
[01:02:44.230 --> 01:02:45.930]  And as far as they could tell,
[01:02:52.690 --> 01:02:59.950]  they had never been to Minnesota, but they decided because gambling was illegal in Minnesota and it was on the web that it would be a crime in Minnesota.
[01:03:00.150 --> 01:03:00.590]  And you know what?
[01:03:00.770 --> 01:03:01.450]  They got diddly.
[01:03:01.770 --> 01:03:02.770]  They got squat.
[01:03:03.150 --> 01:03:08.910]  All they did was prevent those people who own that gambling server from vacationing in Minnesota.
[01:03:09.110 --> 01:03:09.750]  That's all they did.
[01:03:09.910 --> 01:03:11.010]  It's absolutely unenforceable.
[01:03:11.010 --> 01:03:15.310]  And that's what people say about this gambling bill is that it's absurd.
[01:03:15.690 --> 01:03:23.870]  Instead of actually trying to restrict gambling on the internet, you should just, you know, address it as if it's going to happen because it is.
[01:03:31.140 --> 01:03:31.560]  Mic's off.
[01:03:31.600 --> 01:03:32.160]  You're missing a T.
[01:03:34.760 --> 01:03:35.340]  Mic's off.
[01:03:38.340 --> 01:03:38.760]  Testing.
[01:03:42.300 --> 01:03:46.480]  That would be the equivalent of, you know, if I wanted to take a vacation to Vegas.
[01:03:46.820 --> 01:03:49.580]  I mean, when I'm using the internet, that's basically what I'm doing.
[01:03:49.580 --> 01:03:50.840]  I'm taking myself there.
[01:03:52.200 --> 01:03:54.920]  Yeah, I think all this jurisdictional stuff is absurd.
[01:03:56.620 --> 01:04:02.240]  These law enforcement agencies seem to want to, like, stretch their jurisdiction everywhere they can possibly do it.
[01:04:02.480 --> 01:04:14.020]  And like I said, if the law enforcement agency has a particular target in mind or an individual they want to target, they will stretch the definitions of these laws as much as they can get away with.
[01:04:14.020 --> 01:04:27.320]  And even if what they get away with is unconstitutional, you have to then challenge that, which takes a lot of time, money, lots of money, good lawyers, and it's a big fight.
[01:04:29.160 --> 01:04:45.920]  If sometime in the future the law enforcement community could force you to provide them with your key, would it be possible to create a key in which you could take the Fifth Amendment and not provide them with it?
[01:04:46.000 --> 01:04:54.500]  So your key would be like, I hacked the Pentagon and oil feds suck or something, where you would incriminate yourself by giving them the key.
[01:04:55.840 --> 01:04:56.920]  That's really clever.
[01:04:59.540 --> 01:05:02.220]  That's a good question.
[01:05:02.840 --> 01:05:03.920]  That's a good t-shirt one.
[01:05:05.620 --> 01:05:08.320]  Well, I don't know if you're going to get a solid answer on that.
[01:05:09.540 --> 01:05:13.000]  There's different categories of things to which the Fifth Amendment applies.
[01:05:13.220 --> 01:05:15.620]  I'm just telling you the way the law reads, not the way I think it should be.
[01:05:19.840 --> 01:05:25.100]  Things that are communicative, things that have kind of content, you can take the First Amendment about.
[01:05:25.100 --> 01:05:30.620]  But things like giving a sample of your hair, the court has ruled, you can't take the First Amendment about.
[01:05:30.720 --> 01:05:32.240]  If they want a piece of your hair, they're going to get it.
[01:05:32.480 --> 01:05:36.560]  So the question is, is an encryption key more like hair or more like speech?
[01:05:37.040 --> 01:05:38.680]  And we don't really know yet.
[01:05:39.080 --> 01:05:40.720]  We're going to have to see how that works out in court.
[01:05:40.720 --> 01:05:42.540]  Sounds pretty hairy to me.
[01:05:45.580 --> 01:05:49.080]  You mentioned a ban on strong crypto.
[01:05:50.160 --> 01:05:56.020]  Would that just... I mean, they couldn't throw everyone in jail who uses PGP.
[01:05:56.240 --> 01:05:58.120]  So what would they do?
[01:05:58.440 --> 01:05:59.080]  Would they just...
[01:05:59.080 --> 01:06:02.780]  Well, first thing that they would do would be make sure that no one sold it commercially.
[01:06:03.560 --> 01:06:15.780]  And so now all the commercial products that you enjoy, like the stuff put out now by PGP as a company, the stuff put out by Netscape, even Microsoft, if you happen to be an Internet Explorer user, you couldn't get.
[01:06:15.780 --> 01:06:18.880]  The entire net would revert to shareware crypto.
[01:06:19.820 --> 01:06:24.420]  And that's a world you don't want to be in because that's a world where only the people in this room can get encryption.
[01:06:24.640 --> 01:06:29.340]  That's a world where my mother, your sister, your brother, none of those people can get crypto.
[01:06:29.560 --> 01:06:33.280]  And that means that we're a smaller target and we're prosecutable.
[01:06:37.070 --> 01:06:42.870]  Going back to what you said a moment ago about gambling in the state of Minnesota, you were talking about jurisdictional issues.
[01:06:43.090 --> 01:06:45.110]  I mean, just to comment, it's not really a question.
[01:06:45.110 --> 01:06:48.550]  But what about the case of the amateur action BPS in California?
[01:06:49.890 --> 01:06:50.970]  They went to jail.
[01:06:51.530 --> 01:06:52.050]  Exactly.
[01:06:52.510 --> 01:06:55.250]  He was in California and they shipped him off to Tennessee.
[01:06:55.630 --> 01:06:56.190]  It happens.
[01:06:57.690 --> 01:07:05.850]  There's also something more complicated about the amateur action case, including the mailing of restricted material, interstate.
[01:07:06.650 --> 01:07:10.030]  And that's really what was, unfortunately, the killer in that case.
[01:07:11.330 --> 01:07:12.030]  All right.
[01:07:12.310 --> 01:07:15.530]  The most important thing... Here's the most important thing I can think of to ask.
[01:07:15.590 --> 01:07:22.290]  Because the message that I'm really taking away from all of this is that activism is needed desperately.
[01:07:22.770 --> 01:07:32.230]  And the people in this room represent a segment of society that has an extremely high concentration of technical knowledge.
[01:07:32.230 --> 01:07:42.850]  Unfortunately, though, that doesn't necessarily imply anything about our communication skills and our ability to communicate this and to affect change in the political system.
[01:07:43.150 --> 01:07:59.170]  Now, as far as what you mentioned about adopting our legislators and communicating, educating, trying to change opinions, I think that myself and the people in this room could really benefit from some guidance as far...
[01:07:59.430 --> 01:08:04.710]  What would really empower us is some guidance as to what argument...
[01:08:04.710 --> 01:08:06.970]  What are the arguments that we can make?
[01:08:07.150 --> 01:08:11.310]  How can we try to explain...
[01:08:11.310 --> 01:08:18.570]  How can we try to disarm the people who are obviously panicked by this technology?
[01:08:18.570 --> 01:08:24.050]  How can we try to educate and how can we try to inform and how can we try to affect some positive change?
[01:08:25.090 --> 01:08:33.670]  One of the things that you'll see if you go into the Adopt Your Legislature Program or page on crypto.com is that we give you... you type in your ZIP Code.
[01:08:33.910 --> 01:08:37.370]  We give you your member of Congress's local and DC phone numbers.
[01:08:37.630 --> 01:08:43.930]  We give you pointers to documents that you can use as evidence as to why strong encryption is important.
[01:08:44.130 --> 01:08:45.610]  And then we give you talking points.
[01:08:46.110 --> 01:08:48.210]  You know, stress these points when you talk to them.
[01:08:48.210 --> 01:08:58.590]  In fact, if we tell you to go to a town hall meeting because there's going to be one in your district, we'll tell you whether or not your member of Congress is a supporter or an opposer of strong encryption based on their votes.
[01:08:58.810 --> 01:09:02.810]  And we'll tell you should you be congratulating them with a carrot or beating them with a stick.
[01:09:03.490 --> 01:09:04.510]  It's very important.
[01:09:04.790 --> 01:09:05.010]  All right.
[01:09:05.130 --> 01:09:05.990]  Very thorough job.
[01:09:08.750 --> 01:09:09.630]  That's a good question.
[01:09:09.650 --> 01:09:13.090]  And by the way, if you don't win first prize, I'll give you these lockpicks as a second prize.
[01:09:16.010 --> 01:09:30.830]  I suppose my question is really more metaphysical, perhaps rhetorical, but just wondering if anybody here believes that God could create a public key encryption system so strong that he couldn't hack it.
[01:09:44.710 --> 01:09:56.590]  What we found out today is that we really have to be involved in this process of getting into the legislation before it happens, you know, talking to members of Congress, finding out how bills go through the system.
[01:09:57.530 --> 01:10:05.730]  What we also found out is that it's very expensive for this to be done, not for us individually, but as a group to keep us informed.
[01:10:06.670 --> 01:10:15.410]  And what I think we should all do is take a look at our pocketbooks and see if maybe we can spare a few bucks, make a donation to these groups.
[01:10:15.670 --> 01:10:17.170]  They're really helping to protect us.
[01:10:17.430 --> 01:10:17.910]  Wait, wait, wait.
[01:10:17.910 --> 01:10:18.430]  Don't do that.
[01:10:18.550 --> 01:10:19.470]  We don't accept donations.
[01:10:19.790 --> 01:10:20.190]  You don't?
[01:10:20.330 --> 01:10:20.610]  No.
[01:10:20.610 --> 01:10:21.850]  I have money in hand.
[01:10:21.990 --> 01:10:22.350]  I was going to give you.
[01:10:22.770 --> 01:10:23.870]  If you...
[01:10:23.870 --> 01:10:24.030]  If you...
[01:10:24.030 --> 01:10:29.030]  I tell you honest to God, we have thought about taking like $25 and $40 a year donations.
[01:10:29.190 --> 01:10:35.130]  And we concluded that the bookkeeping, the taking track, keeping track of the money was not really worth it.
[01:10:35.270 --> 01:10:48.530]  Compared to if once a month you called your member of Congress when we sent you an email and did that, or called and spoke to a staffer and explained to them about encryption, that is worth hundreds of dollars.
[01:10:48.790 --> 01:10:54.110]  You can't imagine the stories I've gotten about someone who called up like Representative Nadler's office.
[01:10:55.770 --> 01:10:56.210]  Yes.
[01:10:56.530 --> 01:10:57.450]  This is an excellent example.
[01:10:57.650 --> 01:10:58.690]  We do fundraisers.
[01:10:58.910 --> 01:10:59.970]  We don't keep the money.
[01:11:00.510 --> 01:11:02.710]  All that money went to the New York State lawsuit.
[01:11:02.870 --> 01:11:04.150]  It went to the expert witnesses.
[01:11:04.550 --> 01:11:06.490]  To date, we have never received a donation.
[01:11:06.790 --> 01:11:11.110]  And as far as I know, we never will unless someone from a foundation gives us a grant.
[01:11:11.110 --> 01:11:21.750]  Much more important from you is if you decide that you're concerned about this issue, you make the commitment to call your member of Congress and talk to them or talk to their staff about encryption.
[01:11:22.110 --> 01:11:24.570]  That's worth more than any amount of membership.
[01:11:26.210 --> 01:11:28.250]  Are we getting signal that we have to shut up?
[01:11:29.270 --> 01:11:30.150]  All right.
[01:11:30.550 --> 01:11:31.270]  Can we do one more question?
[01:11:33.250 --> 01:11:34.550]  I've got a question.
[01:11:34.550 --> 01:11:48.350]  If someone sends me anonymous, you know, like through a remailer, and I don't know where that mail originated, and I send them back something encrypted, and it turns out they're out of the country, have I really committed a felony?
[01:11:48.790 --> 01:11:55.890]  And also, if someone got mail from me that was encrypted and they sent it out of the country, would I be also guilty of a felony?
[01:11:56.630 --> 01:11:57.070]  No.
[01:11:59.400 --> 01:12:00.160]  Encrypted mail?
[01:12:00.280 --> 01:12:01.320]  Out of the country is a felony.
[01:12:01.540 --> 01:12:02.780]  I'm pretty sure the answer is no.
[01:12:02.940 --> 01:12:03.020]  Well, no.
[01:12:03.020 --> 01:12:03.200]  No, it isn't.
[01:12:03.200 --> 01:12:04.780]  We're trying to figure out how to say no, but...
[01:12:04.780 --> 01:12:04.920]  No.
[01:12:05.520 --> 01:12:11.820]  It isn't a felony because you're not sent, it's actually the software that's illegal, not the encryption itself.
[01:12:12.220 --> 01:12:25.540]  As of today, you still have the right to send encrypted mail and anonymous mail to anyone you want to, and as long as we are still successful in staving off the forces of the FBI, that will still be true, but we need your help, and maybe we should close on that.
[01:12:31.910 --> 01:12:34.410]  Everybody who asked a question, we have to go.
[01:12:34.510 --> 01:12:38.670]  Everybody who asked a question, come up here, I'll either give you a button or a sticker, just for being nice people.
[01:12:39.410 --> 01:12:40.350]  Who gets a T-shirt?
[01:12:41.510 --> 01:12:42.750]  Who do we get the T-shirt to?
[01:12:42.870 --> 01:12:43.350]  That's the question.
[01:12:43.790 --> 01:12:46.010]  The guy who has the key thing.
[01:12:48.030 --> 01:12:49.610]  Everybody stay put, don't go anywhere.
[01:12:49.790 --> 01:12:55.110]  We have the CDC panel coming up in just a moment, so this is going to be interesting.
[01:12:55.650 --> 01:12:56.010]  Interesting.
[01:12:57.630 --> 01:12:58.370]  Thanks for the feed.