Also on Friday, Haiti meets the Bahamas at S.O.B.'s with JoJo and the Exit Band, back-to-back
with the Baja Men.
Shows are 11 p.m. and 1 a.m.
For information, call 212-243-4940.
On Friday and Saturday, February 5th and 6th, the New Faces, New Voices, New Visions series
presents Unveiling Treasures, a bilingual celebration of Dominicans in the U.S., featuring
music by Asa Di Faye with poems and stories presented by Josefina Baez and Guy Davis.
Find these treasures at Aaron Davis Hall, Convent Avenue and West 135th Street on the
City College campus.
For information, call 212-650-7100.
Also on Saturday the 6th, the World Music Institute's New American series presents
Music from China, an ensemble featuring ancient folk and modern Chinese music.
Concert begins at 8 p.m. at Queens College Concert Hall, Culden Center for the Performing
Arts.
For information, call 718-793-8080.
On Saturday, February 6th, celebrate Bob Marley Day with Tony Rebel, Judy Mowat and
Sadella Marley Booker, and featuring WBAI's very own DJs Midnight Ravers, plus other special
guests.
Doors open 8 p.m., show begins at 9 at The Ritz, 54th Street, West of Broadway.
For information, call 212-541-8900.
Grounding off the week at SOB's, on Saturday, February 6th, the sultry Afro-Caribbean salsa
of India and her orchestra in her U.S. debut.
Showtimes are 11 p.m. and 1 a.m.
On Monday the 8th, La Tropica Nights presents the legendary Tito Puente.
Need we say more?
Shows are at 9 and 11 p.m.
And on Tuesday the 9th, Bob Telson and Little Village in a special night of music from gospel
to salsa, with shows at 9 and 11 p.m.
SOB's, you may remember, is located at 204 Varick Street.
For information, call 212-243-4940.
And that's the Music Culture Calendar for the week coming up.
Keep listening to WBAI for regular reports on world music and other cultural events around
New York.
For Music Culture, I'm Neva Wartell.
And I'm Serena Castelli.
And thank you for telling us all we want to know about these particular items and more.
It's 10.02.
This is WBAI New York.
Time for Off The Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a call.
♪ My rider left up on the midnight flyer
♪ Singing like a summer breeze
♪ I think he's somewhere down south
♪ Down above Baton Rouge
♪ But I just can't remember no number
♪ A number I can use
♪ Directory don't have it
♪ Central done forgot it
♪ Got to find a number to use
♪ Tryin' to check out a number
♪ Tryin' to run down a line
♪ Operator says that's privilege information
♪ And it ain't no business of mine
♪ It's flooding down in Texas
♪ The polls are out in Utah
♪ Got to find a private line
♪ He could be hangin' round a steel mill
♪ Workin' in a house with blue lights
♪ Ridin' a getaway bus out of Portland
♪ Talkin' to the night
♪ I don't know where she's goin'
♪ I don't care where she's been
♪ Been doin' it right
♪ Bob do do do do do do
♪ Like a God and a prodigy
And this is off the hook where we try to do it right, but we might make a mistake occasionally
I suppose.
We have Steve Jackson with us on the telephone, speaking to us from Austin, Texas.
Steve, are you there?
Still here.
Okay, great.
Now, you've been going through some rather interesting periods over the past few weeks.
You've taken the Secret Service to court, and last week for three days there was a trial
in Austin.
The trial is over, however the verdict has not yet come in.
Perhaps you could first of all tell us what the trial was about, and then perhaps go over
it on a day-by-day basis.
Well, the basic reason for the trial comes down to the government doesn't understand
anything about computers.
And just listening to your news report, I put two and two together.
I think I know why now.
Okay.
You said there were 65 different phone systems in the White House, right?
65, that's right.
And telephones cause brain damage?
Certain ones more than others.
I see it all now.
It's so clear.
Okay.
No, the problem basically is that the Secret Service, which just fairly recently got authority
just in the last few years, got authority to conduct investigations of what they lumped
together as computer crime.
As of 1990, and apparently as of 1993, still doesn't really understand the technology that
they're dealing with, and thinks that because they're the Secret Service, they don't have
to pay all that much attention to the laws or the Constitution.
We found out just how bad that was in the trial when, on the stand, both the Secret
Service agents who we had up there separately admitted that they, at the time of the raid,
had never heard of the PPA, the Privacy Protection Act.
This is an act that limits and regulates some kinds of government searches.
They had never heard of it.
It wasn't that they had heard about it and decided to ignore it this time or to put the
best face on it, that they had heard about it and thought about it and decided it didn't
apply.
No, they had never been trained in the PPA.
And you as a publisher were entitled to certain special considerations, right?
Yes, and it's not just a publisher.
The PPA is more broadly worded than that.
Anyone who possesses a work product that they have created with the purpose to distribute
information to the public is protected under the PPA.
It's a very broad information-gatherer and news-gatherer shield law.
It's a very broad interpretation of the First Amendment.
And the government in the trial has tried to narrow it.
They argued that regardless of what it says, and the words are clear, that regardless of
what it says, it was really only intended to apply to newspapers, radio stations, and
maybe, maybe, maybe book publishers, but then they turned around and said, oh, Jackson's
not a book publisher, which is false.
So they're really trying to narrow their definitions.
To what it is that they can understand in their view.
Well, I don't think it has to do with understanding.
I mean, these people are not idiots.
They may be ignorant, but they're not idiots.
They understand that they're in trouble, they understand that there's a law that limits
what they can do.
They, in turn, would like to limit that law.
That's not stupid.
That's smart.
But we have to stop them.
Now, the raid took place in the spring of 1990.
That's right.
March 1st, 1990.
So it's been almost three years to the day.
Very close to three years.
Now, it was basically because somebody was working for you that was considered to be
a hacker?
One of my staff was an object of investigation by the Secret Service.
They raided his home and with no more connection than, well, you know, he works for Jackson.
You know, we think he uses a bulletin board at Jackson's office.
They raided the office, too.
And in so doing, they nearly caused Steve Jackson Games to go out of business.
Yes.
They took three computers and a lot of other equipment.
They took more than 300 floppies.
They took a couple of unmounted hard disks with data in them.
And they kept it.
We got back, I think, nine files the day after the raid, copies of those files.
We got back about nine disks worth of files, random and not very relevant, after three
weeks of begging.
The rest of the stuff, we did not get back for months and months.
And indeed, one of the hard disks and a little bit of the other stuff, we never got back
at all.
And one of the computers was damaged to the point of uselessness when it was returned.
So at what point did you decide to take action and how did you go about doing that?
Well, I decided to take action as soon as the Electronic Frontier Foundation let me
know that it was willing to support me.
Within about a week after the raid, I realized that they weren't dealing with me in good
faith.
And at that point, I started doing everything that I could to tell my story, to find allies,
to excite outrage in people or organizations.
But in 1990, it was very hard to find anybody who even understood the issue, let alone was
willing to deal with it.
I was fortunate.
A few people did understand the issue and started raising hell right along with me,
with access to more ears than I had.
Bruce Sterling, the science fiction writer who also lives in Austin, read the reports
of what had happened to me and became both incensed and, he's quite frank about it, frightened
that he would be next.
If they're raiding people who write about cyberpunk, he'd be right up there on the list.
Michael Godwin, who is now the General Counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was
at that time no such thing.
He was a BBS surfer here in Austin who knew about it, thought it was outrageous.
And this is kind of funny, but quite true.
Someone commented on a BBS he frequented that, oh, the reason the media hadn't picked it
up is because they are afraid if BBSes, they'd like to see them all put out of business.
Godwin says, nonsense, they haven't picked it up because they don't understand the story.
The argument went back and forth a while, and Godwin says, okay, well, here, I'll show
you.
I'll get them to pick up the story.
You just have to explain it to them slowly.
And just to prove his point in the argument, he explained it to them slowly, and they ran
the story.
Oh, that's what you've got to do.
Now, the actual trial started a week ago yesterday.
That's right.
On the 26th.
Last Tuesday.
Do you want to describe how it came about?
What unfolded?
Well, it was very interesting.
We were the prosecution.
We were the ones filing suit.
That was when we got the admission from the Secret Service agents that, well, no, they
didn't really know anything about the Privacy Protection Act.
They'd never heard about it at the time.
Okay, another of the laws that they violated, we contend, was the ECPA, the Electronic Communications
Protection Act, also called the Wiretap Act, which regulates what they can do to intercept
an electronic message.
Now, you would think that if you carry away a bulletin board system, which they did, they
carried away our BBS, you'd think that if they physically turn off and walk off with
a functioning BBS, they just might have intercepted some electronic mail, right?
I think so.
You might say that.
They contend that that's not true.
They say that that's not interception.
And that's one of the things that the judge is going to have to decide, because the fact
is no judge has ever ruled on what interception means in the ECPA.
The government is trying to reduce their liability by saying, no, it's not interception if you
pick it up and carry it away.
That's just a stored message.
That's no big deal.
We'll see what happens.
So, I mean, we're talking about a difference in definitions there.
They say interception is simply when they're, I suppose, online monitoring, is that what
they consider to be interception?
That's the position they took here.
So therefore, because they took the whole computer, that's not considered interception?
Right.
How did the judge react to all this?
Well, he made them repeat their position several times just to make sure he heard what they
were really saying.
The interesting reactions from the judge didn't come out until the last day.
Now, we have to make it clear here that the judge we were in front of is not a technical
man.
He's not a computer man.
But it was obvious from his questions very early on that he was really smart and really
paying attention.
He asked good questions.
They were naive questions in the beginning, but they were never stupid questions.
And by the third day, you know, he had picked up enough, I mean, he was up to speed.
I was impressed.
And on the third day, when the defense brought Agent Foley back on the stand, he took over
the questioning from our attorney, and he started asking very pointed questions.
It was very dramatic the way it happened.
Our attorney, Pete Kennedy, had just asked Foley, essentially, now, isn't it true that
you took all this stuff and you kept it, you know, for months and months after you had
finished your investigation of it?
And Foley says, yes.
And the judge held up his hand to stop Pete from asking another question.
And he leaned back in his chair, and he turned his chair to face the Secret Service agent
there in the witness stand.
And he leaned forward, and he said, why?
Why did you keep that that long?
And like I said, then he just took over the questioning.
He wanted an explanation, and it was very clear that there was no good explanation.
He was outraged.
He was, I mean, his outrage was as a citizen rather than as a jurist, because the law doesn't
exist there yet in solid form until he decides it.
And he could turn in a verdict tomorrow and say that under the law, they get away with
it.
I hope they don't.
But, you know, he could do that.
But he was an unhappy man as a citizen.
And you think that outrage was genuine?
Yes, very much so.
What kind of things did he say to the Secret Service?
Oh, at one point he asked him if it had ever occurred to him that I or that my company
might be damaged by the raid.
And Foley answered, well, no.
And the judge said, yes, you did.
You just didn't think you'd hire a lawyer and sue you.
How did Foley react to that?
Well, he didn't break down crying on the stand or anything, but he was white-faced and unhappy.
You wouldn't be, too, if this judge chewed you out.
Uh-huh.
Now, I heard that that chewing out lasted a good 15 minutes.
Yeah.
Probably seemed like longer from up there.
And was Foley the only one to receive all that?
Yes.
If they had plans to call other defense witnesses, they dropped them after Foley had gotten his
talking to.
So they pretty much dropped any further defense at that point?
No, but they relied on legal arguments rather than bringing up witnesses.
But they're still fighting very hard.
The Justice Department's attorney is smart, and he's technical.
Uh-huh.
He understands the facts, he understands the issues, and he did a good job.
Now, they put you on the stand, too, is that correct?
Yes.
I spent a lot of time up there.
Okay.
What kind of things were you asked?
Mostly about the operation of the company and about the operation of the bulletin board.
We had actually set up the Illuminati BBS in the courtroom.
We took the backups that we got off the BBS machine when it finally got back, and we restored
those on a system in the courtroom, and did a demonstration for the judge.
Okay.
Now, I heard that that chewing out lasted a good 15 minutes.
Uh-huh.
Probably seemed like longer from up there.
Yes.
If they had plans to call other defense witnesses, they dropped them after Foley had gotten his
talking to.
Now, they put you on the stand, too, is that correct?
Yes.
I spent a lot of time up there.
Okay.
answer is that a written decision is good because that makes it more serious
and a published decision is great because a published decision is a
formal definition of the law and after that the law is what the published
decision says it is until a higher court changes it. So with a published decision
this would pretty much be a precedent-setting case? Precisely. It's not
really a precedent unless you get a written decision. It's not a precedent
with a capital P. Generally how long does it take? I have no idea and the
attorneys didn't want to guess. They said probably inside a month. This should be
interesting. It's kind of weird having to wait after everything has been
said. I didn't expect that. I guess the attorneys just assumed that
everybody involved with the case knew how that worked. I didn't know that. I
didn't know that until the last day of the trial. You were expecting a verdict as soon as
everything was all over? Yeah, I thought he would go away for an hour or so and then come back and give us an answer.
Well, that's how it works in LA law, isn't it? Not in real life, unfortunately.
We're talking to Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson Games who has sued the Secret
Service. We're waiting for a verdict to come down. If you have a question for
Steve, give us a call at 212-279-3400. This is off the hook. We're on the air for
another 15 minutes or so. Steve, do you have any kind of special celebration
planned if it does come down in your favor? Well, the EFF in Austin is going to
do something March 1st, no matter what. Just as a commemoration of the day of the raid.
If we have a decision before then, then obviously that'll affect the kind
of commemoration we do. I've got something off this subject. You asked for comments from callers, and hey, I guess I'm a caller and I've got a comment on that call ID thing.
Okay, go ahead. You asked what kind of idiot wouldn't answer his phone if the number wasn't displayed. You may imagine my hand is being raised.
If that was available in Texas, now business is a different thing. But if I were at home and I saw a blocked call coming in, hell man, if I could set my phone so it wouldn't even ring, I'd do that. I don't want any calls at home except from...
You wouldn't be the slightest bit curious who would be calling you? I mean, supposing somebody had a payphone and you don't recognize the number.
I'd be a lot more likely to pick it up for a number I don't recognize than I would for a blank one. My take on the privacy issue is that I'm at home and it's my business whether I answer or not.
Anybody's got a right to keep their number from going out. I don't have any problem with that. But I've got a right not to answer if I don't feel like it.
Yeah, well, I don't think anyone has ever said that somebody has to answer the phone. But what I see in the Southern New England telephone case is pretty much that you have to prove that you've earned the privilege to not advertise your number every time you make a phone call, and I think that's just taking it way too far.
I agree, I think that's obnoxious, but I think that you might be surprised how many people would be glad not to answer the phone for a blocked call. I got a picture of one kind of person who's going to send out blocked calls. He's wearing a cheap polyester suit, he's got no hair left on the top of his head, he's sitting in an office with 40, 11 other people, and they're cranking out the junk calls.
I get those. I get those all the time. And if I got one and I knew the number, I could call them back and tell them what to do with their...
But you know it's only a matter of time before those same sleazy people figure out a way to send out a number that doesn't necessarily get back to them. That'll end in a recording or something.
At that point they'll probably be committing some kind of an offense and we can let the Secret Service chase them for a while.
We come full circle then.
We deserve each other.
Let's take a couple of phone calls to see who's out there. Good evening, you're on the air with Steve Jackson.
Hi, good evening Steve. I want to wish you the best of luck with your case and I hope you get your business back together.
Thank you.
My question is, let's say that the judge does rule in your favor.
Boy, it would be nice to say that, wouldn't it?
Well, you know, I'm really hoping that that does happen.
But what I'm curious to find out is, if the judge does rule in your favor, how will this affect other government agencies which tend to do a lot of office raiding and things like that, say the FBI or the Justice Department and on and on?
Well, at a minimum I bet they start teaching about the PPA and their raid schools.
A lot of it depends on the details of the decision.
If he tells them that they've been bad and pops them on the wrist, it won't do a lot.
It'll do something because if he declares us the winners on both counts and doesn't give me a cent in damages,
the statutory legal fees will still get into six figures and that's pretty substantial.
Yeah, that's enough to get the attention of a bureaucrat.
Steve, you said on both counts. What are the two counts?
The ECPA, which is basically walking off with our bulletin board, and the Privacy Protection Act, which is walking off with the manuscript for GERP Cyberpunk.
Do you think what you're doing now, the action you've taken, will spur other people to do the same kind of thing?
What would you advise people that might run into the Secret Service in an unpleasant way?
Take good notes from day one. Get legal advice on day one.
Take photographs to document the state of the area after it's been raided.
Contact the Electronic Frontier Foundation immediately and listen to what they say.
In doing that, do they have any right to stop you from taking the photographs?
I remember Emmanuel had a program a couple of months ago where he was talking about the Secret Service raiding a hacker meeting in a mall in Washington,
and they began confiscating cameras and so forth. Is that the same type of a thing?
I wouldn't want to speculate on what their legal privileges are to keep you from standing outside your own house or standing across the street and photographing them as they come out,
but they can't stop you from taking photographs of the area after they leave.
That's true. I think in many cases, the Secret Service won't allow you to do lots of things.
In fact, FiberOptic is here, and he's one person that's been visited by the Secret Service a couple of times.
What happened when they came to your place of residence?
Well, without going into too many details, let's just say that they were taking pictures of me for their files,
and I was pretty much unable to move from the sofa, and they pretty much made me keep my hands in plain sight
and sort of indirectly threatened to shoot me if I attempted to get up and try to go somewhere.
Yeah, if you're a suspect, they're going to keep you under physical control.
If you're, like me, a third party whose property is imagined to have evidence in it,
they'll take physical control of your building, whether that's your house or your office or whatever,
but they won't try to take physical control of you.
Nobody here tried to photograph them while they were working, so I don't know what would have happened.
I would like to try it.
Can they do that even though this is not a criminal matter?
They did a lot of things that they're not supposed to be able to do, so no offense,
but asking can they do that is not the right question.
Right, I see.
Okay, well, thank you very much.
I'll hang up and listen.
Okay, thanks for calling.
Bye-bye.
You know, it's interesting because you used, Steve, as a bit of evidence, one of their videotapes.
Is that correct?
Yes.
The audio track of their videotape contained things that made a liar out of their agent on the site.
You could hear my employees on the videotape saying things that the agent claimed she had never heard,
you know, up until the videotape was played back.
And what were the nature of those things?
One of my employees, when he was asked who he was and what his business was there,
said, I'm a print buyer.
We're a publisher.
Which doesn't look very good when that agent had just testified that nobody told her that we were publishers.
So a direct contradiction there.
Right.
And right in front of the judge, I guess.
The term for that is impeaching the witness.
Uh-huh.
You know, there were just right at the beginning of the testimony of each Secret Service agent,
we got statements out of them which we then disproved, you know, from physical evidence or from the record.
Uh-huh.
Which, of course, lets the judge draw his own conclusion about whether he can believe anything else they ever say.
I'm surprised really that anybody believes what they say in light of the Neidorf case and all the contradictions that came out there.
You have to remember that most of the people in the country still aren't even clear on the fact that the Secret Service does anything but guard the president.
Uh-huh.
Let alone that they lie a lot.
Uh-huh.
All right, let's take another phone call.
The number is 212-279-3400.
Good evening, you're on with Steve Jackson.
Good evening.
I have a question.
I wasn't able to listen.
I would like to know something while you're explaining your story, but what attracted the Secret Service in the first place?
Did somebody make a complaint?
The Secret Service was investigating the distribution of a document called the 9-1-1 document,
which in a cut-down form was published in FRAC, a computer newsletter.
One of my employees received a copy of FRAC and reposted it on his home BBS,
so in the mistaken opinion that this copy of FRAC contained deadly secret valuable information,
they raided him, and because he worked for me, they raided me.
There it is in a nutshell.
Oh, were they intimidating?
Extremely.
Oh, okay. I wish you success.
Thank you very much.
Thanks for calling.
Anytime you have a bunch of people coming into your house with guns, I guess that can be kind of intimidating.
Well, not your house, but your place of business.
Did they say anything during the raid that you thought was unnecessary or overly intimidating or anything like that?
They made intimidating.
They questioned some of my employees in an intimidating way.
When you're standing there with a gun and saying, what do you do here?
You hesitate.
Yeah.
That's intimidating.
And they behaved in an intimidating manner toward me the next day when I went in supposedly to get copies of my files.
But, I mean, it's definitely SOP.
Well, Steve, we're almost out of time.
Is there anything that you want to say in conclusion?
Well, I should point out, just to follow up on the thread from a couple of weeks ago,
that there was gold fringe on the flag in the courtroom, whatever that means.
Okay. I'm glad we cleared that up.
I never quite understood that, but we have to pass the information along to the people who can use it.
No, seriously, the only thing that I have to say in closing is that we've still got a long way to go.
I'm crossing my fingers that we get a good decision in this, but good court decisions are just the first step.
We need new laws.
We need carefully written laws.
And I hope that people will support the EFF and support the other groups that are trying to get laws written
that reflect the reality of computer importance in society today
and not the imaginations and the fears of people who have never even really used computers.
That's an interesting point, because we're looking at an administration that has just left us
that had virtually no computers, and now we have an administration that's very much into computers and technology.
Do you think that's going to make a big difference?
I sure hope so.
Okay. Do you want to give out any phone numbers, addresses, e-mail addresses, anything like that for people to...
Okay. E-mail address for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
This one's easy. EFF at EFF.org.
That's O-R-G.
Yes. Let me look up a phone number for the National EFF for those people who can't reach them on the Internet.
It's, I believe, still in Cambridge, although they'll be moving their main office to Washington, D.C.
They're about to move, so I'm going to get you the Washington number.
Okay.
It's coming up now.
Okay. You're looking this up on one of your computers, I imagine.
Yeah. Here we go.
All right.
202-544-9237.
Okay.
And I can't tell you who to talk to, because it depends on what you need.
But if you need the EFF, call that number and tell them what you want.
Well, Steve, we wish you the best of luck, as always, and as soon as something happens with your case,
of course, we'll talk about it here and probably have you on again to talk about how good or how bad you feel.
Always happy to come back.
Good luck to you, Mark.
We'll see you sometime.
Good luck to you, too.
Okay.
Take care.
So long.
And don't forget, everybody, there are hacker meetings this Friday coming up, the first Friday of the month.
And, boy, I'll tell you, they're happening throughout the world now.
We've got meetings in Munich, Germany, Amsterdam.
I think Pittsburgh is joining us in Seattle as well, in addition to the regular cities.
Also Atlanta.
Add Atlanta to that list.
And our regular cities of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Texas, which is where Steve Jackson is right now,
St. Louis, Chicago, Philadelphia, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Washington, D.C.,
and right here in New York City at the Citicorps Center in the lobby near the pay phones.
Citicorps Center is that weird building uptown with the slanty roof.
153 East 53rd Street between Lexington and 3rd Avenue.
And the meeting takes place this Friday from 5 p.m. to around 8 p.m.
And to call it a meeting, I guess, is kind of weird because it's more like a gathering of people in a mall kind of a setting.
There are no speakers.
There's no real set agenda.
Just a gathering point for a lot of people to meet and exchange information.
It's what the people in charge fear the most.
I want to thank everybody for joining us this week.
We'll be back again next week for another edition of Off the Hook.
This is Emanuel Goldstein for FiberOptic and everybody else.
Good night.
Stay tuned for the news here on WBAI-New York.
3
Audio Quilts, engaging your mind far into the realm of creative listening.
Hi, I'm Rosemary Mealy.
Join me every Thursday evening from 9 until 10 p.m. over listener-supported noncommercial WBAI radio.
99.5 FM for Audio Quilts, a potpourri of things to come in the realm of creative listening.
Good evening.
In the news tonight, abortion battles fought at the threshold.
New laws protecting access to family planning clinics.
A second trial gets underway in Los Angeles for four officers in the Rodney King beating.
Yugoslavian war crimes under scrutiny amid calls for accountability.
And in New York, the poor and unemployed look for ways to survive.
For these and other stories, I'm David Sears in New York with Verna Avery Brown in Washington.
And this is the news for Wednesday, February 3, 1993.
First to Mark Bevis with news headlines.
The Navy plans to file murder charges against an airman accused of killing a gay sailor in Japan.
News reports said the sailor was killed after admitting he was homosexual.
The Navy won't say if it believes the killing was motivated by hate.
And the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, is keeping a close eye on the case of a North Carolina man
who says he was beaten by three Marines because of Clinton's new policy on gays in the military.
Powell's spokesperson said the general deplores intolerance against any group
and that the military is weighing whether to proceed with separate actions against the three accused Marines.
President Clinton told Office of Management and Budget employees
that the White House needs to set a tone for budgetary fairness.
In the next several days, I will be finalizing and announcing plans
which will demonstrate a substantial reduction in spending at the White House,
reversing many years of growth in services and personnel provided to the president.
Clinton also repeated his campaign pledge that those who made money in the 1980s
must pay their fair share of taxes before those in the middle class must pay more.
The White House said Clinton will probably propose a tax hike for the wealthy
in his speech to Congress February 17th.
The Clinton administration is considering lifting the Reagan administration's ban on rehiring fired air traffic controllers.
White House Press Secretary D.D. Myers said the Reagan ban set the tone for the relationship
between government and labor in the 1980s.
No final decision, Myers said.