Slashdot Mirror

I've found that Congress.org is a great site to use when looking for and trying to contact members of Congress that represent my area. Contact your representatives. We have to make a large outcry now to stop this.

I wrote (actually e-mailed through here) my senators and representatives when this was first posted on /.

I got personal replies from all of them! It took about 2 weeks to get replies back from all of them but they all did. One of them said that he was vaguely aware of the situation and that he was glad to hear from his constituents on the issue.

It does work people! Do it! It will make a difference!

Here is what I wrote:

/////////////////
Senator Bond,

Being one of your constituents (I live in Sometown, MO) - I felt it my duty to inform you that we are not happy about the new Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA) that is currently in draft form and is being spearheaded by Senator Fritz Hollings from South Carolina.

I know that in the wake of last week's tragedy - a more secure computing model sounds like a good idea. But let me assure you that this bill is not the way to go about implementing it. This bill has the potential to ruin computing as we know it. It will squash innovation and many freedoms.

You can check this address for one of the many news stories about this bill:
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/09/20/2 047211

Please do not endorse this bill - as someone who is in your voting district I will be watching very carefully to see who is supporting this bill, and let me assure you that my next vote will be influenced by what I see.

Sincerely,
My Name
//////////////

Fried

One of the easiest ways to contact congress is through congress.org.
Capitol Advantage will even do a custom version for slashdot for a price.
-- full disclosure: I work for capitol advantage.

Here's what I wrote:
I am writing to you today about the use of face scanners in airports. There have been calls by many (mostly makers of face scanners) to put these devices in airports in order to catch suspected terrorists. This sounds like a good idea, but there's on problem: it won't work.

Makers of face scanners claim that their accuracy will be as good as 99.99%. As an engineer who has worked with boimetrics before, I seriously doubt these claims. But even if their claims are accurate, the systems will not work well. Bruce Schneir, a well-respected security expert, has written an excellent article on the subject, which is available at http://www.extremetech.com/article/0,3396,s%253D10 24%2526a%253D15070,00.asp . In it, he shows that even a face recognition system with excellent accuracy will call 10,000 innocent people terrorists for each terrorist it spots. A police force that arrested 10,000 people for each conviction it got would be in a heap of trouble, yet that's what airport face recognition systems would do.

The boy who cried "wolf" only had to do it three times before people started ignoring him, imagine a system that cried "terrorist" 5,000 times before spotting a single one. And this, mind you, is under ideal conditions. I've looked at the pictures of the terrorists that the FBI has released, and many of these are far from ideal. Photographs of other terrorists are not likely to be even as good as these.

In short, putting face scanners in airports is one of the worst ways for combatting terrorists. Simply increasing the pay of airport security personnel would probably be a much better use of that money.

Congressmen listen to letters, whether email, laser printed, or hand written. They key is if you are in their district. They listen to the people who will vote for (or against) them, that's it. So, spamming all 535 representatives won't get you anywhere. Sending a personal email to the three (2 senators and 1 rep) who represent you will actually get you somewhere. So what are you waiting for.... start writing

Part of the problem is that people don't know who
their elected officials are.

A good place to start is www.congress.org.

You can easily search for your representatives
by simply entering your zip-code.

Hope this helps.

I sent this to both of my sentors in my district and my one representative, I thought it might give other people an idea about what to write. I tried not to make it too harsh, nor too soft - while also not putting a lot of technilogcial mumbo jumbo in it:

/////////////////
Senator Bond,

Being one of your constituents (I live in Sometown, MO) - I felt it my duty to inform you that we are not happy about the new Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA) that is currently in draft form and is being spearheaded by Senator Fritz Hollings from South Carolina.

I know that in the wake of last week's tragedy - a more secure computing model sounds like a good idea. But let me assure you that this bill is not the way to go about implementing it. This bill has the potential to ruin computing as we know it. It will squash innovation and many freedoms.

You can check this address for one of the many news stories about this bill:
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/09/20 /2 047211

Please do not endorse this bill - as someone who is in your voting district I will be watching very carefully to see who is supporting this bill, and let me assure you that my next vote will be influenced by what I see.

Sincerely,
My Name
///////////////

You can e-mail the senators and reps straight off of this site.

I suggest that all of you do - they can't ignore all of us!

Fried

We can't let the same thing that happened with the DMCA happen with this law: the geeks of the world need to, just for a moment, crawl out of their holes and write to the folks in congress. Yes, we're not a megacorporation unto ourselves -- but we do have money, and we vote.

With the DMCA, most senators didn't even realize that anybody was even opposed to this law. That can't happen again.

You can find your representatives online.

_________________________
Should the US fight terrorism with terrorism?
againstrevenge.org

No bills are on the table yet.

Last week after the attacks Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) made a speech to the Senate calling for backdoor access to encryption software.

If you want to read more, these links have details:

http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-201-7149229-0.htm l

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,46816,00 .html

Note: Congress reconvenes on Friday, so if you give a shit about nipping this in the bud, write/email/call/fax your respective officials immediately!

Don't know how to contact them? Go to congress.org

Write your congress(wo)men. Write the President. Get the address here, and use paper and a stamp, or at least make a phone call. Do it now. It's time to stand up and be counted, before the knee-jerk reaction to this disaster gains momentum.

I've included a generic version of the letter I am writing. It is intentionally short and non-specific -- customize it to discuss the issues that concern you.

Dear XYZ,

Like you, I am aggrieved at the tragic loss of life resulting from the horrendous events of Sept. 11. Every American has been touched by this trauma which will linger forever in the memory of our nation.

Though I want to see the perpetrators of these acts brought to justice, I must beg you not to compromise American civil liberties in your pursuit of justice. The loss of American citizens' ability to move and communicate freely would be a greater casualty than the thousands killed Tuesday morning.

Benjamin Franklin said that those who give up necessary liberties for security deserve neither security nor freedom. I must echo his sentiment. Do not allow our sacred rights of freedom of speech, association or movement to be abridged in the coming days of difficult choices. America's enemies hate us precisely because we are a free and open society, and they fear the potential that that represents. Do not give them the victory they cannot themselves win by destroying the core of our society, our beloved liberties.

God Bless America,

You can find your congresscritter at Congress.Org and inserting your zip code into the proper fields. When you do this, be sure to include your name, address and zip code in the letter.

Alternatively, you could send the following (NB, I haven't checked for spelling mistakes):

Dear (Senator/Representative) N.

I am writing today to express my displeasure concerning the way the FBI has conducted itself in regards to Dmitry Sklyarov and Elcomsoft.

Mr. Sklyarov gave a talk at a computer security conference on the security weaknesses of Adobe's eBook product, which were apparently easily discovered and exploited. Instead of thanking Mr. Sklyarov for his work, Adobe complained to the FBI and Mr. Sklyarov was detained for violating the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

I believe that copyright holders must have methods to secure their works. But as is obvious thanks to Elcomsoft's work, the protection afforded by Adobe's eBook products is easily overcome. There is no doubt that THOUSANDS of people have been taking advantage of this, silently, and thus ripping off legitimate copyright holders. Elcomsoft has only vocalized what was already occuring.

This is not the first time that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act has been abused like this, and it won't be the last. In its short life we have seen many security consultants and even college and university professors threatened with prosecution under DMCA for exposing weaknesses in computer security ... activity which would otherwise be protected under the First Amendment and the traditions of academic freedom. It is apparent that the DMCA must be changed or perhaps repealed.

I look foreward to your position on this issue.

Sincerely, (name, address including zip)

Things that actually help:

1. OpenDVD - actually learn about the DMCA and the case against it.
2. Electronic Frontier Foundation - donate to the actual court case
3. US Congress - Hand write your representatives and inform them of your digust with this law

(sourceCode==freeSpeech)

--

DMCA 1201(a)(1) is absolutely all it takes to legally keep you from writing a few lines of your own code on a napkin and passing it to a friend. This is the first bit of legislation that does this. It was lobbied by the MPAA, recommended by the Congressional sub-committees, and passed unanimously by legislators who likely thought they were acting in the interests of the American people. Would you vote against a bill with such a trendy name and so few powerful antagonists? What bills will follow this one in regulating computer programs? If this sort of thing continues, we could even end up with a Federal Source Code Review Agency. Sure it sounds stupid, but there's enough money involved to do it.

Protect your rights as programmers:

• Learn what you can about the case. Keep up with the news, and don't get bored with it. This isn't about DVDs, it's about whether or not we are allowed to write and copyright our own code.
• Support the fight in the courts by donating to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Support the fight in legislation by sending a hand written letter to your congressional representatives expressing your digust with the law and your request for one that dismisses it.
• Support those fighting on the front lines by reading 2600, the Hacker Quarterly. (They will ask you to donate to the EFF.)

-the Pedro Picasso

--

This essay at last crystalizes my unease and mistrust of our government's ability to defend personal freedom and further the human condition in the face of massive lobbying by large corporations for laws that will result only in short-term gains for those companies.

In fact, it inspired me to write to my congressmen. If you care about this issue at all, you should do the same. I summarized my feelings on these issues and gave reference to Gilmore's rant; you can do the same or just quote it at them if you're lazy. You can write to them in a web-based form from the U.S. Congress website... Just use the "Elected Officials" search with your zip code to get a listing of your senators and representatives for your cc list.

Stop bitching about this here and go do something about it right now, dammit! The outcome is in your hands!

The chief of staff for Rep. Ernest Istook said his proposed legislation to require mandatory internet filtering in all federally funded schools and libraries "seems like it's a no-brainer to the average Joe". It may be, but the average Joe is wrong.

Internet filtering is not just ineffective -- see for example the extensive reports written by the Censorware project at http://www.censorware.org/ -- it is opposed to the most fundamental principle of both schools and libraries: education through free access to information. Surely we do not want to force such critical assests as our libraries through *anyone's* sieve, certainly not as undemocratic a sieve as most net filtering products are (net filtering companies usually refuse to disclose even what they are filtering to the public, much less submit their blinders to democratic review). See the results of the censorware projects "Foil the Filters Contest" at http://www.dfn.org/Alerts/contest.htm for an idea of how pernicious this technology can be: every filtering software product which Dick Armey recommends blocks *his own web site* at the House of Representatives because it contains the word "dick". Do we really want such blocks in every school and library in the land?

Finally, such technological measures are destined to be ineffective to those who really want to access pornography. The losers will be the law-abiding citizen.

I hope that you will work to defeat this amendment to bill HR4577 and work to convince your fellow legislators that, despite the appearance of being a "no-brainer", this proposed legislation is a danger to the very fabric of our democracy.

Sincerely,
C. Scott Ananian
MIT graduate student.

• Step 1 - Find out who your representative is in the House of Representatives
• Step 2 - call them, write them, email them -- whatever it takes to let them know that you are against censorware in our libraries.

I personally like Congress.org's site, which lets you mail your Senators and Congressperson all at the same time.

If you're a US citizen, go to Congress.org; they have a zipcode-based legislator-finder, with all the necessary contact information. Physical letters or phone calls would probably be better than email (and I intend to use Dialpad to call and make my feelings known), but email is better than nothing.