Date: Thu, Mar 11, 1993 (00:46) From: Glenn S. Tenney Subject: File 3--Computer Freedom and Privacy III Conf. (Report 2) The keynote today (Nicholas Johnson) was fantastic! I may not have agreed with him 100%, but his talk was just wonderful. Don't ask me to repeat it or even paraphrase it, I decided that I was probably going to buy a tape of it and didn't take notes. The electronic democracy session had, for me, an interesting note: Sarah Gray from We The People (ran Jerry Brown's computer stuff) said that they were given free accounts on various systems. I asked, honestly innocently, how they felt about the fact that such contributions were illegal. She basically had no clue that corporate contributions are a no-no. There were more sessions, but... And there were the EFF pioneer awards... Ward Christen's talk was fun -- things haven't changed all that much, it now takes about as long to figure out how to hook up a hard drive to your PC on some SCSI board as it took him to wire wrap and figure out how to build his own 8" floppy controller back then (etc. etc.). And then there was the after dinner talk... Willis Ware, Rand Corp., gave a nice talk about privacy -- and ssn use and misuse. He had lots to say about how California's new requirement of ssn for a driver's license or vehicle registration is a major problem. Over the last 55 years, we've been having our privacy worn down little by little --each time the reason was valid and good. Yet the overall effect is not. Another part of his talk was that policy is being made by private businesses concerned with profits. I'm wiped out now since I have to get back there by 08:30 (Who the hell starts a conference THAT early!!!!!). WIll try for more detail later... ------------------------------ date: Thu, Mar 11, 1993 (02:12) From: Robert David Steele Subject: File 3--Computer Freedom and Privacy III Conf. (Report 3) It has been great. No video though (although I have SEEN a video camera running around, the officially available product seems to be audio tapes). Mark Graham and Tim Pozar tutorial on INTERNET was very fine, well-paced, with excellent hand-outs ("the" book--thank you Bill McDonald for an early copy), good slides, and excellent list of access points. Missed afternoon session in order to give a rant at INTERVAL. Nicholas Johnson Thomas Jefferson (Barlow gently points out Tom got it from Madison) focus on public libraries, education, and cheap postal rates for books as foundation for democracy, we are in negotiation about his doing a speech on what Gore should be doing to honor these founding father visions in the age of cyberspace. Panel on electronic democracy, consisting of Jim Warren as chair, Bill Behnk, Richard Civille, Mark Graham, Sarah Gray, and James Packard Love, was SUPERB. I want to transplant it, without a single change, to my OSS 93. I was really taken with each speaker. Mark Graham's vision and intelligence, Sarah Gray's self-effacing discussion of reality (perhaps the law is irrelevant Glenn--we all use the office telephones and tools for personal business), Richard Civille's focus on what Gore and tools can do to help the poor bootstrap, and James Packard Love's visible, earnest intensity about cost and access to government information were MARVELOUS. Downloaded From P-80 International Information Systems 304-744-2253