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EFFector Online 07.02 Jan. 25, 1993 editors@eff.org
=========================================================================
A Publication of the Electronic Frontier Foundation ISSN 1062-9424
In This Issue:
--------------
Senate FTP Site Online
Public Hearings on Privacy in DC
WUTC Inquiry Comments Due Jan. 31 - Info Available Via FTP
EFF Seeking Volunteer MOO Programmer for "Virtual Office"
A Study of National Cryptography Policy
EDGAR Database Available
Information Infrastructure Task Force Announces BBS
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: Senate FTP Site Online
-------------------------------
A new FTP site has been put online to hold the publicly available documents
and press releases of our Senators.
Chris Casey <chris_casey@kennedy.senate.gov> of the office of Sen. Edward
Kennedy says "Some progress is being made here on the Hill. The Senate now
has an anonymous ftp server running. It's sparsly populated, only Kennedy
and Stevens have posted anything so far, but I imagine the rest will
find their way shortly. At least it's a start. The fact that the Senate
has an anonymous ftp server is not a secret, but I don't think it's widely
known either."
You can access the server by FTPing to ftp.senate.gov, logging in as
"anonymous" (without the quotes) and giving your email address as password.
The site's general information bulletin is as follows:
Welcome to the United States Senate's Anonymous FTP Server
(ftp.senate.gov). This service is provided by the Office of the
U.S. Senate Sergeant at Arms and the Senate Committee on Rules
and Administration.
This server contains general information files about the United States
Senate in the directory "general". Directories are also provided for
specific Senators' offices, in alphabetical order by two-letter state
abbreviations, and for Senate committees and other Senate offices. If
an office is not included in the directory, this indicates no files
have been posted by that office.
No files can be uploaded to this system. Please direct questions about
a specific Senate office's use of this service to the Senate office in
question. General inquiries not involving a specific Senate office can
be directed via Internet e-mail to: ftpadmin@scc.senate.gov
Subdirectories for Senator's offices are structured as follows:
/member/state_abbrev./senator's_name/releases/filename
or
/member/state_abbrev./senator's_name/general/filename
The "releases" subdirectories contain press releases and related materials,
and "general" subdirectories contain information of long-term interest such
as office contacts.
As of Jan. 24, 1994, the site was not being used very extensively, but
individual Senators' directories contained various informational files,
such as the following:
Ted Stevens (AK):
member/ak/stevens/releases
-rw-r--r-- 1 1 1321 Jan 21 16:16 Childhood_Immunizations
-rw-r--r-- 1 1 828 Jan 21 16:16 Inman_Statement
-rw-r--r-- 1 1 3152 Jan 05 11:45 Ketchikan_Subcontractors
-rw-r--r-- 1 1 3488 Jan 21 16:16 Seafood_Inspection
-rw-r--r-- 1 1 1910 Jan 21 16:17 new_staff
-rw-r--r-- 1 1 1661 Jan 21 16:17 tongass_timber
Edward Kennedy (MA):
member/ma/kennedy/general
-rw-r--r-- 1 1 138842 Jan 13 13:49 S1150_Goals_2000
-rw-r--r-- 1 1 1011 Dec 13 15:04 on-line_access
-rw-r--r-- 1 1 133477 Dec 27 10:08 s1040.txt
member/ma/kennedy/releases
-rw-r--r-- 1 1 3591 Jan 14 15:23 Human_Radiation_Experimentation
-rw-r--r-- 1 1 1664 Jan 05 11:11 Statement_on_Firearms_Proposal
-rw-r--r-- 1 1 16188 Dec 15 14:19 major_accomplishment_93
-rw-r--r-- 1 1 14523 Jan 13 11:58 national_health_reform_debate
-rw-r--r-- 1 1 1298 Dec 15 14:18 worker_retraining_grant
Please express your interest in this first small step, and encourage your
Senators to utilize this new Congressional Internet resource. Ask your
Representatives to look into the possibility of a similar system for the
House.
------------------------------
Subject: Public Hearings on Privacy in DC
-----------------------------------------
US OFFICE OF CONSUMER AFFAIRS
PUBLIC HEARINGS ON INFORMATION AGE PRIVACY
Washington, DC: January 26-27, 1994.
Public Invited to Participate.
Representatives from the public, private and non-profit
sectors will present their views on personal privacy and data
protection in the information age at public hearings of a U.S.
Government task force in early 1994.
The hearings will be open meetings of the Privacy Working
Group, chaired by Patricia Faley, Acting Director of the United
States Office of Consumer Affairs (USOCA). The Working Group is
part of a task force set up by the Clinton Administration to
consider how to spur development of an "information
superhighway." Officially known as the National Information
Infrastructure (NII), the "data highway" will be capable of
exchanging data, voice and images electronically within a vast
network of individuals, businesses, government agencies and other
organizations around the world. Ensuring ready access to
information is the goal of the Administrative initiative, but
protecting individual privacy is essential to its success.
The public meeting will examine privacy issues relating to
such areas as law enforcement, financial services, information
technology, and direct marketing. The previous California meeting,
January 10th and llth, was hosted by Jim Conran (Director,
California Department of Consumer Affairs) in Sacramento
The Washington, DC meeting, January 26th and 27th, will be held at the U.S.
Department of Commerce Auditorium, 14th & Constitution Ave. NW.
Registration begins at 8:30am, meetings at 9am.
The public is invited to attend, question speakers and to
make brief comments, but space is limited. Concise written
statements for the record should be sent to "Privacy," USOCA,
1620 L Street NW, Washington DC 20036 or faxed to (202)634-4135.
United States Office of Comumer Affairs
1620 L Street NW
Washington, D.C. 20036-5605
Contact:
George Idelson (USOCA)
+1 202 634 4344
Patricia Faley (USOCA)
+1 202 634 4329
------------------------------
Subject: WUTC Inquiry Comments Due Jan. 31 - Info Available Via FTP
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The Washington State Utilities and Transportation Commission
has launched a public inquiry on how to regulate the
telecommunications industry during the transition to effective
competition. As part of this investigation, Commission staff has
prepared a discussion paper which explores developing trends in
communications technology and market structure and defines basic
policy objectives that a new telecommunications regulatory
structure should accomplish.
Traditionally, Commission inquiries have been open to the
public but have rarely gone beyond comment from the regulated
industries and their major customers. The discussion paper
contends that "in a converged marketplace, local telephone
service will inevitably become simply one component of a multi-
media service package." Thus, the Commission is actively seeking
a wider range of comment from existing and potential
communication network providers as well as informed consumers.
Since the scope of the communications industry has changed,
regulatory arrangements that have been structured around these
formally discrete markets must also change. The discussion paper
calls for a new regulatory paradigm -- eventually "shifting
attention away from corporate earnings and service pricing toward
fair interconnection, common carriage and consumer protection."
The discussion paper, "Alternative Regulation of U S West:
Toward a New Paradigm" eschews the current popular fascination
with specific technology deployments. Instead of defining an
outcome where customers pay for services they may not want, the
Commission's paper believes the state should foster a
communications marketplace where the customer has a wide array of
choices from competitive providers. Essentially, the message is
that the ultimate and only bottleneck should be the limitations
of the human mind.
However, in the short term, the Commission's investigation
seeks a new regulatory plan for the state's largest telephone
company U S West -- envisioning this new regulatory plan as a
major component to ensuring fair and effective competition.
First round of comments are due by January 31, 1994.
The Notice of Inquiry, with the associated discussion paper
on the Alternative Form of Regulation, is available via anonymous
FTP on the Internet. Connect to the host at:
FTP.GOVT.WASHINGTON.EDU,
cd to the directory: /wutc, then:
for the ascii text version, get
NOI_ON_THE_AFOR.txt
for a WordPerfect version, switch mode to Binary and get
NOI_ON_THE_AFOR.wp51
Hard copies can be acquired by sending a request with a postal
address to wutcpol1@wln.com. The Commission is requesting that
formal comment be submitted both in hard copy and on disk in
electronic form; and is requesting permission to post comments.
Please share this posting with others in your organization.
Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission
1300 S. Evergreen Park Dr. S.W.
P.O. Box 47250
Olympia, WA 98504-7250
------------------------------
Subject: EFF Seeking Volunteer MOO Programmer for "Virtual Office"
------------------------------------------------------------------
EFF will be setting up a "virtual office" on Steve Jackson Games' "Metaverse"
MOO (Multi-User-Domain, Object Oriented, a type of text-based
"virtual reality" simulation), part of SJG's Illuminati Online service.
This virtual office should provide EFF information and documents and allow
people to join EFF by downloading an online membership form. Other more
advanced features may be added in the future. This is a serious project,
as Metaverse is not a game like some MOOs but an honest attempt at real-time
VR interaction online.
In accordance with this goal, EFF is seeking an experienced volunteer MOO
programmer who can get such a "virtual office" up and running in short order,
and who is willing to maintain and extend this section of Metaverse in the
future to keep it updated and increasingly useful and interesting.
This position will not be paid, but the programmer will receive an
more-or-less unlimited account on both Metaverse and Illuminati Online
(io.com), which is quite a deal, as this includes a full Internet account,
with email, news, and more. The postition does not include an account on
eff.org, as this would be irrelevant to the virtual office maintenance.
Interested parties, please send a resume of relevant experience to
Stanton McCandlish <mech@eff.org>, EFF's Online Activist.
------------------------------
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