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Subject: FW: An Open Letter To A Senator

A friend of mine wrote the following letter to our local senator and co-sponsor of the Communications Decency Act, Slade Gorton. No one on this list will find it particularly informative, but it is (IMHO) a well-written plea for sanity.

JD - ----------
From: Mike Calligaro
To: John Douceur
Subject: An Open Letter To A Senator
Date: Wednesday, June 21, 1995 12:50PM

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An Open Letter To A Senator

I wrote this for one of my Senators. Feel free to repost wherever you see fit; just keep my name and sig on it. If you would like to modify this to send it to your own Senators, go ahead and change the names where appropriate and sign your own at the bottom. Just put a line somewhere within saying something to the effect of "this is a modified form of the letter originally written by Michael P Calligaro."

If you do use this, I'd love to hear about it. You can reach me at mikecal@microsoft.com.

The Honorable Slade Gorton
United States Senate
730 Hart Senate Office Bldg.
Washington DC 20510

Dear Senator Gorton,

When I read George Orwell's famous novel, 1984, I wondered how any free society could have ever allowed such tyranny to take control. Perhaps this is not as difficult to understand as I once thought.

Maybe the Orwellian government started by disallowing the export of secret codes. They would have claimed this protected National Security and thus invoked the people's fear of foreign countries taking over. This would not have been a particularly big deal, as most people would not have even understood what the secret codes were, much less why they would want to export them.

Then the government might have passed a law that guaranteed their law enforcement agencies would be able to listen in on citizen's telephone communications. They might have convinced people to allow this by playing on their fear of terrorists, even if they really planned to use the law to listen in on drug dealers. The people wouldn't have minded. After all, most of them weren't terrorists so the law had no personal effect.

Around this time maybe an insane citizen did something awful that killed other citizens. The Orwellian agencies would have jumped on this opportunity to increase the people's fear of terrorists. They might have also gone one step further, reminding people that one of the terrible things this person did was "distrust the government." Planting that seed would pay off later.

The government then might have passed a law forbidding certain kinds of communications between citizens, especially those communications that are obscene and pornographic. In doing so, they would have invoked the citizens' fears for their children. This would not have been viewed as a particularly bad thing. After all, most Orwellian citizens didn't like pornography, nor did they make obscene communications. And they all feared for their kids.

Emboldened by their success in banning certain kinds of communications, the government might then have pointed again at the terrorists and suggested that people should not be allowed to learn how to blow things up. If they showed enough pictures of charred babies from the last terrorist attack, they would probably have had little trouble getting this one through. Besides, by then the people would already have been used to there being things they were forbidden from saying to each other in private. This would have just been another set of things. And most people didn't want to trade bomb recipes anyway.

At this point the law enforcement agencies might have shown that some citizens were using the secret codes that were already illegal for export. They would have argued convincingly that these codes were infringing on the agencies' ability to protect the good citizens. Besides which, the laws already in place gave these agencies the right to listen in on phone communications. Why should other electronic communications be any different? The agencies would have produced new codes which allowed them to read the mail of terrorists and child pornographers. The citizens, used to having their phones tapped and still afraid of bad people, would have seen a ban on non-government codes as reasonable.

But all the laws passed up to that point would have been ineffective. Terrorists could learn to make bombs overseas then go to the Orwellian country and wreak havoc. These terrorists could have entered the country, stayed in hotels, blown things up, and left without using the telephone or electronic mail. The government might then have convinced people that they needed to bug all hotel rooms. If enough buildings had been blown up by this point, the citizens would have allowed it. After all, this really wasn't any different than tapping a phone or reading mail, and a majority of normal people didn't stay in hotels anyway.

When this, too, proved ineffective, the government might have suggested that they needed to deal with the foreign terrorists by invading other countries. They might have convinced the citizens that the only way they would live in peace, without the threat of terrorism, was for the country to go to war. In other words, "War is Peace."

Terrorists from within the country, though, would have used their own homes instead of hotels. The government might then have convinced the law abiding citizens that so long as bad people had the freedom to operate, the rest of society was nothing more than slaves to their terror. In other words, "Freedom is Slavery." And the children, who had been raised believing that distrusting the government was bad, just like blowing people up, would have agreed.

I think you can see the final steps from there. And I think you know why I'm writing to you.

Senator Gorton, please try to take a small period of time from your busy schedule and reread Orwell's 1984. When you finish it, think very carefully if that is the society in which you want your children and grandchildren to live.

I urge you to reconsider the path upon which you have chosen to take this great country of ours. With the astonishing 100-0 passing of the Digital Telephony bill in your Senate last year and the equally worrisome 84-16 vote to add the Exon-Coats-Gorton amendment to the Communications Deregulation Bill this year, it's obvious that we are not merely strolling down the above path. We are sprinting.

Orwell's society is not the one in which I would like my children and grandchildren to live.

Respectfully,

Michael P Calligaro

PS Please consider this a "open letter" as I may post it on various newsgroups, etcetera.

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