From: johnl@avs.com (John W. Langner)
Subject: Don't give up on HR1674 yet - a new idea.
Organization: J. Random Misconfigured Site
Distribution: usa
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1992 22:31:52 GMT
X-Posted-From: aurora.avs.com
NNTP-Posting-Host: sol.ctr.columbia.edu

PLEASE read the whole message.  There is a new idea here, not just a 
rehash of all the same old stuff.

While most people (reading this news group) think of HR 1674 as the 
evil plot to take our radios away, it was some routine boring FCC funding 
bill which was destined to sail through the process.  The lobbyists probably 
told the congress people:  "It's boring.  Don't bother reading it.  We 
improved it by sticking in something to make your phone calls more secure.  
Just vote yes.  Now let's go play golf and have a few drinks."

A battle was lost but the war is not over.  The FCC still needs to make
specific regulations and figure out how to enforce them.  There is still
time to expose this scam and possibly derail it.

Whining here won't do any good.

You must contact your congress people immediately.


I have some suggestions:

DO NOT:
------
	Tell them you are a scanner user.
	Whine about your rights being eroded.
	Ramble on about the idiots in Congress.
	Make radical statements like "if you want to take my radio away
		you'll have to pry it from my cold dead fingers."

You will be considered one of the lunatic fringe and be ignored.

Instead tell them (or imply) that you are a cellular telephone user.
Cellular phone users are respectable and productive members of society.

Say you were very pleased to hear about the bill to protect the privacy of
your telephone conversations.  When you investigated the details, you 
were shocked at what it really said.  It missed the target entirely.

I'm confident very few of you bothered to contact your Congresspeople.
Write a letter,.... put it in an envelope, .... address it,......
put on a stamp,.... drop it in the mailbox,....   TOO MUCH WORK!

E-mail is so much easier.  Too bad we can't send messages to Washington
by e-mail.  Well, we can.  Sort of, for a while.

Supporters of one of the Presidential candidates are using e-mail to
find out about the concerns of the people.

Here's how it works.  You send e-mail to:

	Clinton-Wins@mail.clinton-gore.org

The SUBJECT (not the message content) should contain one of:

	question propose		-- to add a question to the list
	question get 			-- to get a list of the questions
	question vote #			-- to vote for question number #

The questions receiving the most number of votes will be passed along
to the presidential candidate.  

Guess what?  One of them deals with HR1674.  Is it too much trouble to 
send one little e-mail message to get the list of questions and another
to vote for your favorite question?  OK, it's too much work to send
two messages.  As an experiment in democracy just type:

	mail -s "question vote 34" Clinton-Wins@mail.clinton-gore.org

(or some variation depending on your system.)


Imagine Clinton's surprize when they tell him:

"We polled the electronic community for their concerns.  There were
the expected questions about jobs, education, the environment, and so
on.  We were surprized to find out that the most important issue to 90%
of the people was cellular telephone privacy.  They want to know why
the idiots in Congress fell for the lies of the lobbyists instead of
trying to find the facts."

Bill says:  "This is great.  Dan stated 'You can't lead this great
country of ours by misleading the people.'  George mislead the people
by signing that bill. We'll nail him on this one in the next debate
and pick up millions of votes from people using cellular telephones."


-----

PLEASE NOTE:  This is not an endorsement of any particular candidate.
There are many important issues being debated.  I do not suggest that
you pick a candidate strictly on whether he wants to take your radios away.

I'm just passing along the information that this communication channel
exists.  So please don't flame me.


These are my own personal opinions, not those of any organization I'm 
associated with such as the company in my e-mail address.



John WB2OSZ

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Newsgroups: alt.radio.scanner