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                    ACM WASHINGTON UPDATE

           U.S. Office of Public Policy of the
                Association for Computing

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                        May 23, 1997
                         Volume 1.3

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CONTENTS
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INTRODUCTION

USACM ACTIVITIES
        Scientific Organizations Discuss Database Treaty
        SIGGRAPH To Hold Policy Seminar at Annual Conference

POLICY BRIEFS
        Bills Introduced to Limit Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail.
        DOD Awards Grant to Build "PetaOps" Supercomputer
        Exports Approved for Encryption for Financial Transactions
        RSA Sues PGP Over Use Of Encryption Algorithm
        ACLU Challenges Virginia Law Restricting Use of Net
        UUNET Will No Longer Peer With Small ISPs
        FCC Approves "Sky Station International"
        ISPs Form "IOPS.ORG"
        Gore Announces New Connections to High Speed Network

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INTRODUCTION
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The Association for Computing is an international professional society
whose 75,000 members (60,000 in the U.S.) represent a critical mass of
computer scientists in education, industry, and government.  The USACM
provides a means for promoting dialogue on technology policy issues with
United States policy makers and the general public. The WASHINGTON UPDATE
will report on activities in Washington which may be of interest to those
in the computing and information policy communities and will highlight
USACM's involvement in many of these issues.

To subscribe to the ACM WASHINGTON UPDATE send an e-mail to
listserv@acm.org with "subscribe WASHINGTON-UPDATE" (no quotes) in the
body of the message.

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USACM ACTIVITIES
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SCIENTIFIC ORGANIZATIONS DISCUSS DATABASE TREATY

On Monday May 12, USACM attended a meeting at the Copyright Office to
discuss new intellectual property protection for databases.  USACM was
invited by the Register of Copyrights to join representatives from other
scientific organizations in discussing the impact of a "sui generis"
regime on the scientific community.  The Copyright Office will hold a
total of eight meetings with constituencies affected by the proposed
protection and will write a report on this issue including the history of
data protection in the U.S., international efforts at "sui generis"
regimes, and summaries of the eight meetings.  The report was requested by
Senator Hatch, Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The
representatives at the meeting seemed to agree on three main points.
First, it is important that the interests of science be taken into account
if any "sui generis" proposal is to be considered. Second, we remain
unconvinced that data or "facts" need to be, or should be protected when
there is no "value-added" effort involved in their arrangement.  Third,
all proposals we have seen so far to protect "facts" would have an adverse
effect on science.

SIGGRAPH TO HOLD POLICY SEMINAR AT ANNUAL CONFERENCE

ACM SIGGRAPH, the leading organization for computer graphics and
interactive techniques, will be holding a special Policy Makers' Seminar
at its annual conference on Monday, August 4, 1997 at the Los Angeles
Convention Center.  USACM is assisting SIGGRAPH in organizing the seminar.
Computer graphics and graphical user interfaces are responsible for the
tremendous increase in use of the Internet by the general public. Computer
graphics special effects are a mainstay in the worldwide entertainment
industry.  The convergence of television and computing has been a result
of pioneering work in the computer graphics research and industrial
communities.  Computer graphics makes computing accessible to
non-specialists in areas ranging from medicine to education.  The annual
SIGGRAPH conference has for almost twenty-five years been the premier
event for computer graphics professionals.  Policy issues which directly
affect computer graphics, from advanced television standards to
cost-effective availability of high bandwidth communications, will be
discussed at the seminar.
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POLICY BRIEFS
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BILL INTRODUCED TO LIMIT UNSOLICITED COMMERCIAL E-MAIL

Representative Smith (R-NJ) and Senator Murkowski (R-AL) have introduced
legislation to give citizens the ability to screen out unsolicited
commercial e-mail messages, often call junk e-mail or "spam."  The Senate
bill would require labels on e-mails which are characterized as
advertisements so that computer users could request service providers to
screen out these types of messages. Users could also ask to be removed
from specific computer mailing lists. Under the "Unsolicited Commercial
Electronic Mail Choice Act of 1997", senders would be required to stop
sending the unsolicited advertisements within 48 hours of a request.
Senders would also be prohibited by law from disguising their messages'
routing.  The bill gives large providers a year to install the equipment
needed to screen out advertisements; smaller providers would be given two
years to comply.  It would also require service providers to cut off
service to companies that send out junk e-mail without the required
information.

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DOD AWARDS GRANT TO BUILD "PETAOPS" SUPERCOMPUTER

The U. S. Department of Defense has given John F. McDonald, a Rensselaer
professor of electrical, computer, and systems engineering a three-year,
$1,369,000 contract from the federal Defense Projects Research Agency
(DARPA) to build a supercomputer that uses a 16-GHz clock.  McDonald will
build a "PetaOps" supercomputer (1,000 trillion operations per second),
which would be the fastest computer ever developed.  The design will
incorporate an 8-way superscalar architecture with a 16-GHz clock that
could reach 128 billion operations per second. McDonald will use eight of
these designs in conjunction to achieve the DARPA designated speeds.
McDonald plans to use the heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBTs) design
on which mainframe computers were once built to solve the main problem of
cooling the machine. Defense will use the faster computer to simulate
battles for training soldiers and to simulate the environmental effects of
natural disasters. Scientists have also said that such speeds could help
unravel the human genome and improve the accuracy of weather predictions.
http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/news/trends/t970509b.htm

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EXPORTS APPROVED FOR ENCRYPTION FOR FINANCIAL TRANSACTIONS

On May 8, the Department of Commerce announced that it will allow the
export of non-recoverable encryption products of unlimited key length for
products that are specifically designed for financial transactions,
including home banking.  They will also allow exports, for two years, of
non-recoverable general-purpose commercial products of unlimited key
length when used for inter- bank and similar financial transactions, once
the manufacturers file a commitment to develop recoverable products.
Export licenses will be granted after a one-time product review.  This
agreement is similar to that set out for the export of other encryption
products in the Administration's Interim Rule on encryption exports
announced last year. http://www.bxa.doc.gov/encstart.htm.

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RSA SUES PGP OVER USE OF ENCRYPTION ALGORITHM

RSA Data Security has filed a lawsuit against Pretty Good Privacy (PGP),
alleging that PGP failed to comply with the terms of a licensing agreement
that RSA had signed with Lemcom, the company with which PGP merged last
year.  RSA says Lemcom had "no ability to transfer rights to the source
code for the Licensed Product to an OEM Customer or anyone else."  When
informed that its license agreement to RSA technology was canceled, "PGP
demanded we sue them in order to exercise audit rights clearly laid out in
the agreement," says RSA President Jim Bidzos.  Meanwhile, PGP says the
products it's developing don't rely on the RSA encryption scheme.  "Those
new products will be encryption-algorithm independent," says PGP VP Robert
Kohn, which will "break RSA monopoly on this technology."

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ACLU CHALLENGES VIRGINIA LAW RESTRICTING USE OF NET

The American Civil Liberties Union and six Virginia college professors has
filed a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a Virginia
state law that makes it a crime for state employees using state-owned
computers to "access, download, print or store any information . . .
having sexually explicit content." In addition, the law prohibits
"storage" of sexually oriented communications on state-owned computers,
and bars employees from using e-mail, chat rooms and list servs, if the
exchange involves sexually explicit words or images. Penalties for
violations are not specified and would presumably be left to the
discretion of state agencies.  The law requires professors and other state
employees wishing to download, post, transmit or store sexually explicit
material on their computers to first ask for approval in writing from
agency heads, such as a university official.  Requests for such approval
are then made available to the public. The Virginia law exempts state
employees who can show they need computer access to sexually explicit
material for a "bona fide, agency-approved research project or other
agency-approved undertaking," but the professors argue that the law would
prevent them from teaching literature written by such sexually explicit
writers as Henry Miller and Allen Ginsberg.  The case, Urofsky et al. v.
Allen, is filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of
Virginia, Alexandria Division, and names Governor George Allen as a
defendant.  The lawsuit specifically challenges Sections 2.1-804-806 of
the Virginia Code.  http://www.aclu.org.

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UUNET WILL NO LONGER PEER WITH SMALL ISPS

On May 12, UUNET Technologies Inc., the world's largest Internet service
provider and a subsidiary of WorldCom Inc. said it will no longer accept
peering requests from ISP's whose infrastructures do not allow for the
exchange of similar traffic levels. Peering is an arrangement whereby
"peers", or ISP's of similar size, route each others' traffic to
destinations on their respective networks.  Because the flow of data and
use of infrastructure are anticipated to be approximately equal in both
directions, no money changes hands in peering relationships.  UUNET's
policy is to peer with ISP's that operate a national network with a
dedicated, diversely routed DS-3 (or faster) backbone, and which will
connect to UUNET at DS-3 or greater speeds in at least four geographically
diverse locations. They said that it is no longer economically feasible
for them to peer with small ISP's which cannot route traffic on a
bilateral and equitable basis.

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FCC APPROVES "SKY STATION INTERNATIONAL"

The FCC has approved the development of Sky Station International, a plan
to provide wireless T1-level service (1.5Mbps) to laptop computers by
routing through giant "weather balloons."  The stations themselves will be
on platforms suspended in the atmosphere approximately 100,000 feet from
the ground by "lighter-than-air craft and station-kept by corona ion
engines."
http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/International/Public_Notices/1996/pnin6060.txt

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ISPS FORM "IOPS.ORG"

Nine of the nation's major Internet service providers announced on May 20
the formation of IOPS.ORG, an organization of Internet service providers
(ISPs). IOPS.ORG will focus primarily on "resolving and preventing network
integrity problems, addressing issues that require technical coordination
and technical information-sharing across and among ISPs." Their primary
purpose is to make the "commercial Internet more robust and reliable.
These issues include joint problem resolution, technology assessment, and
global Internet scaling and integrity." IOPS.ORG will be a basis for
cooperation and collaboration between the large ISPs.  The founding
members of IOPS.ORG are ANS Communications, AT&T, BBN Corporation,
EarthLink Network, GTE, MCI, NETCOM, PSINet, and UUNET, and it is expected
that additional national and international Internet operators will join.
http://www.iops.org

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GORE ANNOUNCES NEW CONNECTIONS TO HIGH-SPEED NETWORK

Vice President Gore announced on Tuesday, May 20, that the National
Science Foundation is awarding $12.3 million in grants to 35 research
institutions across the United States to allow them to connect to the very
high speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS).  These grants will bring the
total number of research institutions connected to vBNS to 64. The NSF
grants help set the foundation for the Administration's Next Generation
Internet (NGI) initiative. http://www.ngi.gov.
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Washington Update is a biweekly publication of the U.S. Public Policy
Office of the Association for Computing HTTP://www.acm.org/usacm/ 666
Pennsylvania Ave., SE, Suite 301, Washington, DC 20003. 202/298-0842
(tel), 202/547-5482 (fax).
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