Clinton and Silicon Valley

Sunday, March 1, 1998 by Dave Winer.

Hi it's me again.

Now I'm typing in Eudora! I love all these different editors on Windows. I'm really waiting for nirvana to catch up with me. An outline with wrapping text is what I want. Like other former-MORE users, the outliner in Word doesn't do it for me. In the meantime, I like the casual feel of typing into Eudora. I feel relaxed.

The 'E' Word 

Bill Clinton's popularity numbers are high, but not with me.

I've never liked the guy. But now I'm really scared of him because it's become clear, as the Lewinsky story unwound, and now festers, how dangerously he lives, how carefully you have to listen to him to understand what he's really saying.

This is the man with his finger on the button. So when he lives dangerously, the rest of us are too.

Clinton came to California last week to talk about technology and taxation, but Silicon Valley wanted to talk about something else -- encryption.

Yes, the issue is still there, as John Markoff of the New York Times got the story in Friday's paper, in an article entitled "Clinton Continues to Stumble over the 'E' Word (Encryption)."

Check out this quote. "To us this is really important, but it's just an irritant to him," said one Silicon Valley executive who met with the President before his speech [Thursday] and asked not to be identified further. "His basic message to us was, 'Can we get this thing done?'"

The thing he wants to get done is keep all email open and unencrypted, so anyone can read anything you send over the Internet, including the FBI.

They won't make it any more difficult for criminals to encrypt messages, but they do make it dangerous for law-abiding computer users like you and me to do serious collaborative work thru the net.

When you think it thru, we may already live in a police state. You don't know who's reading and archiving your email.

Bad 

I bet Clinton is pissed about that quote.

It makes him look bad. But he *is* bad.

All the reporters say Silicon Valley loves him.

I hope he's losing the support of Silicon Valley.

Dave Winer