His observations came as the Electronic Frontier Foundation was trying to resolve matters in a more tidy way. It was sponsoring a lawsuit to prevent Washington from restricting the spread of encryption-related writing and software. Quite correctly the EFF argued that the encryption laws were an “impermissible prior restraint on speech, in violation of the First Amendment.” An EFF victory, needless to say, could nuke the government’s case against Zimmermann. With Hooverian tenacity, as if Phil Zimmermann were Dillinger or a godfather, Washington kept up its harassment and even escalated it in some ways. Jim Warren saw this happen firsthand. He had asked to testify several years ago in Zimmermann’s defense, but the authorities ignored his request. Then in 1995 he had published op-ed pieces in San Jose and San Francisco papers, in which he throttled the FBI and NSA for getting in the way of the best possible security on the Net. In the wake of the Mitnick break-ins, he had accused the Feds of “endangering millions of innocent citizens and law-abiding businesses that use the Net or cell phones, in order to protect their ability to monitor the few who might be guilty of something.” Almost immediately two U.S. Customs agents favored Warren with a surprise visit to his house and quizzed him about Zimmermann and PGP. “When they began the interview,” he said, “they handed me a subpoena that said I was ‘COMMANDED to appear and testify before the Grand Jury of the United States District Court’ in San Jose.“[6.23] “Who says government isn’t responsive,” Warren quipped. He said this in a folksy newsletter sent to hundreds of people on the Net. Its well-earned name was _Government Access_; he had been the main organizer of a successful campaign to get California to put legislative information on the Internet for free. As much as anyone he was trying to work within The System. Yet he was ever skeptical toward “Congress Critters.” Again and again Warren’s newsletter in effect depicted a Washington that could be Torylike in its contempt toward Netfolk. Warren didn’t just write of the well-publicized threats like the Exon bill, or the Clinton Administration’s prosecution of a couple in California because their sex-oriented BBS did not come up to Bible Belt community standards in Tennessee, or the Zimmermann case itself. Warren also wrote of obscure people such as a Berkeley-area hacker who, enraged by restrictions on encryption and by other actions in the vein of King George’s Stamp Act, had fled to Sweden.