FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

For Immediate Release

Contact: Ari Schwartz
202-637-9800
ari@cdt.org

April 3 - John Morris, an attorney with broad expertise in Internet technology as well as constitutional and telecommunications law, has joined the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) on April 2 to head up a new project aimed at promoting better public interest participation in the technical development of the Internet. Morris will lead CDT's "Internet Standards, Technology and policy Project," between technologists, policymakers, and advocates, and will seek to increase public involvement in technical decisions as well as technical understanding among policymakers.

"We are very excited to have John on board to focus on critical public policy issues that are arising in the evolution of the Internet's architecture," said CDT Executive Director Jerry Berman. "As technical decisions about the Internet have an increasingly broad impact, we must find

Since 1994, Morris has been a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Jenner & Block, where he has litigated groundbreaking cases in Internet and First Amendment law. Morris was a lead counsel in the ACLU v. Reno/American Library Association v. U.S. Dep't of Justice case, in which the Supreme Court unanimously overturned the Communications Decency Act of 1996 and extended to speech on the Internet the highest level of constitutional protection. In that case, Morris was responsible for the development of the factual presentation concerning how the Internet works, a presentation that served as the foundation for the Supreme Court's landmark decision.

Prior to becoming a lawyer, Morris had extensive experience with both computers and politics. In the mid-1970's, as a staff member on Capitol Hill, Morris helped to promote the use of computer software to manage and improve constituent communications. In 1981, Morris joined the Datatel Minicomputer Company, where he was one of the lead system designers of the original version of the Quorum constituent management software. In 1985, he co-founded Intelligent Solutions, Inc., which took over development of Quorum and built it into the leading constituent services product used by Members of Congress today.

Morris received his B.A. magna cum laude with distinction from Yale University, and his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was the Managing Editor of the Yale Law Journal. Following law school, he clerked for Judge Thomas A. Clark of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and worked for three years as a staff attorney at the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, Georgia. He joined Jenner & Block in 1990.

Morris's ties to CDT are not new. From May 1999 through April 2000, he took a leave of absence from Jenner & Block to serve as director of CDT's Broadband Access Project. The Project undertook a comprehensive assessment of the legal, policy, and factual issues surrounding the emergence of broadband Internet access technologies. The Project's major report can be found at http://www.cdt.org/digi_infra/broadband/backgrounder.shtml.

CDT's new standards and technology project is funded with support from the Ford and Markle Foundations and is part of a forward-looking effort to promote the public voice in new areas of Internet management and development. "This is an exciting opportunity for me and comes at a key time in the development of the Internet," Morris said. "Through this project, we hope to ensure that free expression, privacy, and other public concerns are addressed during the design of technology, rather than as an afterthought."

"John's mission will be threefold," explained Berman: "To identify standards under active consideration that have public interest implications and get the public interest community involved in their development; to create a network of advocates, academics and publicly concerned technologists that can represent the public interest in a wide number technology development forums; and to create a technology assessment to share information and perspectives about the policy implications of new technologies and the technical implications of new public policies."

The need for this project is demonstrated by the sheer size and complexity of the standards processes. Two of the standards bodies on which Morris will be focusing his efforts are the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The IETF has over 125 separate working groups that are currently considering well over 500 proposed standards or policy statements concerning a huge variety of topics about the Internet. The W3C divides its work into more than 40 separate "activities," and is presently considering approximately 80 recommendations for standards. The work of both bodies can have widespread and long-lasting implications for privacy, public access, and freedom of speech and association.

The Center for Democracy and Technology, a non-profit organization, is dedicated to developing public policy solutions that advance civil liberties and democratic values in the new computer and communications media.

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