As I recall, the 1991 version of me thought a lot of things that the 2012 version of me doesn't. I presume this is true for most humans, including Vice President Biden.
What's interesting was that it was a last minute addition to an omnibus crime bill.
The same thing is still happening today where amendments attacking internet freedom get tagged onto existing bills under the guise of targeting "terrorists, drug dealers, pedophiles, and organized crime" aka "The Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse".
I'm from Canada, last year we had an omnibus crime bill that included an amendment for government to warrantlessly track
online activity which they defended as a way to track pedophiles.
In the USA, this wasn't an amendment but would have affected far more than just predators: "Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011".
In the UK, there is the snoopers bill for monitoring online communication, choice quote [3]:
> "Criminals, terrorists and pedophiles will want MPs to vote against this bill. Victims of crime, police and the public will want them to vote for it. It’s a question of whose side you’re on,” said Home Secretary Theresa May.
Me too. But this wasn't some joker on a bar stool spouting opinions. This was a United States Senator, proposing law. I would hope that if I was _legislating_ I would take care to do _nothing_ until I was quite sure that my proposals didn't diminish the liberties of free people.
Biden might today protest ignorance. Okay, then what the hell was he doing proposing legislation in the first place?
He was not "proposing law". He added a meaningless sense of Congress resolution in 1993 that presaged CALEA, which he cosponsored, and which passed in 1994, and which expressly exempted providers from being required to decrypt encrypted communications.
It is not possible to comment meaningfully on the language discussed without more context, including a description of the bill to which it was to be attached. "Sense of the Senate" type language can be harmless fluff, or it can be potentially important in the legislative history consulted by the courts as they interpret law.
You can no more tell me the significance of that language without that context than you could tell me, without context, the implications of "int i; i = 0;" for a program's execution.
If you want to refute the OP assertion that Biden's proposal actually mattered, you will have to be considerably more thorough than you have been.
Your reliance on your readers to construct your argument for you strongly suggests to me that there isn't much argument there. Because its an exceptional reader who has time for such research -- if the point where there to be made, you'd be more convincing simply making it yourself.
I know zero about Joe Biden's position on crypto. But the style of this argument looks to me very much like FUD.
Just read the rest of my comments. They directly address your point. Not wanting to repeat things I've already written in this thread does not constitute avoidance of argument.
It is true that sense of congress resolutions are not law, and just an 'opinion of congress'.
Just for context of what Biden's opinion was at the time, here is the 'meaningless sense' that appears to have originated in his bill, S-226, from 1991.
SEC. 2201. COOPERATION OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS PROVIDERS WITH LAW ENFORCEMENT.
It is the sense of Congress that providers of electronic communications services and manufacturers of electronic communications service equipment shall ensure that communications systems permit the government to obtain the plain text contents of voice, data, and other communications when appropriately authorized by law.
Again, worth noting that Biden cosponsored a bill less than a year later that (a) provided for lawful intercept of telecommunications while (b) explicitly exempting providers from a requirement to provide plaintext.
The history of that law, CALEA, is a bit more complicated than that. See:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10024163-38.html
CALEA represented one step in the FBI and NSA's attempts to restrict encryption without backdoors. In a top-secret memo to members of President George H.W. Bush's administration including Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and CIA director Robert Gates, one White House official wrote: "Justice should go ahead now to seek a legislative fix to the digital telephony problem, and all parties should prepare to follow through on the encryption problem in about a year. Success with digital telephony will lock in one major objective; we will have a beachhead we can exploit for the encryption fix; and the encryption access options can be developed more thoroughly in the meantime."
CALEA was not passed under the Bush administration; it was passed by a Democratic Senate during the Clinton administration. What does a top-secret memo to George Bush tell us about Joe Biden or CALEA?
Again, I know this sounds pedantic, but it's not an academic distinction. There was definitely a pervasive sentiment that technology was moving faster than law enforcement could keep up with, and that some fix was required. We're talking about a point in time where many phone exchanges still weren't digitally switched! At issue wasn't simply that criminals could evade wiretaps, but that some exchanges might transition to equipment that would preclude wiretapping altogether.
It's intellectually risky to take that sentiment and focus it on cryptography, as if any one player in 1993 had established themselves as an opponent of general-purpose cryptography. This whole thread discusses one word ("plaintext") in a meaningless sense-of-the-Senate resolution that had much more to do with digital switching than it did with cryptography.
We have a similar problem here too (Australia). Other Politicians from the opposing party spend time nitpicking things that were done in the distant past.
It becomes a big deal when anyone does a 'backflip'. I don't have proof, but I would wager that certain politicians stick to supporting things they no longer believe in, just to avoid this kind of thing.
