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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

This statement is profoundly ignorant on many levels, including the relationship between Obama and Biden, Biden's relationship to '90s crypto regulation, and Obama's take on the 4th amendment.

Let's try to catalog the misconceptions here:

* Biden is not a key Obama influencer. The VP rarely is, but this one in particular.

* Obama's tensions with the 4th Amendment stem from counterterrorism and a desire to continue joint NSA/FBI programmatic surveillance systems that they believe are catching terrorists. At the time Biden proposed this language, we were still subsidizing those same terrorists.

* Biden was not the point person for '90s anti-crypto legislation.

* Biden was a cosponsor of CALEA, which actually explicitly exempts providers from decrypting encrypted content.

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I'd add a friendly amendment: CALEA was intended to be a first step, a "beachhead," toward domestic controls on encryption. The fact that the second step was not successful came despite efforts by Biden, the FBI, the NSA, etc. -- not because of them. See below.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10024163-38.html "Joe Biden made his second attempt to introduce such legislation" in the form of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which was also known as the Digital Telephony law, according to an account in Wired magazine. Biden at the time was chairman of the relevant committee; he co-sponsored the Senate version and dutifully secured a successful floor vote on it less than two months after it was introduced. CALEA became law in October 1994, and is still bedeviling privacy advocates: the FBI recently managed to extend its requirements to Internet service providers. 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."

I'd ask here how a bill can be a "beachhead" against encryption when it forbids the government from even requiring that telcos adopt equipment for which wiretaps are feasible, and when it specifically exempts telcos from being required to facilitate decryption.

For clarity, you're talking about 103(b)(3)?

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_...

That doesn't look like a ward against anything, to me. It looks like a compromise stuck into the bill because of push-back from "cypherpunks". If the political winds had changed, or change in the future, that part of CALEA would be removed by a new law.

I think most politicians have no problem banning strong encryption and mandating ISP decryption of it all. Even most citizens have no problem banning strong encryption.

That "we were still subsidizing those same terrorists" bit causes me to reflexively facepalm every time I think about it.

Political alliances are constantly shifting. The US was allied with the Soviet Union in WWII. Then the USSR became the US's arch-enemy in the Cold War. The Osama bin Laden that the US was subsidizing in the 1980s was at that time fighting against the Soviet army in Afghanistan.

Another example of shifting alliances: During the Iran vs. Iraq war, the US and other Western countries were subsidizing Saddam Hussein, since Iraq was considered the lesser of two evils (they had not taken US diplomats hostage as the Iranians had). Everyone looked the other way when the Iraqis used chemical weapons on the Iranians. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, they became an enemy of the US because they were threatening US oil suppliers. At the present time, the Iraqi government is again a friend of the US. In a few years, things could change again.

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