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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

You can feel free to go verify that the bill to which Biden's language was attached did not itself attempt to criminalize encryption.

It is also very easy to discover what the public law Biden cosponsored less than a year later said about lawful intercept and cryptography.

I'd tell you, but I'd be repeating several comments I've already written on this thread.

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.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c102:1:./temp/~c102sT9...:

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.

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