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Comment by harold | Hacker News Reader

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...:

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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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