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Joe Biden tried to ban email encryption back in 1991

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Re: Joe Biden tried to ban email encryption back in 1991

#21

Post by declan »

tptacek wrote: post #8
mtgx wrote: post #4

I wonder if Biden is whispering similar ideas into Obama's ears, and if it's why Obama is so keen on trampling on the 4th amendment these days.

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 jo…

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."

Re: Joe Biden tried to ban email encryption back in 1991

#22

Post by harold »

tptacek wrote: post #16
chernevik wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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...:

Re: Joe Biden tried to ban email encryption back in 1991

#23

Post by tptacek »

declan wrote: post #20

I wrote about this four years ago when Obama chose Biden as his running mate: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10024163-38.html Note one House committee did vote in the 1990s to ban the "manufacture, distribution, or import of any encryption product that did not include a back door for the federal government," but that bill failed to become law: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20032910-281.html Excerpts: Biden's b…

You wrote about this incorrectly; you cited Biden's language, which begins "It is the sense of Congress that", and then wrote "Translated, that means turn over your encryption keys", which it plainly does not mean, because sense-of-the-Senate language doesn't create law.

Then, you wrote "Joe Biden made his second attempt to introduce such legislation in the form of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA)", although Leahy sponsored CALEA. You also failed to note that the only mention of encryption in the bill exempts providers from responsibility for providing plaintext, instead casting CALEA as attempt to ban encryption, which it was not.

I would at this point like to ask you, as a journalist who claims to have covered this topic in detail, what evidence you can present that Joe Biden is "staunchly anti-cryptography".

Re: Joe Biden tried to ban email encryption back in 1991

#24

Post by tptacek »

harold wrote: post #22
tptacek wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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 manufacture…

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.

Re: Joe Biden tried to ban email encryption back in 1991

#25

Post by declan »

tptacek wrote: post #7

The whole US government tried to ban encryption wholesale in the 1990s; they even attempted to standardize a bespoke algorithm (Skipjack) that provided key escrow for law enforcement. During the same period, they religiously enforced export controls that classified any encryption code, including simple hash functions, as munitions. I remember buying a "this t-shirt is a munition" shirt in '95 by giving a website the…

Although Biden's amendment by itself wouldn't have outlawed SSH, it was enough to make programmers see the writing on the wall. A bill with domestic restrictions on encryption was approved by a House committee in the 1990s, and Biden's bill was what prompted PRZ to release PGP, as PRZ himself said at the time. See:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20032910-281.html In response to lobbying from the FBI, a House committee in 1997 approved a bill that would have banned the manufacture, distribution, or import of any encryption product that did not include a back door for the federal government. The full House never voted on that measure.

Re: Joe Biden tried to ban email encryption back in 1991

#26

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #10
Kynlyn wrote: post #6

This is the kind of thing one can expect when their leaders are so far removed from the people that they govern. Joe Biden has been in office since 1973. I'd wager that's longer than many of the HN readers have even been alive. When you have politicians who have been running around in the Washington circles that long, some really bad things will come of it. So, at the time he proposed that, he had been in Washington…

This statement would make sense if you could provide examples of (at the time) younger Senators who actively opposed crypto regulation so we could compare their track records as well.

[deleted]

Re: Joe Biden tried to ban email encryption back in 1991

#27

Post by dmix »

tptacek wrote: post #11
dmix wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyps...

It was the official, overt policy of the Clinton administration through the 1990s. I'm curious as to which amendments you refer to that "attack Internet freedom" in the guise of catching Internet predators.

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.

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1131...

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".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_Children_from_Intern...

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.

http://rt.com/news/uk-snoopers-charter-may-276/

There is certainly a pattern of using the "4 horsemen" to pass bills attacking internet freedom that affect all citizens not just the criminals.

Re: Joe Biden tried to ban email encryption back in 1991

#28

Post by vertis »

kylemaxwell wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Re: Joe Biden tried to ban email encryption back in 1991

#29

Post by kabdib »

Feinstein supported this, too. I wrote her a letter; her response was along the lines of "I don't care, and in any event it's good for you."

Haven't voted for her since.

With recent events, even though I don't live in CA any more, I plan to give her opponents money, for any election she's a candidate in.

Re: Joe Biden tried to ban email encryption back in 1991

#30

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #7

The whole US government tried to ban encryption wholesale in the 1990s; they even attempted to standardize a bespoke algorithm (Skipjack) that provided key escrow for law enforcement. During the same period, they religiously enforced export controls that classified any encryption code, including simple hash functions, as munitions. I remember buying a "this t-shirt is a munition" shirt in '95 by giving a website the…

[deleted]
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