(2008-08-25) Biden Tech Record

Declan Mc Cullagh says Joe Biden has a mixed record on technology who has spent most of his Senate career allied with the FBI and Copy Right holders, who ranks toward the bottom of CNET's Technology Voters' Guide, and whose anti-privacy legislation was actually responsible for the creation of PGP.

All of which meant that nobody in Washington was surprised when Biden was one of only four U.S. senators invited to a champagne reception in celebration of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) hosted by the MPAA's Jack Valenti, the RIAA, and the Business Software Alliance.

The book Electronic Privacy Papers describes Biden's bill as representing the FBI's visible effort to restrict encryption technology, which was taking place in concert with the National Security Agency's parallel, but less visible efforts... Biden's bill - and the threat of encryption being outlawed - is what spurred Phil Zimmermann to write PGP.

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.

The next year, months before the Oklahoma City bombing took place, Biden introduced another bill called the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995. It previewed the 2001 Patriot Act by allowing secret evidence to be used in prosecutions, expanding the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and WireTap laws, creating a new federal crime of "terrorism" that could be invoked based on political beliefs, permitting the U.S. military to be used in civilian law enforcement, and allowing permanent detection of non-U.S. citizens without judicial review.

But Biden's views had become markedly less FBI-friendly by April 2007, six years later.

Biden does [do well](http://action.aclu.org/site/Vote Center?page=legScore&congress=0&session_num=0&repId=199&lcmd=top&lcmd_cf=) on the ACLU's congressional scorecard.)

The ACLU also had been at odds with Biden over his efforts to censor (Censorship) bomb-making information on the Internet.

Biden returned to the business of targeting P2P networks this year. In April, he proposed spending $1 billion in U.S. tax dollars so police can monitor peer-to-peer networks for illegal activity.