Why? He’s the Democrats’ Dick Cheney: a supremely influential, unapologetic party insider with only enough respect for civil liberties — most of it in his words, not his actions — to not go to jail.
He hates the Internet because it transmits child porn, and wants to strip or backdoor all encryption and monitor all traffic to make sure no child porn is there — anything else he gets to see, well, that’s lagniappe.
He’s a vain plagiarist who invites criticism, then tries to silence it. As chair of the Senate foreign relations and judicial committees, he’s overseen and approved — and in many cases, introduced — some of the biggest legislative fuck-ups in those departments.
He’s the wrong choice to be the tiebreaking vote in a very evenly split Senate. He’s the wrong choice for technology and anything involving civil liberty on the Internet.
April 2008 (/.): Senator Joe Biden (D-Del) has proposed an ambitious plan, costing on the order of $1 billion, aimed at
curtailing illegal activities via P2P networks. His plan involves utilizing new software to monitor peer-to-peer traffic on an ongoing basis. (This was later expanded to include chat rooms and Web sites.)
Jan. 2007 (/.): Joe Biden, Dianne Feinstein, and two GOP senators are sponsoring a bill called the PERFORM Act that would require podcasts with music and satellite radio to be locked-up with music industry-approved DRM software. From the article: ‘All audio services — Webcasters included — would be obligated to implement “reasonably available and economically reasonable” copy-protection technology aimed at preventing “music theft” and restricting automatic recording.
Jan. 2006 (/.): Senator Joe Biden’s page on Wikipedia had a major edit removing significant criticism from a Congressional staffer’s IP address.
Jan. 2003 (Ars): According to the No Electronic Theft Act (NET Act) signed into law in 1997 (Biden voted for it), you are an unindicted felon if you have ever downloaded mp3s, shared movies, or pirated software. That’s right, according to the Act, you could face up to $250,000 in fines and three years in jail if you have used a p2p network to download any of the above… even if you no longer do so.
Curiously enough, the Justice Department has not prosecuted anyone under the law yet. This will change, and soon. In July, a bi-partisan group of congressmen asked the Justice Department to begin some NET Act prosecutions ASAP. The group included Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., as well as many others. You can check out the whole list of names as well as read their letter to the Justice Department here (PDF).
July 2002 (/.): Senator Joseph Biden has revised the ‘Anticounterfeiting Amendments of 2002′ to make it a felony to bypass certain DRM technologies.
1996 (EFF): In the wake of the recent public concern about terrorism, Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Joseph Biden (D-DE) have renewed their efforts to pass legislation to restrict the availability of ‘bomb-making’ information on the Internet.
The Feinstein/Biden amendment was added to the Senate Defense Appropriations bill (S. 1762) in early July, and is not currently part of the new law enforcement initiative. However, the amendment poses a serious threat to chill the the free flow of information on the Internet. (GG: Biden also a co-sponsored a similar measure on meth in 1999 and a similar measure on Ecstacy in 2000.)
1995 (EFF): The Omnibus Counterterrorism Bill was introduced as S. 390 into the Senate and as H.R. 896 in the House. It was initiated by the FBI, and passed on by the Justice Department and the White House. Senators Biden (D-DE) and Specter (R-PA) initiated it in the Senate.
THIS IS A GENERAL CHARTER FOR THE FBI AND OTHER AGENCIES, INCLUDING THE MILITARY, TO INVESTIGATE POLITICAL GROUPS AND CAUSES AT WILL. The bill is a wide-ranging federalization of different kinds of actions applying to both citizens and non-citizens. The range includes acts of violence (attempts, threats and conspiracies) as well as giving funds for humanitarian, legal activity.
It authorizes secret trials for immigrants who are not charged with a crime but rather who are accused of supporting lawful activity by organizations which have also been accused of committing illegal acts. Immigrants could be deported: 1) using evidence they or their lawyers would never see, 2) in secret proceedings 3) with one sided appeals 4) using illegally obtained evidence.
It suspends posse comitatus - allowing the use of the military to aid the police regardless of other laws. It reverses the presumption of innocence - the accused is presumed ineligible for bail and can be detained until trial. It loosens the rules for wiretaps. It would prohibit probation as a punishment under the act - even for minor nonviolent offenses.
(GG: The only upside was that Phil Zimmerman and a number of notable others spread PGP as far and quickly as possible to subvert the bill’s effects. PGP is now a commonly used, effective and accessible form of communications encryption — the opposite effect from what Biden wanted with S.390.)
1991 (The Risks): S. 266 introduced by Mr. Biden (for himself and Mr. DeConcini) contains the following section:
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.
The referenced language requires that manufacturers build trap-doors into all cryptographic equipment and that providers of cconfidential channels reserve to themselves, their agents, and assigns the ability to read all traffic.
EFF: The FBI wants to easily intercept and interpret encrypted phone calls, data transmissions and electronic files when they’ve has been given the authority to do so by the courts. Gorges are rising in the technology community as a result. What happens in a court of law, for example, when a vendor hasn’t followed this “suggestion”?
Another argument asks whether a suspected criminal, being forced to provide a “key” to decrypt a message, could be seen as “self-incriminating” something we’re protected against in the Fifth Amendment.
Also, does forcing me to compromise the security of my data infringe on my right to self defense? Since encryption is considered a munition, making it less reliable could be tantamount to, say, forcing me to use a varmint rifle instead of a sawed-off 12-gauge. You got it: “When encryption is outlawed, only outlaws will use encryption.”
(GG: The EFF got Sen. Patrick Leahy to convince Biden to drop the backdoor provision from the bill. That didn’t stop Biden from pushing S.390 four years later.
Arguably, elements of S.266 and S.390, and the support they found in Congress, created the foundation of the telecom/NSA wiretapping. Obama voted in favor of a compromise on FISA that maintained immunity; the headlines when it happened were that Obama flipped his position with Clinton on the opposited side. The odd part: Biden also sided with Clinton against immunity.
The real question isn’t why Obama flipped his position. It’s why Biden did. He got to score political points within his party while not getting anything done to endanger telecom immunity.)
1988 (Wikipedia): Delaware Senator Joe Biden was forced out of the 1988 U.S. Presidential race (but remained in the U.S. Senate) when it was discovered that parts of his campaign speeches were plagiarized from speeches by British Labour party leader Neil Kinnock and Robert Kennedy.
1987 (Wikipedia): In September 1987, the campaign ran into serious trouble when he was accused of plagiarizing a speech by Neil Kinnock, then-leader of the British Labour Party.[26] Though Biden had correctly credited the original author in all speeches but one, the one where he failed to make mention of the originator was caught on video; the New York Times reported “Senator Biden began his remarks by saying the ideas had come to him spontaneously on the way to the debate.”[26][27]
Within days, it was also discovered that as a first-year law student at Syracuse Law School, Biden had plagiarized a law review article in a class paper he wrote. Though the dean of the law school in 1988 as well as Biden’s former professor played down the incident of plagiarism, they did find that Biden drew “chunks of heavy legal prose directly from” the article in question. Biden said the act was inadvertent due to his not knowing the proper rules of citation, and Biden was permitted to retake the course after receiving a grade of F, which was subsequently dropped from his record.[28] Biden also released his undergraduate grades, which started off poorly and remained unexceptional.[28] Further, when questioned by a New Hampshire resident about his grades in law school Biden had claimed falsely to have graduated in the “top half” of his class, (when he actually graduated 76th in a class of 85) that he had attended on a full scholarship, and had received three degrees.[29] In fact he had received two majors, History and Political Science, and a single B.A., as well as a half scholarship based on financial need.[29]
