August 23, 2008 6:09 PM PDT
Joe Biden’s pro-RIAA, pro-FBI tech voting record
Posted by Declan McCullagh
news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10024163-38.html
By choosing Joe Biden as their vice presidential candidate, the
Democrats have selected a politician with a mixed record on technology
who has spent most of his Senate career allied with the FBI and
copyright 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.
That’s probably okay with Barack Obama: Biden likely got the nod because
of his foreign policy knowledge. The Delaware politician is the chairman
of the Senate Foreign Relations committee who voted for the war in Iraq,
and is reasonably well-known nationally after his presidential campaigns
in 1988 and 2008.
Copyright
But back to the Delaware senator’s tech record. After taking over the
Foreign Relations committee, Biden became been a staunch ally of
Hollywood and the recording industry in their efforts to expand
copyright law. He sponsored a bill in 2002 that would have make it a
federal felony to trick certain types of devices into playing
unauthorized music or executing unapproved computer programs. Biden’s
bill was backed by content companies including News Corp. but eventually
died after Verizon, Microsoft, Apple, eBay, and Yahoo lobbied against it.
A few months later, Biden signed a letter that urged the Justice
Department “to prosecute individuals who intentionally allow mass
copying from their computer over peer-to-peer networks.” Critics of this
approach said that the Motion Picture Association of America and the
Recording Industry Association of America, and not taxpayers, should pay
for their own lawsuits.
Last year, Biden sponsored an RIAA-backed bill called the Perform Act
aimed at restricting Americans’ ability to record and play back
individual songs from satellite and Internet radio services. (The RIAA
sued XM Satellite Radio over precisely this point.)
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 hosted by the MPAA’s
Jack Valenti, the RIAA, and the Business Software Alliance. (Photos are
here.)
Now, it’s true that few Americans will cast their votes in November
based on what the vice presidential candidate thinks of copyright law.
But these pro-copyright views don’t exactly jibe with what Obama has
promised; he’s pledged to “update and reform our copyright and patent
systems to promote civic discourse, innovation and investment while
ensuring that intellectual property owners are fairly treated.” These
are code words for taking a more pro-EFF (Electronic Frontier
Foundation) than pro-MPAA approach.
Unfortunately, Biden has steadfastly refused to answer questions on the
topic. We asked him 10 tech-related questions, including whether he’d
support rewriting the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, as part of our
2008 Technology Voters’ guide. Biden would not answer (we did hear back
from Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Ron Paul).
In our 2006 Technology Voters’ Guide, which ranked Senate votes from
July 1998 through May 2005, Biden received a mere 37.5 percent score
because of his support for Internet filters in schools and libraries and
occasional support for Internet taxes.
Privacy, the FBI, and PGP
On privacy, Biden’s record is hardly stellar. In the 1990s, Biden was
chairman of the Judiciary Committee and introduced a bill called the
Comprehensive Counter-Terrorism Act, which the EFF says he was
“persuaded” to do by the FBI. A second Biden bill was called the Violent
Crime Control Act. Both were staunchly anti-encryption, with this
identical language:
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.
Translated, that means turn over your encryption keys. 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 was no foe of the NSA. He once described
now-retired NSA director Bobby Ray Inman as the “single most competent
man in the government.”)
Biden’s bill — and the threat of encryption being outlawed — is what
spurred Phil Zimmermann to write PGP, thereby kicking off a historic
debate about export controls, national security, and privacy.
Zimmermann, who’s now busy developing Zfone, says it was Biden’s
legislation “that led me to publish PGP electronically for free that
year, shortly before the measure was defeated after vigorous protest by
civil libertarians and industry groups.”
While neither of Biden’s pair of bills became law, they did foreshadow
the FBI’s pro-wiretapping, anti-encryption legislative strategy that
followed — and demonstrated that the Delaware senator was willing to be
a reliable ally of law enforcement on the topic. (They also previewed
the FBI’s legislative proposal later that decade for banning encryption
products such as SSH or PGP without government backdoors, which was
approved by one House of Representatives committee but never came to a
vote in the Senate.)
“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.”
There’s another reason why Biden’s legislative tactics in the CALEA
scrum amount to more than a mere a footnote in Internet history. They’re
what led to the creation of the Center for Democracy and Technology —
and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s simultaneous implosion and
soul-searching.
EFF staffers Jerry Berman and Danny Weitzner chose to work with Biden on
cutting a deal and altering the bill in hopes of obtaining privacy
concessions. It may have helped, but it also left the EFF in the
uncomfortable position of leaving its imprimatur on Biden’s FBI-backed
wiretapping law universally loathed by privacy advocates. The debacle
ended with internal turmoil, Berman and Weitzner leaving the group and
taking their corporate backers to form CDT, and a chastened EFF that
quietly packed its bags and moved to its current home in San Francisco.
(Weitzner, who was responsible for a censorship controversy last year,
became a formal Obama campaign surrogate.)
“Anti-terror” legislation
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 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. The Center for National
Security Studies said the bill would erode “constitutional and statutory
due process protections” and would “authorize the Justice Department to
pick and choose crimes to investigate and prosecute based on political
beliefs and associations.”
Biden himself draws parallels between his 1995 bill and its 2001 cousin.
“I drafted a terrorism bill after the Oklahoma City bombing. And the
bill John Ashcroft sent up was my bill,” he said when the Patriot Act
was being debated, according to the New Republic, which described him as
“the Democratic Party’s de facto spokesman on the war against terrorism.”
Biden’s chronology is not accurate: the bombing took place in April 1995
and his bill had been introduced in February 1995. But it’s true that
Biden’s proposal probably helped to lay the groundwork for the Bush
administration’s Patriot Act.
In 1996, Biden voted to keep intact an ostensibly anti-illegal
immigration bill that outlined what the Real ID Act would become almost
a decade later. The bill would create a national worker identification
registry; Biden voted to kill an Abraham-Feingold amendment that would
have replaced the registry with stronger enforcement. According to an
analysis by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the underlying
bill would have required “states to place Social Security numbers on
drivers licenses and to obtain fingerprints or some other form of
biometric identification for licenses.”
Along with most of his colleagues in the Congress — including Sen. John
McCain but not Rep. Ron Paul — Biden voted for the Patriot Act and the
Real ID Act (which was part of a larger spending bill). Obama voted for
the bill containing the Real ID Act, but wasn’t in the U.S. Senate in
2001 when the original Patriot Act vote took place.
Patriot Act
In the Senate debate over the Patriot Act in October 2001, Biden once
again allied himself closely with the FBI. The Justice Department
favorably quotes Biden on its Web site as saying: “The FBI could get a
wiretap to investigate the mafia, but they could not get one to
investigate terrorists. To put it bluntly, that was crazy! What’s good
for the mob should be good for terrorists.”
The problem is that Biden’s claim was simply false — which he should
have known after a decade of experience lending his name to wiretapping
bills on behalf of the FBI. As CDT explains in a rebuttal to Biden: “The
Justice Department had the ability to use wiretaps, including roving
taps, in criminal investigations of terrorism, just as in other criminal
investigations, long before the Patriot Act.”
But Biden’s views had become markedly less FBI-friendly by April 2007,
six years later. By then, the debate over wiretapping had become sharply
partisan, pitting Democrats seeking to embarrass President Bush against
Republicans aiming to defend the administration at nearly any cost. In
addition, Biden had announced his presidential candidacy three months
earlier and was courting liberal activists dismayed by the Bush
administration’s warrantless wiretapping.
That month, Biden slammed the “president’s illegal wiretapping program
that allows intelligence agencies to eavesdrop on the conversations of
Americans without a judge’s approval or congressional authorization or
oversight.” He took aim at Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for
allowing the FBI to “flagrantly misuse National Security Letters” —
even though it was the Patriot Act that greatly expanded their use
without also expanding internal safeguards and oversight as well.
Biden did vote against a FISA bill with retroactive immunity for any
telecommunications provider that illegally opened its network to the
National Security Agency; Obama didn’t. Both agreed to renew the Patriot
Act in March 2006, a move that pro-privacy Democrats including Ron Wyden
and Russ Feingold opposed. The ACLU said the renewal “fails to correct
the most flawed provisions” of the original Patriot Act. (Biden does do
well on the ACLU’s congressional scorecard.)
“Baby-food bombs”
The ACLU also had been at odds with Biden over his efforts to censor
bomb-making information on the Internet. One day after a bomb in Saudi
Arabia killed several U.S. servicemen and virtually flattened a military
base, Biden pushed to make posting bomb-making information on the
Internet a felony, punishable by up to 20 years in jail, the Wall Street
Journal reported at the time.
“I think most Americans would be absolutely shocked if they knew what
kind of bone-chilling information is making its way over the Internet,”
he told the Senate. “You can access detailed, explicit instructions on
how to make and detonate pipe bombs, light-bulb bombs, and even — if
you can believe it — baby-food bombs.”
Biden didn’t get exactly what he wanted — at least not right away. His
proposal was swapped in the final law for one requiring the attorney
general to investigate “the extent to which the First Amendment protects
such material and its private and commercial distribution.” The report
was duly produced, concluding that the proposal “can withstand
constitutional muster in most, if not all, of its possible applications,
if such legislation is slightly modified.”
It was. Biden and co-sponsor Dianne Feinstein introduced their bill
again the following year. Biden pitched it as an anti-terror measure,
saying in a floor debate that numerous terrorists “have been found in
possession of bomb-making manuals and Internet bomb-making information.”
He added: “What is even worse is that some of these instructions are
geared toward kids. They tell kids that all the ingredients they need
are right in their parents’ kitchen or laundry cabinets.”
Biden’s proposal became law in 1997. It didn’t amount to much: four
years after its enactment, there had been only one conviction. And
instead of being used to snare a dangerous member of Al Qaeda, the law
was used to lock up a 20-year old anarchist Webmaster who was sentenced
to one year in prison for posting information about Molotov cocktails
and “Drano bombs” on his Web site, Raisethefist.com.
Today there are over 10,000 hits on Google for the phrase, in quotes,
“Drano bomb.” One is a video that lists the necessary ingredients and
shows some self-described rednecks blowing up small plastic bottles in
their yard. Then there’s the U.S. Army’s Improvised Munitions Handbook
with instructions on making far more deadly compounds, including methyl
nitrate dynamite, mortars, grenades, and C-4 plastic explosive — which
free speech activists placed online as an in-your-face response to the
Biden-Feinstein bill.
Peer-to-peer networks
Since then, Biden has switched from complaining about Internet baby-food
bombs to taking aim at peer-to-peer networks. He held one Foreign
Relations committee hearing in February 2002 titled “Theft of American
Intellectual Property” and invited executives from the Justice
Department, RIAA, MPAA, and Microsoft to speak. Not one Internet
company, P2P network, or consumer group was invited to testify.
Afterwards, Sharman Networks (which distributes Kazaa) wrote a letter to
Biden complaining about “one-sided and unsubstantiated attacks” on P2P
networks. It said: “We are deeply offended by the gratuitous accusations
made against Kazaa by witnesses before the committee, including
ludicrous attempts to associate an extremely beneficial, next-generation
software program with organized criminal gangs and even terrorist
organizations.”
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. He made that
suggestion after a Wyoming cop demonstrated a proof-of-concept program
called “Operation Fairplay” at a hearing before a Senate Judiciary
subcommittee.
A month later, the Senate Judiciary committee approved a Biden-sponsored
bill that would spend over $1 billion on policing illegal Internet
activity, mostly child pornography. It has the dubious virtue of being
at least partially redundant: One section would “prohibit the broadcast
of live images of child abuse,” even though the Justice Department has
experienced no problems in securing guilty pleas for underage
Webcamming. (The bill has not been voted on by the full Senate.)
Online sales of Robitussin
Around the same time, Biden introduced his self-described Biden Crime
Bill of 2007. One section expands electronic surveillance law to permit
police wiretaps in “crimes dangerous to the life, limb, and well-being
of minor children.” Another takes aim at Internet-based telemedicine and
online pharmacies, saying that physicians must have conducted “at least
one in-person medical evaluation of the patient” to prescribe medicine.
Another prohibits selling a product containing dextromethorphan —
including Robitussin, Sucrets, Dayquil, and Vicks — “to an individual
under the age of 18 years, including any such sale using the Internet.”
It gives the Justice Department six months to come up with regulations,
which include when retailers should be fined for shipping cough
suppressants to children. (Biden is a longtime drug warrior; he authored
the Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act that the Bush administration
used to shut down benefit concerts.)
Net neutrality
On Net neutrality, Biden has sounded skeptical. In 2006, he indicated
that no preemptive laws were necessary because if violations do happen,
such a public outcry will develop that “the chairman will be required to
hold this meeting in this largest room in the Capitol, and there will be
lines wandering all the way down to the White House.” Obama, on the
other hand, has been a strong supporter of handing pre-emptive
regulatory authority to the Federal Communications Commission.
