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 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."
...
After taking over the Foreign Relations committee, Biden became 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.
...
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.
...
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".
There are two separate points here: first, whether PRZ released PGP because of what Biden's bill symbolized, and second, whether Biden was anti-crypto.
For the first, see PRZ's contemporaneous statement:
http://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/WhyIWrotePGP.html
It was this bill 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.
For the second, I'd say Biden was more pro-law enforcement (and law enforcement wanted domestic controls on encryption) rather than anti-crypto. This played out not just in crypto but also Biden's support for CALEA, FISA expansion in the 1990s, the Patriot Act, etc:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10024163-38.html
Sorry, I was needlessly hostile in my preceding comment.
You wrote about the bill as was part of an actual effort to restrict cryptography. But it wasn't. In fact, the bill preceded CALEA, which was a very important bill that established statutory authority for lawful intercept; lawful intercept is the most important concept captured in Biden's (practically meaningless) amendment, and cryptography is only ancillary.
Further, the record over the rest of the '90s supports that interpretation. Most importantly CALEA, which Biden cosponsored, and which forbids the federal government from requiring telcos to adopt any specific equipment (ie, the government could not mandate that MCI use switches with specific lawful intercept features) and which all but demands that telcos stay out of the business of encrypting and decrypting altogether, which is exactly what the cipherpunks wanted.
I'd like to see actual evidence supporting the idea that Biden opposed general-purpose cryptography. It may well exist, but I haven't found it on the record. Phil Zimmerman is many things, but "legal expert" is not one of them; we need to do better than "Phil Zimmerman felt like he was under attack" (all commercial cryptographers felt that way even after CALEA passed) and "Biden thought the director of NSA was competent" (hey, he probably was.)
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 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." ... After taking over the Foreign Relations committee, Biden became 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. ... 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. ...