Joe Biden tried to ban email encryption back in 1991

http://dustinkirkland.wordpress.com/2008/11/07/vp-elect-joe-biden-is-responsible-for-open-sourcing-email-encryption/

by dmix • 14 years ago

208 120 14 years ago

dustinkirkland.wordpress.com

kylemaxwell2• 14 years ago

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.

dmix2• 14 years ago

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...

tptacek23• 14 years ago

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.

chernevik14• 14 years ago

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?

tptacek23• 14 years ago

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.

vertis• 14 years ago

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.

mtgx3• 14 years ago

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.

tptacek23• 14 years ago

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 joint NSA/FBI programmatic surveillance systems that they believe are catching terrorists. At the time Biden proposed this language, we were still subsidizing those same terrorists.

* Biden was not the point person for '90s anti-crypto legislation.

* Biden was a cosponsor of CALEA, which actually explicitly exempts providers from decrypting encrypted content.

biesnecker2• 14 years ago

That "we were still subsidizing those same terrorists" bit causes me to reflexively facepalm every time I think about it.

declan6• 14 years ago

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."

Zoophy• 14 years ago

I wish he had succeed. Digital, not just email, encryption is a threat to national security.

omarchowdhury• 14 years ago

Because criminals won't find a way.

derleth2• 14 years ago

> I wish he had succeed. Digital, not just email, encryption is a threat to national security.

Since this comment is on its way to being killed, I quoted the entirety so my response would not be deprived of context.

Twenty years ago, this would have engendered actual debate. Fifteen years ago, it would have been harder to defend, but it would have found defenders. Now, of course, it's seen as utterly absurd and impossible to consider seriously.

Our culture has come to depend on encryption to do even the most basic business; trying to shove the genie into the bottle even partway, by mandating weaker encryption, would simply open our businesses' bank vaults and warehouses to criminals from around the world.

kabdib3• 14 years ago

The nail in the coffin for crypto bans seemed (to me) to be the rise of crypto competency overseas. In the mid to late 1990s there was a lot of progress outside the US.

Also, when VISA comes politely knocking, saying "We'd really like our stuff to be secure, and available to anyone," congre$$ tend$ to li$ten.

mike-cardwell• 14 years ago

I'm sure all criminals will stop using encryption as soon as it is banned.

1337biz2• 14 years ago

When I read these kind of comments, I am not sure if these commentators are compensated better than China's 50 cent party. Some mturk generated comments would probably provide more qualitative contributions than something like this.

derleth2• 14 years ago

> When I read these kind of comments, I am not sure if these commentators are compensated better than China's 50 cent party. Some mturk generated comments would probably provide more qualitative contributions than something like this.

I doubt anyone bothers to pay people to post this stuff to Hacker News. The battle over crypto is essentially over at this point.

As an aside, 'qualitative' is not a synonym for 'quality'; it means 'involving distinctions based on qualities' and contrasts with 'quantitative', which refers to distinctions based on numerical measurements.

Kynlyn2• 14 years ago

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 for nearly 20 years. Shouldn't surprise anyone that he was pushing an agenda for a larger, more powerful federal government.

tptacek23• 14 years ago

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.

Kynlyn2• 14 years ago

Representative Bob Goodlatte was a proponent of relaxation of encryption controls; pushing for a law in 1999, only 6 years after assuming office. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Goodlatte

Conrad Burns was a sponsor of the PROTECT Act which was an attempt to overhaul encryption regulations, including prohibiting domestic controls of encrypted software. He did this after being in office for about 8 years. http://www.techlawjournal.com/cong106/encrypt/19990414burns....

edit: Goodlatte was a Rep, not a Senator.

mtgx3• 14 years ago

Term limits would solve most of the lobbying/bribing/corruption problem in Washington. It wouldn't fix for good, but it would make paying for passing new laws a lot more expensive for companies. Also if everyone could only run once, they'd be a lot less worried about begging for donations for the next campaign. According to Larry Lessig representatives spend up to 70% of their time trying to get donations for their next campaigns, instead of doing their job properly, and passing laws for the actual benefit of the people.

biesnecker2• 14 years ago

I think term limits only make sense if you believe that you don't get better at being a legislator with experience. If you don't, then yes, absolutely, term limits will make buying votes far more expensive, but if you do, then you're constantly running the country with a team of redshirt freshmen, which may well be worse than corporate interests being able to influence policy decisions.

anigbrowl• 14 years ago

We have term limits in California, along with a reputation for one of the most dysfunctional state legislatures in the nation. Term limits are not the panacea people seem to think they are.

tptacek23• 14 years ago

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 numbers off the bottom of a check(!).

The government lost (although export controls still create annoyances today). Nobody in government seriously thinks industry is ever going to adopt a government-controlled encryption algorithm. Also, this isn't part of some secret history of the Internet; the entire cipherpunk movement was a reaction to the attempt to ban crypto.

If you want to keep perspective, it's important to remember that the world of 1993 looked very different from that of 2012. Very few people believed that every teenager in America would be using the Internet as their first line of communication, or that the Internet would steadily consume retail, finance, media, and even industrial controls. Commercial cryptography itself was merely nascent; "cryptography 2.0", a trend of the late 90s, introduced authenticated cryptography to the mainstream (prior to that people just encrypted and added checksums) --- look at SSHv1 and PGP for representative designs. Nobody understood anything in 1993.

Also:

Sense of Congress resolutions don't create law. They're literally just statements of opinion. So the idea that this amendment would have "outlawed SSH" is directly mistaken.

And, the targeting of cryptography in this language is incidental. It was not only the "sense of Congress" but actual law that telco providers create facilities to enable (warranted) wiretaps --- that's CALEA, which passed in 1994. Biden's sense-of-Congress resolution is essentially just a capsule summary of CALEA made to sound slightly smarter with the word "plaintext".

DanBC• 14 years ago

There were websites where people could transfer a short program from inside the US to outside the US, and then sign a petition to say they had done so.

(http://online.offshore.com.ai/arms-trafficker/)

(http://www.cypherspace.org/rsa/)

tkahn6• 14 years ago

Thomas, thanks for injecting sanity into these discussions.

declan6• 14 years ago

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.

tptacek23• 14 years ago

(a) You appear to be referring to a bill that died in a House committee.

(b) It's not in dispute that the DOJ opposed cryptography in the '90s (that's the lede of the comment you're replying to).

(d) The one crypto-relevant bill that does bear Biden's name explicitly forbids the government from demanding that ISPs design networks so as to provide plaintext to law enforcement.

Let's keep the goal-posts clear here. The thread we're commenting on says Joe Biden opposed encryption. That's relevant because Joe Biden is a part of the current administration. I wouldn't want to perpetuate that unfounded idea by pointing out that other people were opposed to encryption in the 1990s; it was a common belief back then.

Spooky23• 14 years ago

House bills that propose dumb or futile things and subsequently go nowhere are really common -- that two year term means that you need to show voters and donors that you mean business.

Tilting at some windmill that matters to the folks at home is like a public affirmation that declares a Congressman worthy of endorsement. (ie. police unions probably care about FBI endorsed bills)

wdr12• 14 years ago

> The whole US government tried to ban encryption wholesale in the 1990s

This simply isn't true.

I'm not sure if you're attempting to absolve Biden of his dreadful part in banning encryption, but if the entire government wanted something to happen, it would have happened.

Yes, PGP was out in the open, however, the government obviously could still have required it, still could have mandated the Clipper Chip, etc.

Also several members of the government notably spoke out against it, including Senators John Ashcroft & John Kerry.

tptacek23• 14 years ago

Biden never banned encryption; the only statute I can find that bears his name says the opposite.

I'm interested in the Ashcroft and Kerry references you're thinking of. Were they contemporaneous, or from the late '90s? In the late 1990s, there was a sharp shift towards liberalizing crypto, with competing bills introduced in the House and Senate by both parties. The argument shifted from "will we mandate key escrow for the general public" to "is it OK for us to provide a facility to mandate key escrow for systems sold to the federal government should we want to do so in the future".

You're right to call me out on one thing: "the entire government" was imprecise wording. I should have said "the Democratic administration, the preceding Republican administration, and prominent members of both the Senate and the House on both sides of the aisle".

chernevik14• 14 years ago

"Sense of Congress resolutions don't create law. They're literally just statements of opinion. So the idea that this amendment would have "outlawed SSH" is directly mistaken."

This is not correct, or if correct, is so in a manner meaningless for any layman. "Sense of the Senate" language is often important in judicial and / or executive interpretation. It may not be "law" but can often matter a great deal in the implementation, enforcement and interpretation of law.

In a discussion among legal experts "resolutions don't create law" might be one thing. In a discussion of non-lawyers of Congressional efforts to make policy it is simply, and at best, wrong.

tptacek23• 14 years ago

You don't have to read tea leaves to figure out what Biden actually believed. His name is on CALEA, which passed less than a year later. CALEA explicitly does not criminalize encryption.

yuhong2• 14 years ago

Remember 40-bit and 56-bit "exportable" encryption?

tptacek23• 14 years ago

Vividly. I was part of a team that shipped commercial security products containing crypto in the '90s. From Canada, no less.

declan6• 14 years ago

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 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. ...

tptacek23• 14 years ago

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".

declan6• 14 years ago

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

IheartApplesDix2• 14 years ago

Not this again. We already have a thread with this line of bs, go polute that.

kabdib3• 14 years ago

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.

sageikosa2• 14 years ago

She doesn't need your vote.

kabdib3• 14 years ago

But her oppponents do. And her opponents could use some cash, too.

mtgx3• 14 years ago

I hope she loses in the next election. She was the one that pretty forcefully pushed the FISA reauthorization with as little debate as possible through Senate. It made me angry just hearing her talk about how the Senate shouldn't waste any time with the amendments and just quickly pass FISA before the year is over.

tptacek23• 14 years ago

She cosponsored the bill they were renewing back in 2008. What did you expect her to think?

jacoblyles3• 14 years ago

Feinstein won't lose because this is a solid Democratic state. Unless there is an organized primary campaign against her, elections are an auto-win for the Feinstein campaign.

philwelch• 14 years ago

If only there was some kind of civil libertarian Democratic tea party movement.

waffle_ss• 14 years ago

One little-known fact about Biden is that he authored the [Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995][1]. This bill was a precursor to the PATRIOT Act in several ways, such as by ["allowing secret evidence to be used in prosecutions, expanding 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 detention of non-U.S. citizens without judicial review."][2] See the Center for National Security Studies [analysis][3] (written in 1995) for more detailed info.

In his own words: "I drafted a terrorism bill after the Oklahoma City bombing. And the bill John Ashcroft sent up was my bill" (his bill was actually introduced before the Oklahoma City bombing).

[1] http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d104:s.00390: [2]: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10024163-38.html?tag=newsL... [3]: http://w2.eff.org/Legislation/Bills_by_number/s390_hr896_95_...

tptacek23• 14 years ago

The anti-terrorism bill to which you refer does not simply criminalize political beliefs, as you imply; rather, it would have allowed prosecutions to raise federal terrorism charges for violent crimes if they met one 9 tests mostly having to do with deliberate attempts to disrupt commerce, target the US government explicitly, or involved people who were not US nationals. It was in that sense like "hate crimes" legislation.

The indefinite detention provision concerned foreign nationals who could not be repatriated (which is a sticky problem everywhere), and provided for judicial review in the US DC Circuit.

It was a stupid bill, but that doesn't mean we should be imprecise about it.

sneak3• 14 years ago

I like your username.

downandout5• 14 years ago

On this issue, Biden was clearly on the wrong side of history (and some of the fundamental tenets upon which the US was founded). But I don't think anyone, even ardent Obama supporters, would argue that he's the brightest star in the sky anyway. He is perhaps the strongest protection against an Obama assassination, since no one would want him to take office.

Fortunately, the system worked in this case. A dangerous law introduced by a dimwitted person was not allowed to weave its way into our system. As a result, the Internet flourished and we are able to discuss this issue on Hacker News. While we haven't been so lucky on other such laws, in general, we should all be grateful that the US system is as effective as it is in muzzling these types of people and the changes they try to make.

enraged_camel4• 14 years ago

>>He is perhaps the strongest protection against an Obama assassination, since no one would want him to take office.

I would argue that the Secret Service is by far the strongest protection.

downandout5• 14 years ago

The pen, or in this case the mere thought that Biden might wind up holding the pen, is mightier than the sword. I think that would make for a scary world that no one wants to see.

asveikau• 14 years ago

I personally consider myself a Biden fan. I have witnessed him talk sense on a number of issues in ways many politicians do not. (Example: several statements on Iraq, from before it was common in US politics to think that war was a bad idea.) The "Biden is dumb" narrative IMO mainly comes from DC-based press that exaggerates gaffes (real and perceived) and tends to blindly re-state existing DC press narratives.

I think the real story here is that US senator is not a good qualification for understanding crypto or technology as a whole. I don't believe that Biden inserted this language out of maliciousness. So our task then becomes to educate our representatives, or if it gets to that point on a single issue vote them out, though my impression is that Biden's opponents are also unlikely to understand crypto or do anything different about what is honestly something of a fringe issue - my vote this year was certainly not about sound crypto policy, and I doubt yours was either.

rdtsc• 14 years ago

> I think the real story here is that US senator is not a good qualification for understanding crypto or technology as a whole.

I think the issue the tendency of the government to constantly chip away at privacy. Terrorism, communism, illegal porn and drugs are all used as reasons.

Trying to find the reason Biden did what he did is not effective. We may never know the reason. We can look at actions -- what bills were supported, by whom and how far they have gotten in the pipeline. Biden's name or track record might not be relevant. This could have also been someone else.

For example the top half of the whole discussion is between chernevik and tptachek whether Biden is in general pro or against encryption. It doesn't really matter what Biden personally believes. But it matters how many and how far and how often such bills make it. Some are passed (like the warrant-less wiretapping), some die quickly.

Also there are countries that make use of encryption illegal. In this country, other laws have passed that chipped away at privacy, so it is understandable why a lot of people feel a little jittery about this topic -- because they can see this kind of bills passing with not too much opposition.

rayiner2• 14 years ago

> On this issue, Biden was clearly on the wrong side of history (and some of the fundamental tenets upon which the US was founded).

Probably on the wrong side of history, but it's pure historical revisionism to say it opposed any principle the U.S. was founded upon. Common law courts in England had broad subpoena powers (just like modern U.S. courts). Moreover, investigators had unlimited access to private documents pursuant to a validly executed warrant. The founders never contemplated a "document the government could never get at." What they contemplated was a series of protections against the government's ability to get documents.

downandout5• 14 years ago

My thinking on the subject of Biden's failed attempt to require that the government be able to recover encrypted information is more akin to attempting to require that everyone leave a copy of their house keys with the local police station just in case they decide to get a warrant to search your house. That is conceptually identical to what Biden proposed, yet such an idea would be decidedly un-American and any politician that raised such an idea would be publicly skewered.

lubujackson2• 14 years ago

Read Crypto by Steven Levy. An amazing account of how cryptography was finally opened up for the Internet. Because before the Net, the wording of the law was very, very restrictive in a way that made no sense with how the Internet operated. It really is eye opening to see the role the NSA played and the tactics they used to try to keep things smothered. Not very different than what is still happening right now with the NSA, apparently.

tptacek23• 14 years ago

What law are you referring to here?

lubujackson2• 14 years ago

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

I was thinking of when the limit of crypto for export was 40 bits SSL, which would have made all e-commerce impossible due to the uselessness of 40 bit crypto. Luckily that was changed.

jacoblyles3• 14 years ago

It's worth noting that Silicon Valley's lobbying organization is inchoate and ineffective compared to more established causes. I'd love to change this. Why can't we use our strengths in crowd-funding and crowd-activism to flex our muscle a bit in some primaries?

California isn't going to be anything but solid blue anytime soon, but we could easily primary anti-privacy Democrats and replace them with pro-privacy Democrats. This is what the Tea Party has done to get rid of fiscal moderates in the Republican House caucus. There's no need to accept whatever creeps the major parties deign to give us.

gunter69• 14 years ago

Joe biden, the titular head of freedom in the Senate.

bediger4000• 14 years ago

Why does it surprise anyone that the US government tried to ban encryption early on? That's the general direction the US government has taken for a long time. The Supreme Court has shaved the "unreasonable search and seizure" protection so thin, that it almost doesn't ever apply. The COINTELPRO (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO) efforts in the 60s shows that the US government hasn't really respected any kind of privacy for a very long time. Banning encryption is the end point of a couple of trends, copy protection (a.k.a. "Digitial Rights Management") and "The War on Terrorism"/"The War on Drugs". The US government just can't make certain that nobody's "Intellectual Property" isn't being "stolen" if any encrypted information flows. Similarly, encryption only helps "terrorists" and "drug dealers" trying to "launder money" or recruit other terrorists to sell crack or something, I get all confused.

But seriously folks, read the writing on the wall: banning encryption is the end point of some trends with a lot of power behind them.

hakaaak• 14 years ago

To the OP: thanks for the post, but the font is nearly unreadable for older guys like me on smaller devices.

16s• 14 years ago

Only the government should have access to encryption and guns. Why would ordinary citizens need these things?

bradfeld• 14 years ago

Fortunately, Biden stayed up all night last night trying to solve the fiscal cliff. Or maybe unfortunately.

Joe Biden tried to ban email encryption back in 1991

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