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".
"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.
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.
So my comment is right, and a crucial statement of your argument is wrong, but we can ignore all that because if look at some other piece of legislation we'll see the real Joe Biden.
I spent 8 years in Washington trying to make public policy that actually made sense. I discovered that this was not possible, in part because the idiocy of policy that does _not_ make sense is masked by rhetorical tricks and argumentation such as we're seeing here. I've seen it called "squid ink", the idea is to defuse a true statement by making assessment of that truth so complicated that most readers won't bother.
90% of this board can distinguish technical ability in about five minutes. Sadly they haven't this same facility with policy discussion.
What part of your comment is right? That sense of the Senate resolutions make law? No, they don't. That sense of the Senate resolutions can matter in later court cases? Maybe, but I'm guessing a failed resolution on a failed bill matters a lot less in court than the successfully passed bill by the same author that became public law less than a year later that says the opposite.
Beyond that, it's hard to even imagine what you think I'm trying to create a smokescreen for. Cryptography was never banned. Every restriction on cryptography that existed in 1993 has been substantially relaxed. As a professional software security person, my career would be hamstrung by the ban you seem to perceive me as advocating for. Maybe you just think I really, really like Joe Biden?
I know very little about you. I've been talking about the signature shape of your arguments.
And I don't know anything of your motivations. Have you read Orwell's "Politics and the English Language"? If so you'll understand that it is possible, indeed sometimes common, for people to take rhetorical stances without actually understanding the position they are taking, out of a reflexive support for their party / faction / coalition of preference. And that those preferences can shape arguments simply to political purposes without actually considering the substance of the question at hand. Indeed people can find themselves in this position without even really realizing it.
Which is why Orwell thought clear language and proper argument so important that he dedicated his life to demonstrating their necessity. Bad arguments an important signal of the possibility of a person so committed to some political purpose in a manner indifferent to the means of achieving that purpose. You could be a political zombie without ever knowing it.
My comment was _right_. "Sense of the Senate" language can, for a layman's usage, constitute law. Your insistence on a point that is wrong, while at the same time eliding that error to some other argument, signals an interest in winning an apparent point rather than in helping people actually understand. This is rhetoric, and at its worst it is very dangerous thing.
I know nothing of your purposes or motives. You may very well be in a state deserving pity more than anything else. But the way you argue is dangerous -- to your country, your community, and to your soul.
I won't speak for Thomas, but I used to teach "Politics and the English Language" in rhetoric and argumentation courses. There are two important things worth pointing out here:
1. Your understanding of the problem domain of language and politics, at least in this post, is incredibly naive. For a rigorous analysis of the subject, try something like Chaïm Perelman's Treatise on Argumentation or one of Ronald Dworkin's books.
2. Your comment being right and Thomas' comment being right aren't mutually exclusive. What he said is correct. What you said is also correct. Your attempt to make your point invalidate his is what's popularly called shifting the goalposts. It's what people do when they want to, as you put it, win points.
Also, as a point of order, your whole shtick of suggesting that someone has taken a position out of blind partisanship without really grasping what's at stake in it yadda yadda -- that's never a constructive way to approach a discussion. Everything you're accusing Thomas of, you're guilty of yourself. Whence Thomas' dismissal, which brings to mind Aristotle:
A man should not enter into discussion with everybody or practice dialectics with the first comer as reasoning always becomes embittered where some people are concerned. Indeed, when an adversary tries by every possible means to to wriggle out of a corner, it is legitimate to strive, by every possible means, to reach the conclusion; but this procedure lacks elegance. -- Topics 8.14.164b
As you are so learned, and Chaïm and Ronald aren't here, perhaps you'd care to offer their more proper reading of Orwell. And as you're so learned, you'll immediately know my remark as a paraphrase, and of whom. Right? Because when I read a book, I do so in such a fashion as to repeat its argument, rather than assign others reading I couldn't do properly in the first place.
Nor can I understand how my reading of Orwell can be "naive". Wrong, maybe. Unless you mean that Orwell argued that these aspects of rhetoric can be deliberately manipulated to bring about otherwise unjustifiable outcomes? And that his chief purpose was to warn others of this manipulation and suggest danger signals of it? I am completely alert to that purpose, and you can be sure my neglect of that theme in my remarks here reflects a very deliberate desire to avoid suggesting anything so ugly of someone about whom I know nothing.
Now as to "moving the goal posts." What I said, from the very start, was that his construction was wrong _for_a_layman_, that it could be right _for_lawyers_, and that the former was here the important context. So my argument acknowledged the sense in which he could be right and dismissed it.
And so forth. I don't really care what you've taught. Bring an _argument_. Because your pompous _assertions_ don't do much more than piss me off.
Nah. Every claim he made is demonstrably incorrect, with the exception of his initial point that '"Sense of the Senate" language is often important in judicial and / or executive interpretation.' This claim is also incorrect, strictly speaking, but if we're charitable and substitute 'occasionally' for 'often', it at least adds something to the discussion. What it doesn't do is show Thomas to be wrong. "Sense of" resolutions aren't legally binding and rarely, if ever, impact public-facing policy. They do, on occasion, impact government-facing policy, for example SCOTUS recess appointments. The rest of his comments are blather and, while worthy of a good chuckle, are unworthy of response.
"Sense of" clauses often determine the precise allocation of appropriated funds. Indeed _committee_reports_, which lack the dignity of a full vote of either House, or a Presidential signature, are treated by executive departments as determinative of public spending. They are the primary mechanism for designating "pork barrel" spending and thus are treated as the primary targets of lobbying efforts.
I know this because I have worked on those bills.
I do not know the legal or regulatory landscape around telecommunications in nearly such detail. But knowing the importance of such language in a REALLY significant corner, I would be very, very slow to regard any of it as without "impact [on] public facing policy." Not without a very thorough explanation of why exactly it was meaningless, and regarded as such generally throughout the industry.
Again, I don't know the industry. I do know that the making and implementation of law is a very complicated business, where the black and white readings of law do not yield the simple answers one might expect from logical analysis. And I know that in very important corners of government language like this, and still further from law than this, is effectively determinative of federal policy. So blanket claims that "sense of" language are without any real force are "demonstrably incorrect".
"Meno: And did you still not think [Gorgias] knew [what excellence was]?
"Socrates: I'm rather forgetful, Meno . . . maybe you know what he used to say. If so, remind me . . . . let's leave him out of it; he's not here after all."
From Plato's "Meno".
Here's another fun quote:
GLENDOWER.
I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
HOTSPUR.
Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?
Thomas is a fairly well known, consistent, and rational individual on HN. As one who has been other side of being corrected (curtailed?) by him, I can say he's the type of individual who, in my experience, just makes sense - particularly if you take a deep breath and step away from. The keyboard for a few minutes. His position here is pretty straightforward "Biden's name was on a document that had no force of law, and then a year later, his name was on a law that did not restrain crypto."
I'm not sure what your argument is, you kind of lost me when you started suggesting Thomas was arguing in a way dangerous to his soul - that kind of hyperbole is usually not helpful - particularly when it's directed to someone as levelheaded, rational and knowledgeable as Thomas.
I'm arguing first that he's wrong about Biden not proposing "law".
Second, and more obsessively, that his insistence on a point so obviously wrong suggests his purpose is rhetorical rather than clarifying. I.e. he cares more about how things appear than helping people see what they really are.
Subsequently I don't seem to be doing much more than throwing food. Maybe I should unplug my computer until I'm in a better mood.
It's an argument over rhetoric, and those suck. Alas it's one reason people get away with rhetoric -- it's hard to tell who's being rhetorical and who's in earnest.
You know "learn to program or be programmed?" Argument is like that, only far more important. Please learn to recognize good arguments from bad, so you can call people like me on my shit. Because otherwise you're reliant on people like me for that, and, well, we'll abuse your trust.
I'm largely saying he's arguing more to confuse than explain. And that he might not actually be aware he's doing so.
I think this sort of thing is important. Most people think this sort of thing is annoying. It's true that arguments like this are usually a waste of time, and this seems no different.
I'll add to my various rantings: This is has been an unexpectedly crummy day for me. I hope that, if given a better mood and better form, I could more clear and less snarky.
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.
(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).
(c) The bill you're referring to had nothing to do with Biden.
(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.
"All right, among us now we that we are all in private just us girls all let our hair down" he didn’t had much hair even then but he let it down "We are not going to prosecute your client Mr Zimmermann he said public key encryption will become available we fought a long loosing battle against it but it was just a delaying tactic" and then he looked around the room and he said "But nobody cares about anonymity do they?"
And a cold chilled went up my spine and I thought alright Stuart and now I know you’re going to spent the next twenty years trying to eliminate anonymity in human society and I am going to try to stop you and let’s see how it goes.
And it’s going badly.
We didn’t built the net with anonymity built in. That was a mistake now we are paying for it.
Our network assumes that you can be tracked everywhere.
And we have taken the Web, and we made facebook out of it.
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)
> 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.
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".
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.
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".