So much for the netroots and the go-ahead, modernist Obama presidency.
CNet’s Declan McCullagh has taken a look at Obama’s new BFF Joe Biden’s voting record on matters digital, and it’s not what you’d call enlightened.
An excerpt:
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.”)
On technology Biden is firmly in the corporate camp. In the 1990s he supported the deregulation of the telecommunications industry – cheers for that – and currently he’s right up the the arse of the recording and media industries in championing the prosecution of downloaders.
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.)
The prospective veep is company guy personified when it comes to online civil liberties, in stark contrast to his running mate’s supposed embrace of the netroots. How the Democrats will square that circle remains to be seen, but if their candidate had to choose between Viacom and the EFF I somehow doubt the EFF would win. Viacom and friends have bigger PACs.
But it’s not just technology on which he harks back to the last century.
Obama certainly didn’t pick him to get the youth vote; Biden doesn’t do modern or nuance on drug policy either. He’s declared war on party-goers and minor intoxicant users as sponsor of the RAVE Act, while at the same time bolstering drug crime and corruption by his creation of the office of Drugs Czar in the nineties and of the massive legal/security bureaucracy that supports it and profits from it.
He’s also a cradle Catholic who while nominally pro-choice and liberal (lookit that 100% NARAL rating!) nevertheless voted strongly for the partial-birth abortion ban, and for abstinence-only education.
Biden attended Catholic school, considered becoming a priest, attends a parish in Wilmington, Delaware, met with Pope John Paul II four times and attended his funeral.
Blimey, they really are going for the working-class antedeluvian white guy, get off my lawn vote, aren’t they?
Add to all this the fact that this is the man with vaunted foreign policy experience who yet was also a sponsors of NATO expansion legislation that kicked off the current troubles with Georgia. Well played! More proof that this is not a man not really in tune with the modern world or 21st century politics. He’s still fighting the bloody Cold War.
I suppose we should be glad that he is at least absolutely, positively against torture. Plus he’s not Cheney.
These days that seems to be qualification enough for the White House.
