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 n

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 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."