No Excuses for this kind of Politics
*Sigh*
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.
Last year, Biden sponsored an RIAA-backed bill called the Perform Act aimed at restricting Americans’ ability to record and play back individual songs from satellite and Internet radio services. (The RIAA sued XM Satellite Radio over precisely this point.)
[From Joe Biden’s pro-RIAA, pro-FBI tech voting record | Politics and Law – CNET News.com]
And, even worse:
. . . months before the Oklahoma City bombing took place, Biden introduced another bill called the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995. It previewed the 2001 Patriot Act by allowing secret evidence to be used in prosecutions, expanding the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act 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 detection of non-U.S. citizens without judicial review. The Center for National Security Studies said the bill would erode “constitutional and statutory due process protections” and would “authorize the Justice Department to pick and choose crimes to investigate and prosecute based on political beliefs and associations.”
[From Joe Biden’s pro-RIAA, pro-FBI tech voting record | Politics and Law – CNET News.com]
Yes Obama still gets my vote. But with every passing day it’s feeling more like the lesser of two evils rather than something truly good. Yes, I know, “the art of compromise, blah blah.” How long do we live with that excuse while our constitutional rights get trashed and the environment chokes on our waste?
Maybe I’m just being pessimistic, but I just don’t think, after learning more about Biden’s record, that he bodes well for “Change” or “Hope.”