On Biden

By now everyone knows that Joe Biden is Obama's pick for vice president. I am not happy about this.

The reason is that among the potential VP choices, Joe Biden seems like the worst choice as far as technology, copyright, and internet topics go and either tied for worst (with Clinton) or the second-worst choice on constitutionalism. For a quick reader on this, go here. For an even quicker rundown, here are some highlights:

-- introduced a bill similar to the Patriot Act around the time of the Oklahoma City bombing, later bragged that the Patriot Act was mostly what he'd written earlier

-- wants the Justice Department to monitor and prosecute copyright violations

-- backed the Digital Millenium Copyright Act

-- introduced a few other bills that were very worrisome for copyright, internet, and technology policy

-- fully in the back pocket of the RIAA and MPAA, even celebrated the anniversary of the DMCA with them

-- wrote two bills that would allow the government to grab encryption keys for any encrypted data from anyone

-- voted for the Real ID Act

-- wrote a bill to censor bomb-making information on the internet

-- held a committee hearing on "Theft of American Intellectual Property" at which groups like the RIAA and Microsoft were allowed to testify but did not call any internet-based company, consumer rights organizations, or civil liberties groups

-- wants the government to monitor p2p networks for illegal activity

-- wrote a bill to expand electronic surveillance in cases of harm to children

-- is one of the most pro drug war members of Congress


In short, this dude has worked very hard against things I care very much about. Seriously, he's got just about everything on there, including First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, expansiveness of government power, internet freedom, copyright minimalism, adoption of useful new technologies, and the drug war. Hey, at least he hasn't publicly called for a ridiculous and obviously disastrous plan for Iraq, like partitioning it into... separate... oh. Nevermind, check off bad Iraq policy as well.

Much like with Obama's decision to vote for the new FISA, this is a flippant alienation of a significant portion of Obama's base in an attempt to try to grab some independents. My whole demographic (the nerdy young well-educated technology-loving civil libertarians, aka People On the Internet) is in an uproar about this, and in our biggest watering holes (like Digg), which were at one point categorically and almost annoyingly pro-Obama, there is serious discussion now about voting for a third party or even not voting at all.

I'm not really under the illusion that my demographic is a big or strong enough bloc to be specifically courted, but I'm also not sure whether the groups that Biden might bring in outnumber us to any real extent. Like, what does he bring in, morons who think that John McCain is good on foreign policy and morons who think that Obama is too inexperienced and that McCain's kind of experiences would be in any way beneficial in leading the country? Those groups definitely exist, but they can be severely cut down just by getting better information, which can be done just by running a more effective campaign. This isn't really the kind of thing that requires a VP choice in my opinion; it's not like picking a guy based on which important swing state he can bring in or on some important thing he did or trait he has, it's just picking a guy to make up for what's been a pretty underwhelming and ineffective campaign so far. I mean, any campaign that lets a guy like McCain get even and build a lead on Obama is just per se bad, there's no way that man should even be in the running at this point.

I'm sorry to see that the Obama campaign feels that it has to make up for its ineptitude by picking Joe Biden.