Al Gore is a United States politician who served successively in the House of Representatives, the Senate, and as the Vice President from 1993 to 2001. In the 1980s and 1990s, he promoted legislation that funded an expansion of the ARPANET, allowing greater public access, and helping to develop the Internet.
Congressional work and Gore Bill Prior to the late 1970s, data communication was primarily on time sharing services, such as those of General Electric. Gore had been involved with computers since the late 1970s, first as a Congressman (1977–1985) and later as senator and vice president. A 1998 article described him as a "genuine nerd, with a geek reputation running back to his day as a futurist 'Atari Democrat' in the House. Before computers were comprehensible ... Gore struggled to explain artificial intelligence and fiber-optic networks to sleepy colleagues." According to Campbell-Kelly and Aspray (Computer: A History of the Information Machine), up until the early 1990s public usage of the Internet was limited and the "problem of giving ordinary Americans network access had excited Senator Al Gore since the late 1970s."Campbell-Kelly and Aspray (1996).Computer: A History of the Information Machine. New York: Basic Books, p. 298.
Of Gore's involvement in the then-developing Internet while in Congress, Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn have also noted:
On June 24, 1986, Gore introduced S-2594, Supercomputer Network Study Act of 1986.
As a senator, Gore began to craft the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 (commonly referred to as "The Gore Bill") after hearing the 1988 report Toward a National Research Network submitted to Congress by a group chaired by University of California, Los Angeles professor of computer science, Leonard Kleinrock, one of the central creators of the ARPANET (the ARPANET, first deployed by Kleinrock and others in 1969, is the predecessor of the Internet).
Indeed, Kleinrock would later credit both Gore and the Gore Bill as a critical moment in Internet history:
The bill was passed on December 9, 1991, and led to the National Information Infrastructure (NII) which Gore referred to as the "information superhighway". President George H. W. Bush predicted that the bill would help "unlock the secrets of DNA," open up foreign markets to free trade, and a promise of cooperation between government, academia, and industry.
Prior to its passage, Gore discussed the basics of the bill in an article for the September 1991 issue of Scientific American entitled Scientific American presents the September 1991 Single Copy Issue: Communications, Computers, and Networks. His essay, "Infrastructure for the Global Village", commented on the lack of network access described above and argued: "Rather than holding back, the U.S. should lead by building the information infrastructure, essential if all Americans are to gain access to this transforming technology"Gore, Al (1991). "Infrastructure for the Global Village"Scientific American presents the September 1991 Single Copy Issue: Communications, Computers, and Networks, 150"...high speed networks must be built that tie together millions of computers, providing capabilities that we cannot even imagine."Gore, Al (1991). "Infrastructure for the Global Village" Scientific American presents the September 1991 Single Copy Issue: Communications, Computers, and Networks, 152
Mosaic Perhaps one of the most important results of the Gore Bill was the development of Mosaic in 1993. This World Wide Web browser is credited by most scholars as beginning the Internet boom of the 1990s:
Gore's legislation also helped fund the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, where a team of programmers, including Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, created the Mosaic Web browser, the commercial Internet's technological springboard. 'If it had been left to private industry, it wouldn't have happened,' Andreessen says of Gore's bill, 'at least, not until years later.'
Gore and the Information Superhighway As vice president, Gore promoted the development of what he referred to as the Information Superhighway. This was discussed in detail a few days after winning the election in November 1992 in The New York Times article "Clinton to Promote High Technology, With Gore in Charge." They planned to finance research "that will flood the economy with innovative goods and services, lifting the general level of prosperity and strengthening American industry." Specifically, they were aiming to fund the development of "robotics, smart roads, biotechnology, machine tools, magnetic-levitation trains, fiber-optic communications, and national computer networks. Also earmarked are a raft of basic technologies like digital imaging and data storage." These initiatives were met with some skepticism from critics who claimed that "the initiative is likely to backfire, bloating Congressional pork, and creating whole new categories of Federal waste." These initiatives were outlined in the report Technology for America's Economic Growth. In September 1993, they released a report calling for the creation of a "nationwide information superhighway," which would primarily be built by private industry. Gary Stix commented on these initiatives a few months prior in his May 1993 article for Scientific American, "Gigabit Gestalt: Clinton and Gore embrace an activist technology policy." Stix described them as a "distinct statement about where the new administration stands on the matter of technology ... Gone is the ambivalence or outright hostility toward government involvement in little beyond basic science. Although Gore is most famous for his political career and environmental work, he is also noted for his creation of the internet." Campbell-Kelly and Aspray further note in Computer: A History of the Information Machine:
In the early 1990s the Internet was big news ... In the fall of 1990, there were just 313,000 computers on the Internet; by 1996, there were close to 10 million. The networking idea became politicized during the 1992 Clinton–Gore election campaign, where the rhetoric of the information highway captured the public imagination. On taking office in 1993, the new administration set in place a range of government initiatives for a National Information Infrastructure aimed at ensuring that all American citizens ultimately gain access to the new networks.Campbell-Kelly and Aspray (1996). Computer: A History of the Information Machine. New York: BasicBooks, 283
These initiatives were discussed in a number of venues. Howard Rheingold argued in the 1994 afterword to his noted text, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, that these initiatives played a critical role in the development of digital technology, stating that, "Two powerful forces drove the rapid emergence of the superhighway notion in 1994 .... The second driving force behind the superhighway idea continued to be Vice President Gore." In addition, Clinton and Gore submitted the report, Science in the National Interest in 1994, which further outlined their plans to develop science and technology in the United States. Gore also discussed these plans in speeches that he made at The Superhighway Summit at UCLA and for the International Telecommunication Union.
On January 13, 1994, Gore "became the first U.S. vice president to hold a live interactive news conference on an international computer network". Gore was also asked to write the foreword to the first edition of the 1993 internet guide, The Internet Companion: A Beginner's Guide to Global Networking by Tracy LaQuey. In the foreword, he stated the following:
Since I first became interested in high-speed networking almost seventeen years ago, there have been many major advances both in the technology and in public awareness. Articles on high-speed networks are commonplace in major newspapers and in news magazines. In contrast, when as a House member in the early 1980s, I called for creation of a national network of "information superhighways," the only people interested were the manufacturers of optical fiber. Back then, of course, high-speed meant 56,000 bits per second. Today we are building a national information infrastructure that will carry billions of bits of data per second, serve thousands of users simultaneously, and transmit not only electronic mail and data files but voice and video as well.
The Clinton–Gore administration launched the first official White House website on 21 October 1994. It would be followed by three more versions, resulting in the final edition launched in 2000. The White House website was part of a general movement by this administration towards web-based communication: "Clinton and Gore were responsible for pressing almost all federal agencies, the U.S. court system, and the U.S. military onto the Internet, thus opening up America's government to more of America's citizens than ever before. On 17 July 1996. President Clinton issued Executive Order 13011 – Federal Information Technology, ordering the heads of all federal agencies to fully utilize information technology to make the information of the agency easily accessible to the public."
The Clipper Chip, which "Clinton inherited from a multi-year National Security Agency effort," was a method of hardware encryption with a government backdoor. In 1994, Vice President Gore issued a memo on the topic of encryption, which stated that under a new policy the White House would "provide better encryption to individuals and businesses while ensuring that the needs of law enforcement and national security are met. Encryption is a law and order issue, since it can be used by criminals to thwart wiretaps and avoid detection and prosecution."
Another initiative proposed a software-based key escrow system, in which keys to all encrypted data and communications would reside with a trusted third party. Since the government was seen as possibly having a need to access encrypted data originating in other countries, the pressure to establish such a system was worldwide.
These policies met with strong opposition from civil liberties groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, scientific groups like the National Research Council, leading cryptographers, and the European Commission. All three encryption initiatives thus failed to gain widespread acceptance by consumers or support from the industry. The ability of a proposal such as the Clipper Chip to meet the stated goals, especially that of enabling better encryption to individuals, was disputed by a number of experts.
With this resistance and lack of industry support, the Clipper Chip and key escrow initiatives were abandoned by 1996.
Gore had discussed his concerns with computer technology and levels of access in his 1994 article, "No More Information Have and Have Nots." He was particularly interested in implementing measures, which would grant all children access to the Internet, stating: