Threats to Internet Freedoms (consolidation thread)

[hanshan]

...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/11/house-committee-rushing-approve-dangerous-information-sharing-bill


NOVEMBER 30, 2011 - 2:24PM | BY KEVIN BANKSTON AND LEE TIEN

House Committee Rushing to Approve Dangerous "Information Sharing" Bill

Proposal Would Gut Privacy Laws, Allow Unprecedented Data-Grab by Government

We’re for better network, computer, and device security. Unfortunately, "cybersecurity" bills often go off track—case in point: the " Internet kill switch. " The latest example comes courtesy of the leaders of the House Intelligence Committee. Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and ranking member Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) are introducing "The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011"(PDF).

The bill would allow a broad swath of ISPs and other private entities to "use cybersecurity systems" to collect and share masses of user data with the government, other businesses, or "any other entity" so long as it’s for a vaguely-defined "cybersecurity purpose." It would trump existing privacy statutes that strictly limit the interception and disclosure of your private communications data, as well as any other state or federal law that might get in the way. Indeed, the language may be broad enough to bless the covert use of spyware if done in "good faith" for a "cybersecurity purpose."

This broad data-sharing between companies wouldn’t be subject to any oversight or transparency measures (users can’t restrict companies’ sharing), while the only oversight for sharing with the federal government, ironically, would be through the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board—which hasn’t existed since January 2008.

Worse yet, the bill doesn’t limit what the federal government can do with the data or private communications that ISPs and others hand over, except to say that it can’t be used for "regulatory" purposes—apparently it can be used for law enforcement and intelligence targeting purposes.

Based on how this proposal diverges from the White House’s own cybersecurity proposal from May 12, we hope and expect that the Administration isn’t happy with this House Intelligence bill for several reasons—insufficient privacy protections, lack of oversight, skepticism about efficacy. Perhaps at the top of the list is concern over the fact that the bill allows information sharing with any federal agency—including the National Security Agency (NSA)—thereby threatening civilian control of domestic cybersecurity efforts. As Rod Beckstrom, former Director of DHS’s National Cybersecurity Center, said when he resigned in March 2009:

"NSA currently dominates most national cyber efforts…. I believe this is a bad strategy…. The intelligence culture is very different from a network operations or a security culture [and] the threats to our democratic processes are significant if all top level government network security and monitoring are handled by any one organization (either directly or indirectly).

Considering how greatly this bill would change the law and cybersecurity policy generally, the timing is especially shocking: the bill, introduced today, was only shown to privacy advocates such as EFF yesterday, and yet the Committee intends to "mark-up" and vote on whether to recommend passage of the bill TOMORROW.

Lawmakers should not rush to approve such a broad expansion of government power to obtain private information about its citizens without so much as a hearing on the bill. EFF flatly opposes this bill, and urges House Intelligence Committee members to oppose the bill and support any amendments to make it more privacy-protective if and when the Committee considers the proposal tomorrow. Eviscerating our online privacy protections won’t strengthen our cybersecurity, it will only undermine it.

...

[Plutonia]

Censor the internet?

Mmmm ...

Maybe not:

A story on TorrentFreak yesterday announced a new browser plug-in from MafiaaFire. Reading the comments and seeing the lack of impact, I think people don’t realize that MafiaaFire just killed the copyright industry’s entire ISP censorship strategy dead in the water.

The story on TorrentFreak goes into deep detail with the technical details on the inner workings of the plugin. Perhaps therefore, I guess, did many miss the big picture after this piece of code has come into being.

Here is that big picture with the plugin installed:

US goons seize torrent site domains? No effect.
Courts order ISPs to lie in their DNS records, giving you another page instead (“site blocked”)? No effect.
Courts order ISPs to nullroute certain IP blocks, trying to trick you into thinking that the site is offline? No effect.

See, now?

In the hypothetical extreme case that some United States goon agency would seize the domain thepiratebay.org entirely, most ISPs also lying about its previous DNS records and giving you a “page censored” sign, and even having blocked it at the IP level (a technique never used), you would still just type “thepiratebay.org” in the address bar as usual (given that you also have the first MafiaaFire plugin).

The story on TorrentFreak goes into detail on how this is accomplished using a list of thousands and thousands of proxies, circumventing censorship. Essentially, what the released plugin does is to turn your computer into a node in a mesh network that finds the shortest unblocked route to the target you request.

This kills the copyright industry’s strategy that the ISPs are “critical gatekeepers” right dead in the water. Of course, the reason the strategy could be so easily killed is that it is fundamentally wrong to begin with; the Internet doesn’t work like that. No matter how much the copyright industry dreams and screams for one, there just isn’t a central point of control.

The first list of circumrouted sites include The Pirate Bay and Newzbin2, but more are to come (and, most importantly, are easy to add).

Now, I predict that the copyright industry will be pretending in courts and to their bosses that installing this plugin represent a “significant extra effort”, and therefore hinders copying. Besides that I consider the prevention of spread of culture to be bordering on a crime against humanity, this predicted allegation is delusional. How many steps are already required to prepare a fresh, out-of-the-box machine for file sharing? The free and pirate technologies for encoding audio and video are superior to the commercial alternatives, but they also require separate installation.

You need to install all the proper codecs (AC3, MPEG4, DivX3–DivX5, all OGG variants and a bunch more), you need to map the AC3 channels to your speaker config, you need to install at least one BitTorrent client and configure it, you need to configure your firewall to accept BitTorrent connections, and a couple of other things. Adding the installation of a plugin, turning the number of steps to 21 from 20, is absolutely inconsequential. These are preparations that are already made to a computer to enable its file sharing, that all 250 million European file sharers already do. What is included out of the box is entirely irrelevant, as nothing enabling file sharing is.

It could be noted, by the way, that the demise of Internet Explorer also was despite the fact that it came tightly tied to the operating system and people needed to jump through hoops and rings of flame to replace it. People learned to do that, and did that. Just like with file sharing and anti-censorship tools.

Of course, pirates are engineers and take active measures to reduce the number of steps required to enable file sharing on a given computer. On the Ubuntu operating system, which I use, it’s a matter of one single command for setting up everything in the checklist above:

apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

So to summarize, MafiaaFire just killed all the copyright industry’s censorship-for-profit, both current and future, without any measurable extra effort required for the 250 million Europeans that share culture and knowledge. The plugin’s name is the somewhat cryptic “The Pirate Bay Dancing”, that derives from the movie Dirty Dancing, and more specifically, the assertive quote Nobody puts The Pirate Bay in a corner! I subscribe to that idea.

Oh, and to answer a common question: The plugin is currently Mozilla-only but will be released for Chrome in about two weeks. MafiaaFire released for Firefox first in homage to Mozilla Foundation’s formal response to US censorship goons (“take a hike”).

So: Thank you, MafiaaFire. Thank you immensely. You’ve done humanity a great service.

Viva Freedom of Speech, and death to all censorship, no matter whose bottom line it serves.

http://falkvinge.net/2011/12/01/mafiaaf ... ensorship/

[whipstitch]

US judge orders hundreds of sites "de-indexed" from Google, Facebook
By Nate Anderson

After a series of one-sided hearings, luxury goods maker Chanel has won recent court orders against hundreds of websites trafficking in counterfeit luxury goods. A federal judge in Nevada has agreed that Chanel can seize the domain names in question and transfer them all to US-based registrar GoDaddy. The judge also ordered "all Internet search engines" and "all social media websites"—explicitly naming Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Bing, Yahoo, and Google—to "de-index" the domain names and to remove them from any search results.

The case has been a remarkable one. Concerned about counterfeiting, Chanel has filed a joint suit in Nevada against nearly 700 domain names that appear to have nothing in common. When Chanel finds more names, it simply uses the same case and files new requests for more seizures. (A recent November 14 order went after an additional 228 sites; none had a chance to contest the request until after it was approved and the names had been seized.)

How were the sites investigated? For the most recent batch of names, Chanel hired a Nevada investigator to order from three of the 228 sites in question. When the orders arrived, they were reviewed by a Chanel official and declared counterfeit. The other 225 sites were seized based on a Chanel anti-counterfeiting specialist browsing the Web.

That was good enough for Judge Kent Dawson to order the names seized and transferred to GoDaddy, where they would all redirect to a page serving notice of the seizure. In addition, a total ban on search engine indexing was ordered, one which neither Bing nor Google appears to have complied with yet.

Missing from the ruling is any discussion of the Internet's global nature; the judge shows no awareness that the domains in question might not even be registered in this country, for instance, and his ban on search engine and social media indexing apparently extends to the entire world. (And, when applied to US-based companies like Twitter, apparently compels them to censor the links globally rather than only when accessed by people in the US.) Indeed, a cursory search through the list of offending domains turns up poshmoda.ws, a site registered in Germany. The German registrar has not yet complied with the US court order, though most other domain names on the list are .com or .net names and have been seized.

The US government has made similar domain name seizures through Operation In Our Sites, grabbing US-based domains that end in .com and .net even when the sites are located abroad. Such moves by themselves would seem to do little to stop piracy in the long-term; they simply teach would-be miscreants to register future domain names in other countries.

Why wait for SOPA?

Lawyer Venkat Balasubramani, writing about the case yesterday, sums it up eloquently: "Wow."

"I'm sympathetic to the 'whack-a-mole' problem rights owners face, but this relief is just extraordinarily broad and is on shaky procedural grounds," he writes. "I'm not sure how this court can direct a registry to change a domain name's registrar of record or Google to de-list a site, but the court does so anyway. This is probably the most problematic aspect of the court's orders."

Rightsholders have asked Congress to write these provisions (and a few more) into law, and they have pushed for government seizures like those from Operation In Our Sites (which just seized another batch of new domains this last weekend). But as Balasubramani points out, cases like Chanel's show that rightsholders can already get what they want from judges, and they can go after far more sites more quickly than the government.

"The fight against SOPA [the Stop Online Piracy Act] may be a red herring in some ways," he notes, "since IP plaintiffs are fashioning very similar remedies in court irrespective of the legislation. Thus, even if SOPA is defeated, it may turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory—opponents may win the battle but may not have gained much as a result."

[JackRiddler]

.

This primer for lobbying against SOPA describes the issues well. It doesn't do much to challenge the unsustainable and unjust reigning conception of "intellectual property" for corporate persons, but argues more that SOPA would be bad for innovation in a capitalist system. Anyway. Whatever kills it, makes us stronger.

[JackRiddler]

http://www.cbsnews.com/2102-501465_162-20027837.html

January 7, 2011 4:31 PM
Obama Eyeing Internet ID for Americans

By Declan McCullagh

This story originally appeared on CNET
(Credit: istockphoto.com)

STANFORD, Calif.--President Obama is planning to hand the U.S. Commerce Department authority over a forthcoming cybersecurity effort to create an Internet ID for Americans, a White House official said here today.

It's "the absolute perfect spot in the U.S. government" to centralize efforts toward creating an "identity ecosystem" for the Internet, White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt said.

That news, first reported by CNET, effectively pushes the department to the forefront of the issue, beating out other potential candidates, including the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security. The move also is likely to please privacy and civil-liberties groups that have raised concerns in the past over the dual roles of police and intelligence agencies.

The announcement came at an event today at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, where U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Schmidt spoke.

The Obama administration is currently drafting what it's calling the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, which Locke said will be released by the president in the next few months. (An early version was publicly released last summer.)

"We are not talking about a national ID card," Locke said at the Stanford event. "We are not talking about a government-controlled system. What we are talking about is enhancing online security and privacy, and reducing and perhaps even eliminating the need to memorize a dozen passwords, through creation and use of more trusted digital identities."

The Commerce Department will be setting up a national program office to work on this project, Locke said.

Details about the "trusted identity" project are remarkably scarce. Last year's announcement referenced a possible forthcoming smart card or digital certificate that would prove that online users are who they say they are. These digital IDs would be offered to consumers by online vendors for financial transactions.

Schmidt stressed today that anonymity and pseudonymity will remain possible on the Internet. "I don't have to get a credential, if I don't want to," he said. There's no chance that "a centralized database will emerge," and "we need the private sector to lead the implementation of this," he said.

Jim Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology, who spoke later at the event, said any Internet ID must be created by the private sector--and also voluntary and competitive.

"The government cannot create that identity infrastructure," Dempsey said. "If it tried to, it wouldn't be trusted."

Inter-agency rivalries to claim authority over cybersecurity have existed ever since many responsibilities were centralized in the Department of Homeland Security as part of its creation nine years ago. Three years ago, proposals were circulating in Washington to transfer authority to the secretive NSA, which is part of the U.S. Defense Department.

In March 2009, Rod Beckström, director of Homeland Security's National Cybersecurity Center, resigned through a letter that gave a rare public glimpse into the competition for budgetary dollars and cybersecurity authority. Beckstrom said at the time that the NSA "effectively controls DHS cyberefforts through detailees, technology insertions," and has proposed moving some functions to the agency's Fort Meade, Md., headquarters.

One of the NSA's missions is, of course, information assurance. But its normally lustrous star in the political firmament has dimmed a bit due to Wikileaks-related revelations.

Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private who is accused of liberating hundreds of thousands of confidential government documents from military networks and sending them to Wikileaks, apparently joked about the NSA's incompetence in an online chat last spring.

"I even asked the NSA guy if he could find any suspicious activity coming out of local networks," Manning reportedly said in a chat transcript provided by ex-hacker Adrian Lamo. "He shrugged and said, 'It's not a priority.'"

[hanshan]

...

January 7, 2011 4:31 PM

Obama Eyeing Internet ID for Americans

By Declan McCullagh

This story originally appeared on CNET
(Credit: istockphoto.com)

STANFORD, Calif.--President Obama is planning to hand the U.S. Commerce Department authority over a forthcoming cybersecurity effort to create an Internet ID for Americans, a White House official said here today.

It's "the absolute perfect spot in the U.S. government" to centralize efforts toward creating an "identity ecosystem" for the Internet, White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt said.

the language framing is classic Orwell - (buffoons, alla 'em)

tx, Jack

...

[crikkett]

Google Plus' Real Names campaign last year was a test run for "internet id"... your Google/Facebook profile is a de facto Internet ID...

[Stephen Morgan]

US Government Seeks Extradition of UK Student For File-Sharing and gets it, too. Not so much a threat to internet freedom as a threat to freedom originating in the internet. Crazy.

Google defraud African businesses by pretending to be in partnership with local firm, at least two Google call centres were calling African business and extorting money from them for a service provided by a different company for free, by pretending to represent a joint venture. Extraditions come there none.

Microsoft confirms UEFI fears, locks down ARM devices, for the first time computers will be produced which will never be able to run any operating system other than M$ Windows, as a result of the hardware requirments imposed by M$ on Windows 8 vendors.

Bad times.

[JackRiddler]

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2 ... mode=print

January 13, 2012, 5:49 pm

Fighting Antipiracy Measure, Activist Group Posts Personal Information of Media Executives
By AMY CHOZICK


Mike Segar/ReutersThe hacking group Anonymous posted online the personal details of Jeffrey L. Bewkes, left, the chairman of Time Warner, and also leaked information about the family of Sumner M. Redstone, right, who controls Viacom and the CBS Corporation.


The online activist group known as Anonymous, which has targeted opponents of the Occupy Wall Street movement and businesses that stopped providing services to WikiLeaks, has set its sights on a new adversary: media executives.

In protest of antipiracy legislation currently being considered by Congress, the group has posted online documents that reveal personal information about Jeffrey L. Bewkes, chairman and chief executive of Time Warner, and Sumner M. Redstone, who controls Viacom and the CBS Corporation. Those companies, like almost every major company in the media and entertainment industry, have championed the Stop Online Piracy Act, the House of Representatives bill, known as SOPA, and its related Senate bill, called Protect I.P.

The documents, culled from various databases, included Mr. Bewkes’s home addresses and phone numbers, and encouraged users to bombard the company and its executives with e-mails, faxes and phone calls. Mr. Bewkes has received intimidating phone calls and a barrage of e-mails, according to supporters of the legislation who have knowledge about the matter but are not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The documents also included the corporate contact information for a range of companies including NBCUniversal, Sony Pictures Entertainment and the Walt Disney Company.

A Disney spokeswoman said neither the company nor its chief executive, Robert A. Iger, had received threats. Time Warner declined to comment. The file that was posted regarding Mr. Redstone has details about his family, home and career but does not include private contact information. A Viacom spokeswoman declined to comment.

Anonymous, a loosely organized collective of so-called hacktivists, has called its effort “Operation Hiroshima.” It began on Jan. 1, when the group dropped a trove of documents on Web sites that facilitate anonymous publishing, like Pastebin.com and Scribd.com. The documents included information about media executives and government figures like Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and New York City Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, and data on corporations and government entities that the group opposes.

“They should feel threatened,” said Barrett Brown, a Dallas-based online activist who has worked with Anonymous, referring to backers of the antipiracy legislation. “The idea is to put pressure on the politicians and companies supporting it.”

The online effort underscores how heated the arguments have become over legislation that may seem like arcane government regulation. Media companies say the legislation, which has bipartisan support, will crack down on illicit downloads of movies, music and television, especially from overseas Web sites. SOPA would expand the ability of the government and private companies to hold Web sites responsible for content the companies believe infringes on their copyrights, allowing greater use of court orders and lawsuits that could ultimately shut down the sites.

The technology industry, including giants like Google and Yahoo, and advocates for Internet freedom say the bills would censor the Internet, stifle free speech and give the government too much power to regulate and shut down Web sites in the United States. Both sides have spent millions on lobbying in Washington. But at the grass-roots level, the issue has galvanized Internet activists, who lack lobbying power but have promoted the cause among the online community.

“You take our speech, you take our Internet, you take our Bill of Rights, you take our Constitution, we fight back,” said a monotone voice on a YouTube video posted by Anonymous before the Operation Hiroshima document drop.

Lawmakers and their aides have also been targets. A photograph of a 25-year-old aide for the House Judiciary Committee was superimposed into pornography by a group related to Anonymous, according to another aide who was briefed on security threats to lawmakers and their staffs. “Why can’t they just hire a lobbyist like everyone else?” this aide said.

The vast majority of SOPA opponents convey their views through legitimate means. Hundreds of Web sites have encouraged blackouts and boycotts to protest the legislation. According to BlackoutSOPA.org, nearly 12,000 users have changed their Twitter profile pictures to a “Stop SOPA” badge.

“The more outrage expressed on the Internet in the coming days, the better,” said Fred Wilson, a managing partner at Union Square Ventures, a venture capital firm and an early investor in Twitter. He said he did not condone threats or “any kind of intimidation” by hackers.

Last month Scribd.com introduced a function that made the words on documents gradually fade away. As they did, a pop-up prompted users to contact their representatives. “Don’t let the Internet vanish before your eyes,” it read.

The tactics have succeeded in some cases. Initially a supporter, the Web hosting company Go Daddy reversed its position on SOPA after Wikipedia and thousands of other Web sites said they would withdraw their domains from the service. “Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it,” Warren Adelman, Go Daddy’s chief executive, said in a statement.

Companies like Time Warner, which owns HBO, CNN and the Warner Brothers studio, and Viacom, which owns MTV and the Paramount studio, have experienced security teams, but they are not necessarily trained to handle anonymous online threats, said Josh Shaul, chief technology officer at Application Security Inc., a New York-based provider of database security software.

“It’s easy to get something taken off a Web site, but it’s impossible to erase things off the Internet,” he said.

Less than a week after the Operation Hiroshima documents were posted, a Twitter message linking to Mr. Bewkes’s home phone numbers and addresses, his annual income and his wife’s name and age had spread across the Internet. The message included #OpHiroshima, the shortened Twitter code for the effort.

The global activists in the nebulous collection known as Anonymous often use computer skills to support political causes. For example, Anonymous demanded a full Christmas dinner for Pfc. Bradley Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who is in prison facing charges of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks.

Last month, hackers associated with Anonymous published a trove of e-mail addresses and the personal information of subscribers of Stratfor, a security group based in Austin, Tex. Last year, a splinter group affiliated with Anonymous attacked the Sony Corporation, shutting down its PlayStation online network. The attack cost the company around $171 million, according to industry estimates. Movements like Anonymous often squabble among themselves, but SOPA is a uniquely unifying cause, said Gabriella Coleman, a professor at McGill University and an expert on hacking. To these activists, she said, “Internet freedom is not controversial.”

Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company
NYTimes.com 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018

[JackRiddler]

.

SOPA set to die for now. Occasionally you can say something for Obama.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/us/wh ... ml?_r=1&hp

White House Says It Opposes Parts of Two Antipiracy Bills
By EDWARD WYATT
Published: January 14, 2012



WASHINGTON — The Obama administration said Saturday that it strongly opposed central elements of two Congressional efforts to enforce copyrights on the Internet, all but killing the current versions of legislation that has divided both political parties and pitted Hollywood against Silicon Valley.

The comments by the administration’s chief technology officials, posted on a White House blog Saturday, came as growing opposition to the legislation had already led sponsors of the bills to reconsider a measure that would force Internet service providers to block access to Web sites that offer or link to copyrighted material.

“Let us be clear,” the White House statement said, “online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy, threatens jobs for significant numbers of middle class workers and hurts some of our nation’s most creative and innovative companies and entrepreneurs.”

However, it added, “We will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.”

The bills currently under consideration in Congress were intended to combat the theft of copyrighted materials by preventing American search engines like Google and Yahoo from directing users to sites that allow for the distribution of stolen materials. They would cut off payment processors like PayPal that handle transactions.

The bills would also allow private citizens and companies to sue to stop what they believed to be theft of protected content. Those and other provisions set off fierce opposition among Internet companies, technology investors and free speech advocates, who said the bills would stifle online innovation, violate the First Amendment and even compromise national security by undermining the integrity of the Internet’s naming system.

Though the Obama administration called for legislation this year that would give prosecutors and owners of intellectual property new abilities to deter overseas piracy, it also embraced the idea of “voluntary measures and best practices” to reduce piracy.

Whether Congress can produce a compromise is uncertain, particularly in the House of Representatives, where Republicans have fought bitterly over the antipiracy legislation and party leaders, who control the chamber, are loath to offer further opportunities for intraparty battles.

The Motion Picture Association of America, the Hollywood lobbying group that has been most visible in its support for the current bills, said in a statement on Saturday that it welcomed the administration’s call for antipiracy legislation. But, the trade group added, “meaningful legislation must include measured and reasonable remedies that include ad brokers, payment processors and search engines.”

Hollywood and the music industry have broad political support for their efforts, and the Chamber of Commerce and labor organizations have pushed for the legislation. But they often find themselves facing off against the libertarian views of leaders in the technology industry.

Opponents of the House bill, the Stop Online Piracy Act, and the Senate bill, the Protect IP Act, have focused most of their attention on the proposed blocking by Internet service providers of Web sites that offer access to pirated material.

In December, a group of influential technology figures, including founders of Twitter, Google and YouTube, published an open letter to lawmakers saying that the legislation would enable Internet regulation and censorship on par with the government regulation in China and Iran.

That argument struck a chord with the Obama administration, which through the State Department and other channels has been pushing other countries to loosen restrictions on Internet access.

In its statement Saturday, the White House said any proposed legislation “must not tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet.” Parts of the bills that provide for filtering or blocking through the Domain Name System — the Internet’s address book — could drive users to unreliable routes through and around the blocked sites, the White House said. That would “pose a real risk to cybersecurity and yet leave contraband goods and services accessible online.”

The statement did not threaten a presidential veto, but it made plain what types of piracy enforcement measures the White House would not accept.

The statement was attributed to Victoria Espinel, the intellectual property enforcement coordinator at the Office of Management and Budget; Aneesh Chopra, the administration’s chief technology officer; and Howard Schmidt, a cybersecurity coordinator for the national security staff.

Jenna Wortham contributed reporting from New York.

A couple of interesting comments, including the "pro" argument.

Catherine Fitzpatrick
New York

If Obama vetoes SOPA if it is passed by the Congress, he will lose my vote.

All the Google propaganda theses are repeated here thoughtlessly with the simplistic implication that only the evil RIAA and "Hollywood" supports SOPA, or that there is in fact all these dangers from SOPA that they claim.

Geeks block malware sites all the time; geeks block even the IP addresses of commenters they don't like on their blogs. Blocking numerical DNS is not the issue. Going after piracy is a narrow law-enforcement activity and the sites should be blocked and can be blocked without the damage to free expression that the hysterics claim.

This is really only about one thing: Google's business model, and the business model of so many other platforms enabling free uploads without regard to infringing content. They want people to join free, upload free, then click on ads. IP holders can then play "catch me if you can".

SOPA would put a dent in such behaviour and rightly so, but it wouldn't harm "innovation" unless 'innovation" depends on a model of stealing others' content first, to make money, then only giving it back for money-making purposes if a DMCA takedown is filed with a lawyer right behind it to sue.

SOPA isn't about piracy only; it's about whether representative democracy in real life or "code-as-law" in the hands of the technologists in the virtual world gets to prevail.

Jan. 14, 2012 at 9:52 p.m.

Micah
a slightly higher vantage point

This is wonderful news & I don't want to downplay or sully it but having read the Whitehouse statement (which is quite measured), I have to ask *where has it been displayed that 'piracy' is a real world problem that these media conglomerates face?* We (the people) seem to have received the outcome we hoped for but the administration's statement attempted to codify the supposition that the MPAA & the RIAA and those they represent are facing losses due to piracy. Please show me anything close to factual evidence that these 'rouge' consumers of content are truly harming competition, creativity, innovation or income in either the music or film industry. This is a ruse - just an attempt by those who can't fathom a new world of content distribution to cling to the past & legislate as opposed to innovate. This new world of content distribution is vast & provides for all sorts of monetary extraction. If you or your organization is too shortsighted or foolish to find these points of extraction, please don't expect us to prop you up with draconian legislation.

Jan. 14, 2012 at 9:52 p.m.

Nelson Alexander
New York City

Marx saw historical development as driven, in part, by the conflict between rapid changes in "productive relations" (technologies) and a slower rate of change or outright resistance in "social relations" (property laws and customs), which would eventually bring about a crisis. The poor fit between our ideas of "property" and the nature of "information" is an unfolding example.

Content creators need to get paid, in some way, but our current capitalist system is badly structured to deal with this new phase of technology. A pure capitalist system based on "shareholder value" probably never would have researched and developed our IT technologies to begin with. It is hard to bottle and sell information. It is just oo leaky.

[Allegro]

.
A few minutes ago, I found this notice.

Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge

For over a decade, we have spent millions of hours building the largest encyclopedia in human history. Right now, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open internet. For 24 hours, to raise awareness, we are blacking out Wikipedia. Learn more.

Contact your representatives.

[vanlose kid]

Stop Sopa or the web really will go dark

The corporations lobbying for Sopa know exactly what they want: control of online information for profit. This is a crossroads

Dan Gillmor
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 17 January 2012 21.11 GMT

As thousands of websites, including the English version of Wikipedia, prepare to "go dark" Wednesday in protest against internet censorship, a new explanation is emerging for the would-be censors' acts: they simply don't understand how the internet works. The evidence suggests otherwise.

Search on the these terms – "don't understand" Sopa Congress – and you'll find a lots of blogposts and news stories making this point. Sopa, of course, stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act, which may or may not be stalled at the moment.

Change "don't" to "doesn't' and "Congress" to "Rupert Murdoch" in that search and you'll find a bunch of new ones stemming from Murdoch's spate of Tweets over the weekend, in which he denounced Sopa opponents and took special aim at his longstanding object of loathing, Google. Two of the resulting "he doesn't understand" pieces came from people whose work I greatly respect: see this post at the Guardian by Jeff Jarvis, and this one by Mathew Ingram at the GigaOm technology blog.

I beg to differ. What we're seeing does not derive from any misunderstanding. Rather, I'm convinced, this concerted push to censor the internet, through measures that would fundamentally break it, stems from a very clear understanding of what's at stake. Indeed, legislation like Sopa, or its US Senate companion, the Protect IP Act (Pipa) – and a host of activities around the world – share a common goal. These "fixes" are designed to wrest control of these tools from the masses and recentralize what has promised to be the most open means of communication and collaboration ever invented.

Sopa is now, apparently, on hold in the Congress. But no one believes the copyright cartel and its allies will give up on their goals. And that is why a host of websites – including Wikipedia – will go dark on 18 January, to bring even more public notice to this trend.
Now, it's fair to say that some individual members of Congress have demonstrated, via their public statements, a lack of attention to the technical details of how the net works. I assure you, however, that the staff members who have taken dictation from Hollywood and its allies know precisely what their measures would achieve, if enacted. And I assure you that Rupert Murdoch and his top staff are fully cognizant of the realities they fear and loathe.

So, why do they make unsupportable statements?

Because they don't dare make an honest argument. If they were saying what they believe, it would go roughly this way:

"The internet threatens our longstanding control of information and communications, and that is simply unacceptable. Therefore, it is essential to curb the utility of the internet for everyone else."

Some Sopa opponents have their own semi-blind spot. We are sometimes reluctant to acknowledge that, despite the copyright industry's blatantly bogus claims about losses from infringement, there are at least some losses. But copyright holders have always suffered some losses to infringement. They, and society, lived with the trade-off. Information could spread more widely, with great benefits to all, despite some losses.

The people who want to protect "intellectual property" from all infringement have set up a binary choice. They tell us that if we do not agree to their absolute control, we are endorsing stealing. This is another lie, though it's been an effective one until recently – when people began to realize what was at stake.

In fact, if the issue is binary, it can be framed as a choice between no freedom of speech and freedom of speech. After all, the logical extension of absolute control is a permission-based information economy, in which we need permission to quote anyone else. And since all journalism and entertainment is built upon borrowing from other creators, nothing new could be legally created without permission.

It can also be framed as needing permission to innovate – one of the clear effects of Sopa and other such bills. Because they would give Hollywood and other IP owners easy ways to shut down new ideas simply based on allegations, investors would stop funding most things that didn't have prior assent from the various existing cartels. This is not speculation: major technology investors have said precisely this.

Two of my own websites will go dark Wednesday. Both, as well as my books, are published under Creative Commons licenses that permit free copying and distribution of my work for non-commercial uses. My first book has been available as a free download since 2004, when it was first published. Last week, I received the latest in a steady series of royalty checks from the publisher. This is not counter-intuitive. It is the reality of the world we now inhabit.

The lawmakers and Murdochs and Hollywood types and others who are trying to lock down this emerging ecosystem are fully aware of how things work. They have what they consider good reasons for their efforts. But if they succeed, they will destroy most of what I and many others have been working toward. They will create an information monocolture where regimes work with corporations to control more than what we can read, hear and watch, because they will control how we can speak beyond the room we're in at the moment.

The stakes are that high. I wish they didn't understand what they're doing, but they are too smart to know otherwise.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... ll-go-dark

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[Stephen Morgan]

Their's always the darkweb.

[wintler2]

It is nice that wikipedia & google are making todays symbolic black-out stand against SOPA, wouldn't it be marvellous if they made it material and stopped serving IP addresses for SOPA supporters?

Their's always the darkweb.

Interesting slip, SM... do you think say Tor & I2p are 'theirs' as well? What do you mean by darkweb?

[Stephen Morgan]

It is nice that wikipedia & google are making todays symbolic black-out stand against SOPA, wouldn't it be marvellous if they made it material and stopped serving IP addresses for SOPA supporters?

Reddit, also. Might be better to highlight ways to get around it, rather than just protesting.

Their's always the darkweb.

Interesting slip, SM... do you think say Tor & I2p are 'theirs' as well? What do you mean by darkweb?

The darkweb is that part of the internet not in public view, I2p, tor, freenet, the rest of that crowd.

Just a typo, you know. You do have to be careful, of course.