Tag Archives: Internet censorship

SOPA soap opera

Posted on by at 6:57 am

There is a fascinating article in The Hollywood Reporter describing the behind-the-scenes drama at the MPAA during the SOPA smackdown of the past few weeks.

In the desperate hours of early January, with chatter spreading that the White House was poised to make a devastating statement opposing parts of proposed anti-piracy legislation that Hollywood studios considered key to the industry’s very survival, MPAA president Christopher Dodd made a phone call to DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg.

Katzenberg’s company is not an MPAA member, but a list of the top 10 fund-raisers bundling money for President Obama would include not only Katzenberg but also his political adviser, Andy Spahn. It would not include any of the chiefs whose studios belong to the MPAA. So the former U.S. senator reached out, he says, to find out about the thinking inside the White House.

“The rumors were running rampant,” says Dodd. “I was trying to use all the information points I could to find out what was going on.”

Dodd says that at the time of his call, he had been assured no major actions were imminent. Then, on Jan. 14, the administration said it would not support legislation “that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.”

“They just made up their mind to do it,” says Dodd. “I raised issues about it, but they were going to march ahead.”

And the article notes the damage to Dodd’s reputation and effectiveness as a lobbyist caused by this remark:

In the days after the controversial House version of the bill, the Stop Online Piracy Act, was derailed, Dodd belittled those who opposed it and threatened Democrats who had fled when the bill became radioactive. Perhaps his worst post-defeat move came Jan. 19 when he told Fox News that “those who count on, quote, ‘Hollywood’ for support need to understand this industry is watching very carefully who’s going to stand up for them when their job is at stake.” There was an instant outcry, including a petition on the White House website calling on the administration to investigate Dodd for “bribery.” (In less than a week, it had attracted more than 21,000 signatures.)

As I previously noted, that remark by Dodd does seem to come close to an offer of a direct quid pro quo of money for legislative action.

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Plain English guide to SOPA

Posted on by at 6:42 am

If you are confused or uncertain about what SOPA would actually do, I recommend this more or less plain English technical explanation provided over at Reddit.

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White House opposes SOPA, PIPA

Posted on by at 6:26 am
Logo of the United States White House, especia...

Yesterday, on the official White House blog, the Administration came out strongly against both the DNS changes and censorship provisions of both SOPA and PIPA. With regard to the DNS changes, the White House has concluded that the risks of damage to the Internet charged by opponents of the bills was real:

Proposed laws must not tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet through manipulation of the Domain Name System (DNS), a foundation of Internet security. Our analysis of the DNS filtering provisions in some proposed legislation suggests that they pose a real risk to cybersecurity and yet leave contraband goods and services accessible online. We must avoid legislation that drives users to dangerous, unreliable DNS servers and puts next-generation security policies, such as the deployment of DNSSEC, at risk.

With regard to censorship risks, the post provides:

Across the globe, the openness of the Internet is increasingly central to innovation in business, government, and society and it must be protected. To minimize this risk, new legislation must be narrowly targeted only at sites beyond the reach of current U.S. law, cover activity clearly prohibited under existing U.S. laws, and be effectively tailored, with strong due process and focused on criminal activity. Any provision covering Internet intermediaries such as online advertising networks, payment processors, or search engines must be transparent and designed to prevent overly broad private rights of action that could encourage unjustified litigation that could discourage startup businesses and innovative firms from growing.

Effectively, both bills seem dead for now.

But don’t expect the entertainment industry to go away quietly.  For example, the MPAA responded aggressively to the White House position and seem to have read an entirely different Administration release.

We welcome the Administration’s clear statement that legislation is needed to stop foreign based thieves from stealing the hard work and creativity of millions of American workers. For too long in this debate, those that seek to preserve and profit from the status quo have moved to obstruct reasonable legislation. While many of the elements mentioned in the White House statement are critically important, we believe, as do others in our coalition, that protecting American jobs is important too, particularly in these difficult economic times for our nation. We are pleased that Chairman Leahy and Chairman Smith reiterated yesterday that they too support action. So now it is time to stop the obstruction and move forward on legislation.

***

While we agree with the White House that protection against online piracy is vital, that protection must be meaningful to protect the people who have been and will continue to be victimized if legislation is not enacted. Meaningful legislation must include measured and reasonable remedies that include ad brokers, payment processors and search engines. They must be part of a solution that stops theft and protects American consumers.

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Good news on SOPA

Posted on by at 7:06 am

Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, has announced that the Committee will hold a hearing on January 18 to “examine the potential impact of Domain Name Service (DNS) and search engine blocking on American cyber-security, jobs and the Internet community” in light of SOPA proposals. He lists a roster of witnesses with actual technology skills. This contrasts with the virtual absence of such expertise in the formal SOPA hearings to date.

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SOPA is a danger to us all

Posted on by at 7:50 am

From Politico:

The conservative and liberal blogospheres are unifying behind opposition to Congress’s Stop Online Piracy Act, with right-leaning bloggers arguing their very existence could be wiped out if the anti-piracy bill passes.

“If either the U.S. Senate’s Protect IP Act (PIPA) & the U.S. House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) become law, political blogs such as Red Mass Group [conservative] & Blue Mass Group [liberal] will cease to exist,” wrote a blogger at Red Mass Group.

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Summary of today’s SOPA action (updated)

Posted on by at 7:28 pm

Declan McCullagh has all the details. Well worth a full read.

Update: More info from Wired here. And, if you are interested in a cogent explanation of the security risks of SOPA, read this article by Stewart Baker, formerly Policy Director for the Department of Homeland Security, referenced in the Wired article.

SOPA delayed (updated x2)

Posted on by at 1:41 pm

This is excellent, if temporary, news. The House Judiciary Committee holding hearings on SOPA adjourned without a vote.  The bill be now be considered in 2012.

Internet companies and users get surprise holiday gift: Lamar Smith runs out of time, delays #SOPA vote to 2012. "We stand adjourned." #cnet
December 16, 2011 2:36 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@declanm
Declan McCullagh

Update: Not so fast. It appears that the Judiciary Committee meeting may resume next Wednesday. Damn.

BREAKING: Judiciary has scheduled the rest of #SOPA markup next Wednesday, Dec. 21 at 9 AM EST. #stopsopa #open #dontbreaktheinternet #ip
December 16, 2011 5:48 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@DarrellIssa
Darrell Issa

Update 2: Apparently the delay was to bring in some persons with knowledge as to how the Internet actually works. An unusual acknowledgement from Congress.

The guy who started it all – Texan Republican Representative Lamar Smith admitted he needs to look a little further into the investigation of claims that the legislation will damage the infrastructure of the internet. According to The Guardian, it was Republican Rep Jason Chaffetz from Utah who urged Smith to postpone the session until technical experts (read: people who actually now what the Internet is) could be brought in to discuss the impact of altering the Web’s domain-naming system to fight piracy.

The delay will not go over well with the media firms in Hollywood that have lobbied hard for SOPA. Holmes Wilson, co-founder of Fight For The Future, a lobbying group against SOPA, said: “It’s a huge victory, if a temporary one. This is not what they wanted.”

Dear Santa, all I want for Christmas is for SOPA to die a swift death.

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SOPA/ProtectIP risk operation of the Internet (updated)

Posted on by at 8:37 am

A group of 83 technology inventors and engineers, who collectively built the technology for the Internet, have warned that SOPA/ProtectIP are threats to the Internet’s continued operation. The number one signatory is Vint Cert, the co-inventor of TCP/IP, the underlying networking technology that is at the base of the Internet.

If enacted, either of these bills will create an environment of tremendous fear and uncertainty for technological innovation, and seriously harm the credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key Internet infrastructure. Regardless of recent amendments to SOPA, both bills will risk fragmenting the Internet’s global domain name system (DNS) and have other capricious technical consequences. In exchange for this, such legislation would engender censorship that will simultaneously be circumvented by deliberate infringers while hampering innocent parties’ right and ability to communicate and express themselves online.

Update: And there is this highly appropriate take by Alexandra Petri in today’s Washington Post:

As long as there have been new technologies, the entertainment industry has been trying to get them shut down as filthy, thieving pirates. Video cassettes? Will anyone tune into TV again? MP3 players? Why even bother making a record? Digital video recorder that lets you skip ads? That’s a form of theft!

But SOPA is threatening to touch something far more precious than that — the glorious sprawl of the Internet.

SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, is a bill that, in the name of preventing online piracy of copyrighted work, creates a horrifyingly large censorship authority for the Internet. Among other things, it requires service providers (which have come out opposing the bill) to block access to entire sites if a user on the site is accused of copyright infringement.

There are dozens of reasons this is wrong. The biggest and most pressing is that not only does the bill not do what it sets out to do, it also creates a horrifyingly blunt instrument to censor the Internet.

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Cato Institute calls for SOPA block

Posted on by at 9:04 am

More from Cato on anti-piracy legislation here.

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Tech quote of the day (updated)

Posted on by at 3:20 pm

E.U. law precludes an injunction made against an Internet service provider requiring it to install a system for filtering all electronic communications passing via its services, which applies indiscriminately to all its customers, as a preventive measure, exclusively at its expense, and for an unlimited period.

– Excerpt from a ruling this week in the European Court of Justice, banning a statute that attempted to require ISPs to filter all Internet content sent to their customers containing possible file-sharing activity.  We need the same clear judicial statement in this country affirming that the Internet is not a tool to be run for the benefit of IP owners.

Seal of the United States Department of Justice

Update: Meanwhile, in the US:

US authorities have initiated the largest round of domain name seizures yet as part of their continued crackdown on counterfeit and piracy-related websites. With just a few days to go until “Cyber Monday” more than 100 domain names have been taken over by the feds to protect the commercial interests of US companies. The seizures are disputable, as the SOPA bill which aims to specifically legitimize such actions is still pending in Congress.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have resumed “Operation In Our Sites”, the domain name seizing initiative designed to crack down on online piracy and counterfeiting.

The new round comes exactly a year after 82 domains, including Torrent-Finder, were taken over in 2010. At the time ICE labeled the actions “Cyber Monday crackdown,” referring to the Monday following Thanksgiving where consumers are persuaded to shop online.

TorrentFreak has identified more than 130 domains taken over by the government during the last 24 hours, which makes this the largest seizure round to date. The authorities have yet to comment via official channels, but we assume that they will use the same justification for the domain seizures as they did last year.

Welcome to the land of the free.

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SOPA and Protect-IP (updated)

Posted on by at 6:19 am

Rebecca MacKinnon, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and a founder of Global Voices Online, has a strong op-ed today calling for SOPA and Protect-IP to be denied.

The bills would empower the attorney general to create a blacklist of sites to be blocked by Internet service providers, search engines, payment providers and advertising networks, all without a court hearing or a trial. The House version goes further, allowing private companies to sue service providers for even briefly and unknowingly hosting content that infringes on copyright — a sharp change from current law, which protects the service providers from civil liability if they remove the problematic content immediately upon notification. The intention is not the same as China’s Great Firewall, a nationwide system of Web censorship, but the practical effect could be similar.

Abuses under existing American law serve as troubling predictors for the kinds of abuse by private actors that the House bill would make possible. Take, for example, the cease-and-desist letters that Diebold, a maker of voting machines, sent in 2003, demanding that Internet service providers shut down Web sites that had published internal company e-mails about problems with the company’s voting machines. The letter cited copyright violations, and most of the service providers took down the content without question, despite the strong case to be made that the material was speech protected under the First Amendment.

The House bill would also emulate China’s system of corporate “self-discipline,” making companies liable for users’ actions. The burden would be on the Web site operator to prove that the site was not being used for copyright infringement. The effect on user-generated sites like YouTube would be chilling.

YouTube, Twitter and Facebook have played an important role in political movements from Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park. At present, social networking services are protected by a “safe harbor” provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which grants Web sites immunity from prosecution as long as they act in good faith to take down infringing content as soon as rights-holders point it out to them. The House bill would destroy that immunity, putting the onus on YouTube to vet videos in advance or risk legal action. It would put Twitter in a similar position to that of its Chinese cousin, Weibo, which reportedly employs around 1,000 people to monitor and censor user content and keep the company in good standing with authorities.

If you care about free speech, free access to data, and the ability of individuals to speak broadly about any topics they wish, you should read his essay and take action now.

Update: And you can send a physical letter to your Congress critters, free, here.

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An Internet for the 1%

Posted on by at 7:24 pm

Lauren Weinstein, in a post to the Privacy Forum mailing list, details the means, methods and goals of a complete extra-judicial regulation of the heretofore free operation of the Internet. His post is a warning and points to real danger. Read the full post, but here is an excerpt:

… with the fullness of time, the phone companies, cable companies, governments, and politicians galore came to most intensely pay attention to the Internet, as did the entertainment industry behemoths and a broad range of other “intellectual property” interests.

Their individual concerns actually vary widely at the detailed level, but in a broader context their goals are very much singular in focus.

They want to control the Internet.  They want to control it utterly, completely, in every technologically possible detail (and it seems in various technically impossible ways as well).

The freedom of communications with which the Internet has empowered ordinary people — especially one-to-many communications that historically have been limited to governments and media empires themselves — is viewed as an existential threat to order, control, and profits — that is, to historical centers of power.

Outside of the “traditional” aspects of government control over their citizenries, another key element of the new attempts to control the Net are desperate longings by some parties to turn back the technological clock to a time when music, movies, and other works could not so easily be duplicated and disseminated in “authorized” fashions. …

In their efforts to control people and protect profits, governments and associated industries (often in league with powerful Internet Service Providers — ISPs — who in some respects are admittedly caught in the middle), seem willing to impose draconian, ultimately fascist censorship, identification, and other controls on the Internet and its users, even extending into the basic hardware in our homes and offices.

I’ve invoked fascism in this analysis , and I do not do so lightly.

If you care about free speech, free access to data, and the ability of individuals to speak broadly about any topics they wish, you should read his essay and take action now.

PROTECT IP Act Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

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Stop the E-PARASITES Act (updated)

Posted on by at 7:33 am

The E-PARASITES Act (the latest name for legislation originally named the PROTECT IP Act) has been proposed in the House. It is also called the “Stop Online Privacy Act” or SOPA. The bill, if enacted, would effectively allow websites to be blocked, without judicial review or due process, based merely on claims of infringement. It would also make it illegal to use any technology to bypass such blocks. It would also make it a felony to illegally stream content online.

Here is a summary of the guts of bill from the EFF:

As with its Senate-side evil sister, PROTECT-IP, SOPA would require service providers to “disappear” certain websites, endangering Internet security and sending a troubling message to the world: it’s okay to interfere with the Internet, even effectively blacklisting entire domains, as long as you do it in the name of IP enforcement. Of course blacklisting entire domains can mean turning off thousands of underlying websites that may have done nothing wrong.  And in what has to be an ironic touch, the very first clause of SOPA states that it shall not be “construed to impose a prior restraint on free speech.” As if that little recitation could prevent the obvious constitutional problem in what the statute actually does.

But it gets worse. Under this bill, service providers (including hosting services) would be under new pressure to monitor and police their users’ activities.  Websites that simply don’t do enough to police infringement (and it is not at all clear what would qualify as “enough”) are now under threat, even though the DMCA expressly does not require affirmative policing.  It creates new enforcement tools against folks who dare to help users access sites that may have been “blacklisted,” even without any kind of court hearing. The bill also requires that search engines, payment providers (such as credit card companies and PayPal), and advertising services join in the fun in shutting down entire websites.  In fact, the bill seems mainly aimed at creating an end-run around the DMCA safe harbors. Instead of complying with the DMCA, a copyright owner may now be able to use these new provisions to effectively shut down a site by cutting off access to its domain name, its search engine hits, its ads, and its other financing even if the safe harbors would apply.

The full text of E-PARASITES is available here. And an explanatory video is here.

Taken together, this would effectively allow a government-mandated firewall on the Internet violating free speech rights of American citizens (and those around the world), all for the private benefit of the music and movie industries. It is outrageously over-reaching and should be firmly opposed.

And here is how you can easily oppose the bill without cost in less than a couple of minutes

Update: And you should read this essay by Lauren Weinstein, who clearly outlines the stakes involved.

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Dangerous new censorship law introduced

Posted on by at 5:53 pm

Protect-IP is a very powerful Internet censorship law that has been introduced in Congress.

PROTECT-IP establishes the same “Great Firewall of America” that COICA provided for, a blacklist of websites censored in the USA because they are “dedicated to infringing activities.” But PROTECT-IP adds a duty for credit-card and other payment processors to boycott sites that the entertainment industry doesn’t like. It also requires ad brokers to blacklist these sites. And it gives rightsholders the power to get payment processors and ad networks on-board through private court action, skipping government oversight altogether. It also forces search-engines to de-index sites that have been targetted by the entertainment industry.

I do not understand why laws like this, which inhibit free speech for the benefit of the entertainment industry, should be allowed.

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