SOPA Protests 'Poisoned the Well,' Says Congressional Staffer 330
Techdirt has a story about statements from Congressional staffer Stephanie Moore, who had some interesting — and somewhat insulting — things to say about the 'net-wide protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). "Netizens poisoned the well, and as a result the reliability of the internet is at risk," she said. Moore went on, "Congress was criticized for not being tech savvy, but from a lot of the comments we got it became clear that the people who were calling us did not understand the bill any better than we did." The article also points out comments from Steve Metalitz, a lawyer who represents members of the entertainment industry: "Most countries in the world already have this option at their disposal to deal with this problem. If site blocking broke the internet, then the internet would already be broken."
Embarrassment extractor (Score:2, Interesting)
When you go into politics, what kind of device do they ram up where to rip your ability to feel embarrassment out?
Same with EU/ACTA (Score:5, Interesting)
EC member Anders Jessen, Trade, suggested that the negotiations surrounding ACTA were unfair; not because of all the shrouded-in-secrecy/hidden-agenda stuff, but because of 'threats' against governments (hacks on government websites, threats to release data if governments voted in favor of ACTA) and the focus on the 'digital' section.
He suggested that if that section had not been there, ACTA would have been accepted, and that would have been a good thing with regard to fake physical articles such as clothes and parts (specifically pointing out aircraft parts).
Yet it doesn't dawn on him that maybe they should remove the 'digital' section and re-submit. Or, more likely, it does - but he knows as well as anybody else that the 'digital' part is actually the meat and the 'physical' is just to get major manufacturers and their lobbying prowess on board.
Some of that shines through in his statement that Google's revenue is now bigger than that of all newspaper publishers together, noting that in this era you can make copies much, much faster and that 'online users have cannibalized offline users'.
He does admit to some mistakes and that this is a time for self-reflection for the EC as the EP critized him and suggested that next time something is put forth to which a yes-or-no vote is to be cast, they should better coordinate and cooperate with the EP.
Source:
http://www.nu.nl/tech/2841489/europese-commissie-vreest-gevolgen-bij-afwijzen-acta.html [www.nu.nl]
Translated (horribly):
http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=nl&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nu.nl%2Ftech%2F2841489%2Feuropese-commissie-vreest-gevolgen-bij-afwijzen-acta.html [google.com]
Re:The Main Problem with SOPA (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the problem comes from the fact that laws are being written by lobby groups. If the people sitting in congress can't figure it out, they should call on the public to read and react to it. Every Time.
If there is something underhanded in the laws being debated, the SOPA type protests should happen, and the congress people will realize they have to fix it or abandon it.
For the most part this part of the process is broken. Why are we letting corporations dictate laws that only benefit themselves? If "corporations are people" then they should be jailed and executed for murder anytime a law they wrote results in peoples deaths. This obviously isn't going to happen, so we should stop pretending corporations are people.
Let's bring the literacy rate up, and put an "app" on peoples devices, phones, tablets, computers, etc that allows everyone in their country read bills being proposed, who wrote them, lobbying for them, and actually participate in the process.
The SOPA law as proposed, would break the internet, because pieces of the internet are operated by US corporations, like root zones and SSL signing. If you start arbitraily blocking sites (see India's recent backlash) you're moving responsibility from those that should be responsible (the site operators) to the ISP's (thus raising costs) and DNS registrar's.
Here's a simple blocking-type of solution that doesn't break the internet, nor make it a pain in the ass for ISP's to implement. All home users have a cable or DSL modem (or some other router locked down by the ISP), if a site, like TPB is a huge problem, then null-route that IP address in the router for users. Then list in the end-user router's software what routes are blocked for their own safety. The end-user can then delete these null routes once per reboot cycle if they know what they are doing. Once it reboots, it redownloads the null route list.
Problem solved, users who delete the routes from their hardware, know exactly what they are doing, everyone else just gets a destination unreachable. ISP's don't have to deal with anything other than maintaining a list of null routes. No 3-strikes bullshit, and technically proficient users don't have to hack the hardware or run tunnels to bypass blocked sites. This is the low-hanging fruit.
It's unfortunate that we'd need to block anything, but it's not just piracy sites that are unsafe, there's also malware C&C servers that should be blocked.
Re:Embarrassment extractor (Score:5, Interesting)
That's the trouble with capitalism. Any philosophy which promotes the principle of selfishness is going to encourage behaviour which is harmful to others providing it is profitable - first people do away with morality/decency and just "stick to the rules", then they realise that actually it's fairly easy to ignore the rules too.
Unfortunately, the best progression we've ever had from raw capitalism - the balanced social democracies emerging in '50s and '60s Europe - were destroyed by the neoconservative project's battle commencing in the '70s. And now the latter have the cheek to blame the former.
A Window into the Mind of Washington (Score:3, Interesting)
That's what Moore's comments are. In front of the cameras all of the Washington crowd crows about democracy and rights and thinking of the children and the like, but they secretly despise all of those things and all of us who cherish them. They mock honesty because dissembling is the air they breathe. They hate action because the status quo fills their pockets. They hate freedom because it curbs their power. Think of the worst cartoonish super villain you can think of, then imagine an entire city filled with them, and you have the capitol of the United States. They're all psychopaths.
That's why we need to clear all of them out and do a serious reboot of the country. We know a lot of things now that we didn't know 200 years ago when the first iteration of the Constitution was written, and we've had 200 years to watch the outputs of the first system. We can engineer a system of government that does not select for the psychopaths we have now.
Re:Address the real problem (Score:2, Interesting)
The corporations are supposed to be non-entities, they are not "people", so why are they allowed to act like "people"?
Because legally, they are in fact people, and have been for quite some time.
Re:Translation (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Courts and the Internet (Score:4, Interesting)
You would think that might give the law makers something to think about wouldn't you.
Re:Translation (Score:5, Interesting)
You mean this part?
The article also points out comments from Steve Metalitz, a lawyer who represents members of the entertainment industry: "Most countries in the world already have this option at their disposal to deal with this problem. If site blocking broke the internet, then the internet would already be broken."
In that case, if site blocking were effective in preventing piracy then surely these activities would already be measurably and very clearly falling in all those other unspecified countries that have that form of censorship.
That said, I don't think this is a completely black-and-white issue. A lot of people object to censorship of some/all kinds of speech on principle or feel that blocking is overkill for an activity such as copying a piece of information. However, probably many of the same people would not object to shutting off a command/control site for malware that was bringing down millions of PCs at a staggering economic cost, or to isolating a group who really were trading child porn. Fundamentally, on a technical level, either someone has the ability to block sites or they don't, but on an ethical level it isn't even close to that simple.
Re:Ha! You're just as stupid as we are! (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, politicians are just elected people of the population. Garbage in, garbage out.
Not really. 57% of senators and 38% of Representatives hold degrees in law.. Understanding the law is their area of specialization. The population? Not so much. Further, the people chose each particular politician because they think that he/she would be better at the job than the other guy.
Re:Translation (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a difference between blocking site that is serving malware and blocking one that is pushing an unpopular political idea, displaying images some consider art, or exposing some objectionable behavior by others or similar. In the case of malware the site is part of scheme to illegally convert another persons property for the operators own use.
The thing is the government CAN shut those sites down already and they don't need SOPA to do it. They simply have to gather enough evidence to get a court order to do it. Then they have to conduct some proceeding where the site owner gets to argue they were not doing anything wrong where they state must prove they were; they same SHOULD hold true for sites engaged in distributing intellectual property they don't control.
Nobody I have ever talked to seriously objects the idea the government can shut down a website, when its being used directly in what appears to be some form of crime, and there is enough evidence to support that claim to get warrant from a judge, and its on a TEMPORARY TENTATIVE basis pending the outcome a fair legal proceeding.
What SOPA is about is depriving site operators their rights to due process of law, and reducing it to someone in the executive branch can pull your site at any time for any reason without review, and with little or no possibility of appeal. Which is NOT HOW THIS COUNTRY IS SUPPOSED TO WORK!
Re:Translation (Score:5, Interesting)
However, probably many of the same people would not object to shutting off a command/control site for malware that was bringing down millions of PCs at a staggering economic cost, or to isolating a group who really were trading child porn.
The problem isn't the "censorship" per se (at least, not in my opinion), it's the ridiculous lack of probable cause and due process surrounding this shit. The Jotform takedown was a perfect example of how all of our fears regarding SOPA were completely justifiable [itworld.com]. There should be public hearings before the government is able to declare something a "danger" and knock it off the 'net. The way it's handled now is totally against the spirit of the law and the concept of innocence until proven guilt. Outside of Freedom of Speech (which this SOPA shit directly undermined), and the guarantee of security of our person and property (which the TSA is doing everything it can to eliminate), that's probably one of the most sacred foundations of our entire fucking existence as a nation.
Kind of undermines all of our posturing about security and freedom while we're bombing villages in the middle east back into the stone age when we're playing the same fucking games we bitch about with our own citizens here at home. What I want to know is if the people condoning this bullshit are evil or just plain ignorant...it would save me the time trying to logically converse with them, at the very least.
Re:Apparently it's you who doesn't understand. (Score:5, Interesting)
Hell, the difference between Clinton (higher taxes, reduced debt, economic boom) with shrub who inhereted the windfall economy then by removing taxes caused a worldwide recession, and with Obama's spineless kowtowing to the rabid right-wing whereby stalling the economy even further because idiotic parasites like you whine and bitch about government, should show you your unthinking and poisonous mental garbage proposition is PROVEN FALSE.
Your view of history is slightly distorted. For one thing, it wasn't Shrub's tax cuts that caused a worldwide recession, it was the Dot-Com bust that did that. That's what happens when bubbles burst. Shrub's tax cuts certainly didn't help the situation (they made it worse), but they weren't the cause. Clinton's policies probably didn't help here; worse, Clinton's to blame for the 2008 recession since he signed the (Republican-authored) bill in 2000 that repealed the Depression-era Glass-Steagal act which would have prevented the real estate boom and bust.
Second, Obama isn't spineless; he just acts that way so he can blame the Republicans for everything that's going wrong. Both the Democrats and the Republicans are equally to blame for the current mess. Just look at this stupid staffer that's trying to promote SOPA: she's a Democrat. It's the Democrats that were big fans of SOPA. It's the Democrats (in Congress; they had a majority there during Shrub's last two years) that wanted to bail out all the giant financial companies and banks. Yes, the Republicans are idiotic parasites too, but the Democrats are just as bad, they just serve different industries.
The main problem with bashing Capitalism is that you need to promote something that you think is better. I haven't seen anything that is; the Russians and Chinese tried Stalinist communism and planned economies, and they were a disaster. China's been industrializing at an amazing rate since they threw off the yoke of planned economies and switched to a free(er) market. The way I see it, the problem with capitalism is when it's either completely unchecked by government, which has a duty to regulate things to maintain healthy competition and prevent monopolies, or in cases where they're unavoidable (water utilities, for example), strictly regulate them or provide them as government services directly, or worse the government is utterly corrupt and bought out by large companies, which is exactly what we have here in America. That's called "Crony Capitalism". The hybrid socialist/capitalist systems they had (and still have, to an extent) in many places in Western Europe seem to be the best systems in terms of stability and fairness.