Clay Shirky has the best overview I’ve seen/heard/read of PIPA and SOPA and the context from whence they emerged:
Bottom line: the legilsation’s about wanting us to be passive consumers, not producing and not sharing.
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I put on my $DAYJOB CTO hat for Midas Green Tech and facilitated a conference call with Sean McLaughlin, the Chief of Staff for the Judiciary Committee, and executives from CoreNAP and DataFoundry today.
Sad to say, it’s not dead yet. The “Internet experts hearing” that the Oversight committee was planning has apparently been canceled, so that’s a loud voice in opposition that the House probably won’t get to hear.
http://oversight.house.gov/index.php?option=com_jcalpro&Itemid=1&extmode=view&extid=363
The requirements to force ISPs to edit DNS results are apparently out, so that’s good.
Search engines will still be required to block results.
Visa and Mastercard will still be required to stop the financial flows.
Supposedly your hosting company won’t be required to look over your shoulder to see what’s going on on your site, but some legal eagles have noted that the only way for a hosting company to avoid penalty will probably be to….Look over your shoulder.
Now, to be fair, Sean did keep pounding on the point that “this applies only to foreign web sites.” My problem is what’s really “foreign” in these days of the Internet / World Wide Web / globalization?
The next big event is the cloture vote on the 24th in the Senate. For more info on that see
http://www.publicknowledge.org/blog/pipa’s-january-24th-vote-and-how-filibuster-w
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EFF-Austin just received this press release from the Computer and Communications Industry Association:
Contact:
Heather Greenfield
202-783-0070 ext 113
hgreenfield@ccianet.org
Ed Black
202-783-0070 ext 110
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
January 12, 2012
Washington – Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy has put out a statement may add a provision to study the impact of DNS blocking before that provision within the controversial PROTECT IP bill (PIPA) would take effect. The offer to suspend the timing of DNS blocking comes after cybersecurity experts in the Obama administration and those implementing the latest cybersecurity measure known as DNSSEC have warned PIPA and the latest cybersecurity measures the government has spent the last ten years developing are incompatible. Internet engineers and cybersecurity experts have written to Congress about their serious concerns.
The following can be attributed to Computer & Communications Industry Association President & CEO Ed Black:
“I hope this statement signals a recognition they didn’t understand this issue when the bill was drafted. We hope this means they will step back, talk to stakeholders, identify and focus on the real problem they’re trying to solve and target that. But it seems more likely to be aimed at newer opponents of the bill that haven’t absorbed how harmful the legislation would still be, even if there was a firm commitment to remove DNS blocking, which there isn’t.
“This DNS blocking was the tip of the iceberg in terms of the broad range of real problems with the approach of SOPA and PIPA. The DNS blocking was easy to understand and remove. Those who value the functioning of the Internet and the jobs that depend on it should now focus on the provisions of the legislation that still cause much collateral damage to the Internet.
“Those pushing this flawed bill discounted a lot of early concerns voiced by Internet experts about the bill. The DNS blocking was just one glaring flaw that would harm cybersecurity. There are a lot of other concerns they seem to continue to ignore about the collateral damage to the Internet that are also well founded. If the offer to further study the DNS blocking provision were a sign of real willingness to step back in general and rethink this bill, then it would be meaningful.”
About CCIA:
CCIA is an international, nonprofit association of computer and communications industry firms, representing a broad cross section of the industry. CCIA is dedicated to preserving full, fair and open competition throughout our industry. Our members employ more than 600,000 workers and generate annual revenues in excess of $200 billion.
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Guest post by Mark Boyden
Found this recently (from July 2011, read article for full text, images, videos, documents, and deeper links):
Police To Begin Using Iris Scans From Controversial Iphone App, FED Forms “Center For Identity” At U-Texas Austin Campus
~ Alternative News Report – July 21, 2011
Representatives from private industry and the US federal government has already made a discreet presentation to college students in Austin Texas this spring where the concept of a series of “National Identity Management Centers” aka “The Center For Identity” was introduced to students.
I have wondered WHY this presentation was made on a college campus to college students, most of whom are gullible and many are still innocent to the beguiling tactics of surreptitiously introduced socialism and mass population surveillance programs by the federal government. Restated: most college kids do not understand what “social engineering” means, or “mass indoctrination by media gradualism.”
Until just recently if you were to try to explain these mind control methods to college kids they would hop on their skateboards and laugh it off. But that en mass naivete is now changing. “The Center For Identity” on the University of Texas at Austin has already been planned and now has a web presence.
A close friend, college aged, and a student in Austin, who attended this presentation told me later the entire ambiance of the material was creepy, hard to understand and altogether very ambiguous.
Just exactly WHAT is a “national identity management center’? I examined the literature which was handed out at this presentation and it was all cloaked in well familiar magnanimous federal platitudes about ‘personal identity security” and so forth. There was even a letter included from President Obama. The specific term “RFID” was not referenced in the literature, but I had the very distinct feeling that once these federally staffed “national identity management centers” become operative, that RFID, Iris scans, facial recognition, DNA scans and a host of other high technology personal identification methods will be deployed through the centers. There is a partnership forming between high level corporations and the federal government to establish these “national identity management centers” for profit. That was made very clear in the documents that I examined. I have posted some of these documents at the end of this report.
Read the entire article, view the videos, and included documents, at Alternative News Report.
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