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SOPA

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« on: January 17, 2012, 07:23:59 pm »

SOPA , or the Stop Online Piracy Act has been a growing concern for many internet users since it was first proposed.
Here are some links..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57329001-281/how-sopa-would-affect-you-faq/
http://gizmodo.com/5877000/what-is-sopa

Discuss it here.


I do understand from the standpoint of protecting the work of artists and musicians.
If you use a piece of music I have written or produced in a LU vid or stop motion, I am honored. If you sell that vid, I will lovingly expect to be compensated.. and there are already laws in place to protect that right. And by and large they work.

It is not our place to police the internet.. the idea is ludicrous.
SOPA as written is a load of horse excrement.
SOPA, and its sister bill in the Senate, the Protect IP Act, or PIPA. Both bills attempt to deal with online sites that traffic in illegally copied content, but at extreme cost of remaking the architecture of the internet itself. That’s a high price to pay, especially since neither bill will actually curb real piracy: SOPA and PIPA are the effective equivalent of blowing up every road, bridge, and tunnel in New York to keep people from getting to one bootleg music stand in Union Square — but leaving the stand itself alone.

Outspoken SOPA opponents like Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Ca.) will be taking the opportunity to promote the rival OPEN Act, which does away with the DNS redirect provisions of SOPA but still attempts to cut off payments to foreign infringing sites after hearings at the US International Trade Commission. And we'll go through all of this again when PIPA comes up for debate in the full Senate after being unanimously approved in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
This battle is far from over. It is crucial that we let our opinions be heard.
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« Reply #1 on: January 17, 2012, 07:43:41 pm »

In a recent AMA on Reddit confirmed as legitimate, Rep. Polis has stated that he believes that the bill will not pass. (Language not even slightly appropriate)

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« Reply #2 on: January 17, 2012, 11:49:50 pm »

https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/sopa-pipa/
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« Reply #3 on: January 24, 2012, 05:54:24 pm »

I feel like SOPA is a bit overkill. I understand artists not wanting their hard work being copied and given away for no profit, but the SOPA is being acted upon is extreme. Personally, I buy all of my music that I listen to (except when I download music that an artist has freely given to people to download).

Also, Megaupload got shut down. Not that it affects me in any way, as I don't use file sharilng/p2p sites, but a lot of people seemed pretty concerned about it.
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« Reply #4 on: January 24, 2012, 07:28:55 pm »

Now they're trying to make us Canadians get SOPA-like restrictions. >_>
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« Reply #5 on: January 26, 2012, 12:18:35 pm »

... There is reason to make something like SOPA, but not to the extent that SOPA was going to be. Having music sales be restricted to be jsut that-sales- is justifiable. But shutting down other things (like Wiki, facebook, youtube etc) isn't right, as none of those support piracy. Unfortunately there are many converting sites that allow you to convert youtube vids to mp3 files (audio only), but Youtube doesn't support those sites, so it shouldn't be affected... However there is Vevo, which artists now use to post their own high quality vids, but then you have to watch ads...

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« Reply #6 on: January 26, 2012, 12:47:27 pm »

Oh yeah, I wouldn't mind something that made it harder for others to make counterfeit stuff; but there's no reason to break the internet to do it! Especially when this has consistently lasted through the years. Heck, they even have tried to outlaw stuff before, only for that to not work out so well as they planned. One of the worst things about SOPA, though, aside from it breaking everything; is that it won't do a thing to stop what it actually is trying to do, especially when you consider the fact above, about it lasting throughout the years.

Do I want to see creators and such rewarded for their hard work? Certainly. But the silly restrictions people think up just to try and go about that is insane.
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« Reply #7 on: February 20, 2012, 09:32:34 pm »

http://www.itworld.com/security/251584/sopa-replacement-uses-child-porn-excuse-spy-997-percent-americans

SOPA replacement uses child porn as excuse to spy on 99.7 percent of Americans

SOPA author Lamar Smith pushing bill to make web sites track every user's every move
By Kevin Fogarty

February 20, 2012, 3:37 PM — The SOPA and PIPA bills that went down in flames earlier this year for their unbearable intrusiveness, used content piracy as an excuse to give the government powerful tools with which to censor Internet content.

For 2012 the primary author of those bills has switched to a fallback tactic: using child porn as an excuse to create a vast surveillance network from which the government can demand data on every email sent, site visited or link clicked on by all but a fraction of one percent of the U.S. population.

Internet anti-censorship advocates including Anonymous are calling for the ouster of Texas Congressman Lamar Smith, who is following his co-sponsorship of the failed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) with a bill critics call "Big Brother" disguised as an effort to curb child porn and sexual abuse.

Last May Smith, a Texas Republican credited as primary author of both SOPA and PIPA, the Senate version, also introduced H.R. 1981, a bill called the "Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011″ (PCFIPA).

The anti-child-porn provisions in the bill are a "fig leaf for its true purpose: A sweeping data retention requirement meant to turn Internet Service Providers and online companies into surrogate snoops for the government’s convenience," according to Julian Sanchez, Internet privacy and censorship researcherat the center-right Cato Institute.

Smoke and mirrors concealing observers watching you from behind the smoky mirrors

The bill amends existing laws empowering the U.S. Marshals Service to issue subpoenas and chase fugitives.

The amendments expand the Marshals' ability to issue subpoenas and adds online pornographers to their list of top targets.

    The important, though administrivia-looking part of the bill is this: "A provider of an electronic communication service... shall retain for a period of at least 18 months the temporarily assigned network addresses the service assigns to each account... records retained pursuant to section 2703(h) of title 18, United States Code..." – FCPIFA, H.R. 1981

ISPs are already required to keep some customers' activity records for 180 days, so this doesn't look like a big change.

Except, PCFIPA, HR 1981, requires ISPs keep track of every single IP address they assign (except to wireless users) and all the activity flowing across that link.

It doesn't limit itself to just ISPs, either. By addressing the bill to cover any company providing "electronic communications" or "remote computing" services, the bill effectively covers any site offering services online.

PCFIPA, HR 1981, reverses that point of view (as did PIPA and SOPA), to create a vast database of every action of ever American online – a deep pool of data on the activity of millions of Internet users, through whose private activity they can sift at will until they find something that looks like evidence of a crime.

That's exactly the opposite of the intent of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. The Fourth Amendment prevents police from searching, questioning, holding or otherwise harassing suspects unless a judge agrees there's a good reason to investigate a specific person for a specific crime.
Going beyond child pornographers to treat everyone like a criminal

Accusations that PCFIPA is a universal surveillance bill in disguise cite two specific problems with the bill:

    The first is language in the existing federal law, which requires ISPs to provide, under warrant: all of a customer's Internet activity, including email, web browsing, downloads, IM, social networking and anything else done across the public Internet;
    the customer's name address, phone number and IP address;
    a list of all local and long distance phone calls;
    a list of all electronic communications;
    means of payment – all credit-card, bank account or other method the customer used to pay;
    silence – ISPs under warrant or subpoena to give up private records aren't allowed to alert the customer.

    The second is the phrase "unregistered sex offenders" and the power it gives the U.S. Marshals Service to issue its own subpoenas to investigate 99.762 percent of the U.S. population.

By addressing "unregistered sex offenders," Lamar Smith's PCFIPA expands its powers of comprehensive surveillance over everyone in the U.S. who has not already been convicted of a sex crime.

According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's Map of Registered Sex Offenders (PDF) there are about 748,000 registered sex offenders in the United States and territories.

That's an average of 238 offenders per 100,000 who are not sex offenders – approximately .238 percent of the total U.S. population.

Since it is empowering U.S. Marshals to investigate people who have not yet been convicted, under PCFIPA, the only thing required to get a valid subpoena to examine all the online activity 99.762 percent of the U.S. population, is an investigating officer willing to say the subpoena has something to do with investigation of online child porn.

They don't even have to accuse a specific person or limit themselves to a specific geographic area. Geographically surveillance targets have to be within 500 miles of a specific target of investigation.

Online the bill allows for usage connections – anyone you called, who called you, any sites you may have visited or spammers who might have sent you email.
Not only are you a criminal; every web site you ever visit has to collect 'evidence' on you

The requirement that ISPs and essentially every site on the Internet keep 18 months worth of records on every visitor would create a complete record of every site visited, every email sent, every link clicked on by every resident of the U.S. and its territories – a vast and comprehensive database of everything any American does online, into which curious cops can dip almost at will, whether they have a good reason to do so or not.

"The data retention mandate in this bill would treat every Internet user like a criminal and threaten the online privacy and free speech rights of every American," according to Kevin Bankston, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Requiring Internet companies to redesign and reconfigure their systems to facilitate government surveillance of Americans' expressive activities is simply un-American."

“The bill is mislabeled,” Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) told CNET in July, when PCFIPA went through brief review in the House judicial committee. “This is not protecting children from Internet pornography. It’s creating a database for everybody in this country for a lot of other purposes.”

Smith argued in committee that the bill involved investigation only of those suspected of the sexual abuse of children.

No so, countered the ACLU, which argued it would actually impact "hundreds of millions of individuals who have no connection to the sexual exploitation of children whatsoever. ..There is nothing in the bill that would limit the use of these records to child exploitation cases," countered the American Civil Liberties Union, which sent a letter carrying protests from it and 29 other civil rights groups to Smith last summer, without result.

"In fact, the records would involve all internet users everywhere and they would be available to law enforcement for any purpose. This new mandate is a direct assault on the privacy of internet users," the letter said.
So what's the upshot?

There is no conclusion to this story yet.

PCFIPA, H.R. 1981, is on the House legislative calendar to be debated, changed, approved or denied sometime during the coming year.

Oddsmakers rate its chances as good, considering it sailed through committee by a vote of 19 to 10.

SOPA and PIPA had similarly good odds before being brought down in flames.

PCFIPA, HR 1981, should have much worse chances, considering that powers it grants are much more sweeping than those of either Internet censorship bill and that it adds a huge burden to both ISPs and anyone providing content or software services across the web.

Together the constituency opposing PCFIPA should be at least as large as that opposing SOPA and PIPA.

Opposing those two bills took a lot of effort and unity among independent-minded Internet users.

Both unity and the ability to project opposition appear to have dissipated in the weeks since.

Especially given the effort of Lamar Smith and his backers to conceal unconstitutional powers of surveillance and censorship behind child pornographer straw men, it's entirely possible HR 1981 will come up for a vote without nearly as much outcry for the 'net.

If that happens, all the complaining about privacy done by anyone online until now will be moot. PCFIPA requires your ISP to keep track of what you do when it can see you and requires other sites to keep records of what you do when it can't.

By comparison, losing your email password to a keylogger or having your iPhone give away your location data are small potatoes.

Lamar Smith wants to know more than a password or location. He wants to know what sites you click on, what spam you get, what sites you visit that you delete from your history cache so no one else can see them.

Lamar Smith wants to know who you email, who you text and what links you click on in blogs complaining about his irrational, insatiable need to spy on Americans who have done nothing wrong and nothing to arouse suspicion that they have.

Lamar Smith doesn't believe in innocent until proven guilty. Lamar Smith doesn't believe in innocent at all.

He only believes in "unregistered offenders" – meaning "those who haven't been caught yet.

Give Lamar Smith his way and every site on the Internet will have to keep records to turn over to Lamar and his cronies, so people who don't like you can sift through everything you do, looking for something you've done wrong.

Putting unconstitutional limits on the freedom of 99.7 percent of Americans is a fair exchange for a law that might give cops a slightly greater advantage in chasing the .238 percent of Americans who may actually be involved in child pornography.

Doesn't it?
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« Reply #8 on: February 20, 2012, 11:14:49 pm »

PCFIPA? they really don't want pronounceable acronyms, do they? >_>

This bill sadly has a lot higher chance of passing than anything before it. I mean, just TRY to go against this bill without sounding like you support what its "against"
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« Reply #9 on: February 20, 2012, 11:16:40 pm »

EXACTLY.. scary, isn't it??
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« Reply #10 on: February 21, 2012, 10:25:50 am »

The UK wants something similar to that, except they took the 'disagree with us and you're a TERRORIST!' angle instead of the child pornography angle. It really is stupid of politicians to generalise anyone against it as a terrorist... or 'that'. People are allowed to have these things called OPINIONS, government!

What's worse is that the United Nations now wants unprecedented power over the Internet.

What politicians don't seem to understand is that the Internet is not owned by any specific country, and that any bills to censor the Internet are going to affect a lot more than just their country. This is why I believe that the Internet should be considered its own country. That may sound stupid.
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« Reply #11 on: February 21, 2012, 11:30:59 am »

You're not the first person to think that. frankly i agree. check this out.

https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html
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« Reply #12 on: February 21, 2012, 05:24:53 pm »

Even when SOPA was just beginning to fail, people on /r/SOPA had predicted this exact scenario.

I'm not surprised.

We live in a world where money - I.E. rich lobbyists - rule.

Hopefully this will prove to be unenforceable - I have the suspicion that it will.

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« Reply #13 on: February 21, 2012, 07:16:27 pm »

Logos-Using logic and well reasoned arguments to convince people. The right way to persuade people.

Ethos-Manipulating people's emotions to convince them rather than using facts or common sense. The "wrong" way to persuade people.

Which one sounds more like this new bill?
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« Reply #14 on: February 22, 2012, 03:41:02 pm »

Ethos.

Though manipulating people's emotions is much easier in times of depression and recession. Not saying it is or it isn't a time of depression or recession or both. In situations like that, it is much easier for totalitarian governments or dictatorships to rise. Just saying.

Politics should not interfere with the internet. Or, for that matter, with anything that the government attempts to control but really doesn't know anything about.
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« Reply #15 on: February 23, 2012, 08:10:40 pm »

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120222/01562717837/how-new-internet-spying-laws-will-actually-enable-stalkers-spammers-phishers-yes-pedophiles-terrorists.shtml

How New Internet Spying Laws Will Actually ENABLE Stalkers, Spammers, Phishers And, Yes, Pedophiles & Terrorists
from the not-as-simple-as-you-might-think dept

There's proposed legislation in the US (sponsored by Lamar Smith) and in Canada (sponsored by Vic Toews) and in the UK that uses various flimsy justifications for the mass collection of data on telecommunications users. The data covered by these proposals varies, but includes things like URLs, phone calls, text/instant/email messages, and other forms of communication. Some of this proposed legislation deals with communication metadata, e.g., sender, recipient, time, etc.; some of it deals with communication content, e.g., the full text of messages.

I'm going to gloss over the specifics for two reasons: first, they've been covered exhaustively elsewhere, and second, I think it's an absolute certainty that whatever these proposals contain, the next ones will contain more.

The putative reasons given for these proposals are the usual Four Horseman of the Infocalypse: terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, and money launderers. One would think, given the hysteria being whipped up by the proponents of these bills, that one could hardly walk down the street without being offered raw heroin by a grenade-throwing child pornographer carrying currency from 19 different countries.

Of course, everyone who's actually studied terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers and money launderers in the context of telecommunications knows full well that nothing in these bills will actually help deal with them. The very bad people who are seriously into these pursuits are not stupid, and they're not naive: they use firewalls, encryption, and tunneling. They use strong operating systems and robust application software. They use rigorous procedures guided by a strong sense of self-preservation and appropriate paranoia. They're not very likely to be caught by any of the measures in these bills because they'll (a) read the text and (b) evade the enumerated measures.

Yes, there are occasional exceptions: every now and then, a clueless newbie or a careless dilettante turns up when they're caught. And of course when that happens, there's always a press conference announcing the event, and many claims that it's a "major blow against crime" and a flood of self-congratulatory press releases. But it doesn't mean anything, except that someone was either stupid...or careless...or was set up.

The unpleasant reality that these bills are trying to avoid is that catching very bad people requires diligence, patience, expertise and intelligence, aka "competent police work." There's no substitute and there are no shortcuts. This means that these bills will achieve very few of their stated goals; that is, the benefit to society from them will be minimal, if any.

But what about the cost?

I don't mean the financial cost, although that will be high -- much higher than those proposing such legislation are prepared to admit; I mean the cost to society as a whole.

If such legislation passes, then everyone will know that every ISP is building a database -- a highly useful database for very bad people. It's the sort of thing that some very bad people have been trying to construct for years, often at considerable expense and effort. How very nice of someone else to build it for them, saving them the cost and trouble -- because they, and/or their agents, will of course target it for acquisition. And given the parade of security breaches and dataloss incidents we see on a daily basis, it's certain they'll get it. (My bet is that they'll get it before it's even finished. Any takers?)

There's an old military saying -- a bit of inter-service trash talk: "The Air Force builds weapons; the Navy builds targets".

Politicians who propose such measures appear to be thinking that they're building a weapon -- a weapon that law enforcement agencies can use to pursue people who've committed, or are suspected of committing, crimes. But they're not. They're building a target. They're building the mother lode for stalkers, pedophiles, spammers, identity thieves, child pornographers, blackmailers, extortionists, and yes -- terrorists. A Techdirt story just a few days ago gave some rather creepy examples of what Target's data mining can do...and they're just trying to sell you stuff. Imagine what very bad people are capable of, given far richer data and the rather obvious inclination to break the law at will.

What's worse than building a target? Telling everyone you're building a target. What's worse than telling everyone you're building a target? Telling everyone where it is. What's worse than telling everyone where it is? Telling them what's in it. Yet that's exactly what these bills would do: force the construction of a target, inform everyone that it exists, where it is, and what's in it.

I'm sure that the very bad people these bills allegedly target are delighted. I'll bet they're having a hard time not expressing their enthusiastic support. But my guess is that most of them will heed Napoleon's sage advice: "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."

I'm not the only one who's observed that these databases are targets, not weapons. So has Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian:

    "This is going to be like the Fort Knox of information that the hackers and the real bad guys will want to go after. This is going to be a gold mine. [...] The government will say that they can protect the data, and they can encrypt it. Are you kidding me? The bad guys are always one step ahead."

But this is not the worst of it -- that is, the certainty that very bad people will find ways to acquire these databases and to correlate them with each other and with still more databases isn't the endgame.

Particularly talented intruders will not only get it, they'll monitor it in real time. How do you feel about someone knowing where you bank, that you've made three phone calls to stores today, and that you have a Visa card with the following number that you just used from a hotel room 300 miles from home? How do you feel about the web browsing of your teenage daughter being observed by someone who's also reading her instant messages and listening to her VOIP calls, and has the IP address she's using in her college dorm room?

And even this is STILL not the worst of it. Given the rampant Internet and computer illiteracy that we see every day out of law enforcement, private investigators, journalists, and others around the world -- such as the clueless people behind these bills -- it's only going to be a short time until "the logs say X" becomes semantically equivalent in the vernacular to "X is true". And it is at that point that some of the more talented very bad people won't just acquire this data: they'll modify it.
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« Reply #16 on: February 23, 2012, 08:36:51 pm »

That is a very good point, too. (That header is intriguing though, it looks as if it came from Slashdot, yet I don't see any reference to this anywhere recently...)
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