SOPA sponsors return: "think of the children"

http://www.slashgear.com/sopa-sponsor-has-another-internet-bill-that-records-you-247-20210264/

by fchollet • 15 years ago

163 56 15 years ago

We need to call them out on how Orwellian this bill is and how they are hiding behind child abuse to monitor the whole Internet and everyone, before they get a chance to ask "why are we against protecting children online?".

Let's frame the issue before they do. Also bring up the point that Rep. Lofgren tried to add an amendment called "Keep Every American's Digital Data for Submission to the Federal Government Without a Warrant Act.". Of course they rejected it.

pawn• 15 years ago

Orwellian was the same word I was thinking as I read this.

It's too bad the bill's code number isn't H.R. 1984 - it'd be a lot more appropriate.

Nogwater• 15 years ago

Maybe Reddit should organize a campaign to send every member of congress a copy of _1984_, and maybe _Fahrenheit 451_. Seems like they could pull it off. On the other hand, it might just give them more ideas.

pi18n• 15 years ago

They could use a new book, they've finished reading Brave New World a while ago.

noonespecial• 15 years ago

"Ultima Ratio Politicus"

English Translation: Think of the children.

jugularity• 15 years ago

Yup. The most popular current excuses to shirk problems by suppressing liberty:

(1) anti-terrorism (2) health and safety (3) think of the children

I was actually pretty shocked to hear initial talk of protecting American inventions from 'foreign thieves'. That kind of language seems way out of date...

twunde2• 15 years ago

Its worth noting that the RH (reported in house) version of the bill is significantly better. This requires logging only ip addresses and only for 12 months AND the response may only be compelled by a government entity.

        (1) A commercial provider of an electronic communication service shall retain for a period of at least one year a log of the temporarily assigned network addresses the provider assigns to a subscriber to or customer of such service that enables the identification of the corresponding customer or subscriber information under subsection (c)(2) of this section.

        `(2) Access to a record or information required to be retained under this subsection may not be compelled by any person or other entity that is not a governmental entity.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c112:1:./temp/~c1122yS...:

twunde2• 15 years ago

It still needs work, like requiring reasonable suspicion of child pornography, but it is significantly better. Also if anyone can confirm whether or not that Reported in House means that the actual bill that has been fixed and that it is not just suggested changes to the bill that would be great

jeffl8n• 15 years ago

I agree; this isn't nearly the scale of SOPA/PIPA.

This bill just makes it a requirement that ISPs keep customer IP addresses on record for at least a year. I'm guessing that most major ISPs have already agreed to do this sort of thing for law enforcement without any law requiring it.

drunkenmasta• 15 years ago

"Think of the Children!" will always remain a tactic as long as people are concerned that, by opposing the argument, they will be seen as "anti-children." Simply knowing that it is a tactic should take away the fear of opposing it for what it is. A manipulation tactic.

Vivtek• 15 years ago

Dammit, I hate being right: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3476099

brian_cloutier• 15 years ago

Am I reading this right? At the bottom of section 8 is this gem.

[...] a court shall presume [...] that the distribution or publication using the Internet of a photograph of [...] a specific person serves no legitimate purpose [...]

What does that mean? If you transmit a picture of somebody without them giving the okay first you're probably up to no good?

pestaa• 15 years ago

In my country you cannot store/distribute a picture of a person without explicit permission if the person is the picture's main content.

You can, however, use a picture of a group of people without asking them one by one.

zdw• 15 years ago

There's a very slippery slope of misuse that eventually creeps in with any new enforcement privilege. One example - the extra abilities the Patriot act gave to law enforcement that now are used almost exclusively for non-terrorism related investigations.

_Y_• 15 years ago

That seems to be the right way to fight these things, if those that have been abused as children are against this law, then this law isn't to protect the children, but to simply push it under the rug.

RexRollman• 15 years ago

I really don't understand why a republican would sponsor this. Their party claims to want a smaller government, and yet, they don't have a problem with a more intrusive one?

shingen• 15 years ago

The things the parties champion are what they can always most easily intrude upon because their bases ignore it (they buy the jargon and assume their party stands for what they claim).

For example, it wasn't Clinton that doubled the size of the government, it was Bush and Reagan both. It was the Bush spending increases that have really sanctioned Obama's spending increases. Bush would say he was for lower taxes, but his spending forces long term tax rates to skyrocket.

But it was Clinton that set new records on pot busts. It was the Democrats that tried to restrict freedom of speech with the fairness doctrine (nice name). The Democrats have had no problem with the Patriot Act thus far. It was a supposedly civil liberties loving President that just wiped out habeas corpus and the right to due process (NDAA bill).

The Democrats champion civil liberties and hammer you on them all day long. The Republicans champion free markets, yet they've acted the like the anti-free-market party (including creating the Federal Reserve in secret).

nextparadigms2• 15 years ago

BOTH parties agree on the important things : getting more control and power for themselves.

nkcraddock• 15 years ago

Where's YC with a startup to catch people who sexually abuse children?

pgeorgi• 15 years ago

Catching predators is (still) a matter of law enforcement (and IMHO that's a useful safeguard, even if flawed in some instances).

Providing law enforcement with better tools might be a worthwhile geek venture (and given the tools they are sold by megacorps, "better" might not even be hard), but with the existing procurement rules (etc etc) it's probably hard for a startup to enter that market.

Alternative route: Build tools to optimize other public office work, and then use the political process to request that freed money (and headcount) is retargetted to supporting the police ("think of the children!"). While there is still a procurement problem, there might be areas covered in less red tape than police work.

mattstreet• 15 years ago

Why don't you submit a business proposal to them?

drblast• 15 years ago

The usual assumption about politicians and lawmaking goes something like this:

A lawmaker receives large contributions from certain moneyed groups with an agenda, and will introduce legislation favorable to that group. The only way to prevent this from happening is to either contribute more money to the opposing side or more directly by ensuring that passage of the legislation will anger so much of the populace that no amount of money will save the incumbent come election time.

That doesn't seem to make sense in this case. The same technologically clueless people who introduced SOPA aren't of their own accord going to decide that ISP's need to keep a year of DHCP logs in case that information is useful later.

It looks like the only entity to benefit from this would be the U.S. Attorney General, as it ostensibly will prevent the circumstance where the evidence of a case hinges on tying a person/household to an IP address but the logs are missing or overwritten.

Creepy. If this involved real-world monitoring and logging it would be the biggest news story of the day, but since it's the Internet it's just tech stuff.

JumpCrisscross• 15 years ago

When is Lamar Smith's next election? Are there any candidates running who would say they're opposed to this nonsense? Seriously consideing putting together a PAC in New York City.

Update: Ouch, this will be expensive... http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/elections.php?cycle=2...

w1ntermute2• 15 years ago

If there's a group of people that understand technology less than Smith and care less about protecting freedom of speech on the internet than him, it would have to be the people living in Texas's 21st congressional district, which he represents.

Smith's been in the House since 1987, so he won't be going away any time soon without a fight. He won his last reelection with 69% of the votes, in 2010. Even though you've got 2 more years to prepare to take him down, I'd say you're extremely unlikely to succeed, particularly when you consider how short the public's collective attention span is.

Reddit already did an analysis of this[0], and determined which Congresspeople who supported bills like the Patriot Act, NDAA, and SOPA/PIPA are most vulnerable in the 2012 elections. I think they decided upon one or two targets to focus on, which is a smart move. If they can come up with a winning strategy and get a pro-internet/freedom of speech politician who sticks to his principles into office, then they have hope of gaining support from other groups of people in future elections.

0: http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/nylx0/a_megalist_o...

-----

Personally, I believe that many of the current problems with the political system stem from (a) the electoral system and (b) the campaign finance system.

The electoral system allows otherwise unelectable politicians to get into Congress and hold onto their seats purely by virtue of gerrymandered Congressional districts. This[1] is Texas's 21st Congressional district. Ignore the vast swaths of land in the middle of nowhere, as those are not very densely populated. Focus on the parts of the district that approach the cities of San Antonio and Austin. See how oddly shaped they are? This is to ensure that only wealthy people in those cities are in the district. By combining the social conservatives (religious people) in the rural areas with the fiscal conservatives (wealthy people) in the suburban areas, they've created a district that is unwinnable for a non-Republican (Democrat or 3rd party).

Moreover, the lack of proportional representation in favor of a winner-takes-all situation makes it impossible for 3rd parties to get a foothold in the public consciousness, so that they can build over several elections into a formidable force. So even in districts that aren't so blatantly gerrymandered, you're left with what's essentially a political duopoly.

We've gone over the campaign finance issues with lobbying and all in other threads here, so you probaly already know the issues with that. The bottom line is that solving any of these issues requires first getting "our" people into office, using the current system.

The best hope of doing this is to identify local elections where we can first bring in an opposition candidate who supports us. This requires an election where (a) there's an incumbent who isn't really liked by his/her constituents, (b) a dearth of opposition candidates, and (c) someone living in the district who's supportive of our views and has the time, interest, and ability to run and win. This person would have to run as a Democrat or Republican (whichever the incumbent isn't) in order to get people to vote for him. If we can repeat this process in the same geographical area for several other positions, all of these candidates could then leave the parties they're a member of at the same time and form a new one. Now you would have a 3rd party with credibility and several respectable members already in political office. From there, it would be a matter of expanding to other states, and eventually to the national level.

1: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/de/Texas.21st.Co...

dataminer• 15 years ago

Most people don't understand technology, but they do understand freedom. The strategy to get a pro technology representative elected is to get a small government person elected in such region, who believes federal government has very little role in every day life of a citizen.

wisty2• 15 years ago

(a) Virtually no-one ever admits their country's system is flawed. The Brits don't realise that the House of Lords is a really crappy substitute for a senate. The Americans don't realise that proportional representation, compulsory voting, and instant runoff voting is a much better system. They say stuff like "you'll just get a candidate that nobody hates, not someone who a few extremists really love, and if voting is compulsory you'll have normal people voting", and not realise that's a good thing.

I've no idea what the Australians get wrong ... though it probably involves having too many levels of government.

Iv• 15 years ago

Internet can be a cheap multiplier. While it can't easily buy ads on TV, it can put you on headlines for a fraction of the cost.

shareme• 15 years ago

Doesn't corrupting US Congress harm children?

It devalues their future voting rights, etc at the very least.

rdtsc• 15 years ago

This is the nuclear option but also shows they are desperate.

biafra• 15 years ago

"Each time you use a credit card, each time you read your bank statement, all of your IP information and your search history will be required by your ISP to be stored for 18 months at all times."

How can my ISP store my search history? DuckDuckGo and Google offer https to do the searching.

How can my ISP know where I use my credit card? Whenever I pay by credit card I use https.

scotth• 15 years ago

Ugh...yeah. Just another case of technology confusion.

The bill's bad nonetheless, but one thing's for sure: the ISPs won't be spying on your searches or your banking.

esteth• 15 years ago

I might be revealing my stupidity here, but surely your ISP can MITM the HTTPS handshake and decrypt all of your traffic? Unless you have a pre-arranged key that hasn't travelled through their network.

ahelwer• 15 years ago

This is the purpose of certificates.

vidarh4• 15 years ago

SSL is designed so that only the server with the private key for a specific certificate can complete the handshake correctly for that certificate, and the certificate is tied to the domain name.

The ISP can MITM the handshake and return a different certificate, but unless a certificate authority supported by your browser is complicit, they can't get that certificate signed for the domain you're trying to visit, and the browser will complain.

gergles• 15 years ago

Your ISP won't be able to get a trusted certificate authority to issue them a cert for "*", which is what they would need to do in order to transparently MITM SSL. They could generate that cert on their own, and maybe install it into the Windows cert store with the "installation CD", but they couldn't intercept your traffic on an unadulterated system.

bytenotes• 15 years ago

Is it possible that a website be created that will aggregate thoughtful arguments against such legislation, attach videos, talking points, letter templates and such as well as connect local people that can practically get involved in resisting constant attacks on freedom?

Or is there such a website already?

skymt• 15 years ago

> Each time you use a credit card, each time you read your bank statement, all of your IP information and your search history will be required by your ISP to be stored for 18 months at all times.

Where did the author get that idea? I just read the bill, and the only part relating to ISP record-keeping is the section requiring ISPs to keep a log of what IP address is assigned to a customer. There's nothing about tracking searches or financial transactions, or any traffic monitoring at all.

iamgilesbowkett• 15 years ago

Y Combinator is right to be mad, but wrong about the target.

Smith also attempted to expand the DMCA in 2006, again pushing for new wiretapping privileges for police. It's a question whether this guy is trying harder to destroy the Internet or the Fourth Amendment, but imagine how awesome it would be if that was just an academic question about a guy who didn't have a career in politics any more.

The bad news is he's been in office since 1987 and has won his most recent elections with crushing victories. The good news is he's a Republican, and SOPA is wildly anti-business; the other bad news is it may be tough to make that stick, because it's only obvious to the technologically literate. Fortunately, he also he has motivated, successful enemies on his home turf; his district includes parts of staunchly Democratic Austin, and that's because the Supreme Court ordered his Congressional district redrawn after the League of United Latin American Citizens won a gerrymandering lawsuit against then-governor Rick Perry. This probably also means he's extremely corrupt, but it's hard to imagine SOPA coming from anybody who wasn't extremely corrupt in the first place.

Let's all form a political action committee called the Coalition To Defend The Internet From Ignorant, Corrupt Assholes and get contributions from every millionaire in Silicon Valley so we can deep-six this guy so completely "Lamar Smith" becomes a synonym for "no career in politics ever again."

We can use a two-pronged attack; fund his Republican competitors, and find ways that they can show how pro-Hollywood and anti-business SOPA was (Republicans hate Hollywood), while at the same time also funding his liberal opponents. A Democratic victory in Smith's district is very unlikely, but his Democratic opponents probably hate him enough to make some noise, and I think it's extremely likely that Texas is full of younger Republicans who would love to take his place. There's got to be at least one who understands the Internet.

If you want context, I also posted nearly exactly this same thing on my blog, plus a bunch of links (mostly to Wikipedia) providing factual backdrop:

http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2012/01/lets-end-lamar-smit...

tszyn• 15 years ago

Let me just point out that, according to the research done by Steven Levitt, author of Freakonomics, money does not win elections, so if you agree with Levitt's conclusions, financing Smith's opponents is not the best way to proceed.

brudgers• 15 years ago

Proposal: Smith's Law

Every discussion of internet regulations eventually references child pornography.

tzs• 15 years ago

The first paragraph is completely wrong. Of the things listed in the first paragraph as things the bill requires, not a single one is correct.

The only factual statement in that paragraph is the link to the bill text.

In fact, I cannot find any even remotely plausible (or even an implausible) way to misread the bill so as to come up with his claims. Either the author is simply lying (to generate controversy and traffic perhaps), or is just repeating something he got elsewhere and made no effort whatsoever to verify.

This is not HN quality material. Flagging.

For those curious, here's what is actually going on. Under current law, an ISP has to cough up certain customer information to the government upon a proper legal request. That information is name, address, phone number connection records or session times and durations, how long the customer has been a customer and what services they use, subscriber phone number or subscriber number, temporary network addresses, means and source of how they pay for the service (including credit card number if that is how they pay).

As far as I can see, there is no requirement that the ISP retain this information. They just have to make it available if they have it. Practically, of course, most of it will be retained for business purposes.

What this bill adds to this is that the ISP has to keep a log for one year of temporary IP address assignments and mapping of them to the customer information listed earlier. So, it's adding a new data item to log, and it is making it so that the customer information mentioned early has to be kept a year (which in practice is not a change because it is almost certainly kept anyway regardless of legal requirements).

It also adds a section that says that access to this information may not be compelled except by a government entity. This may be good news for those who are doing file sharing, as on first reading it would prevent plaintiffs in civil suits from getting access to the information.

Anyway, there is nothing whatsoever that will "have your internet service provider tracking all of your financial dealings online. Each time you use a credit card, each time you read your bank statement, all of your IP information and your search history will be required by your ISP to be stored for 18 months at all times".

ramblerman• 15 years ago

Lamar Smith, creator of SOPA and this bill, is the same guy who killed the "Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act of 2011". Proposed by Barney Frank and Ron Paul, he cut it down before it had a chance using his rank of chairman of the House Committee on the Judiciary.

It would have pushed legislation from the federal to the state level. . A lot of our young ones are ruined in our current penal system over trivial crimes.

He is a staunch anti abortion activist, and has signed multiple bills to make abortion as difficult as possible, if not impossible. Even signing a bill to prevent a mother from taking her unborn over state lines to perform an abortion.

If you ever want to know my political opinion on something, just check Lamar Smiths' position, I'll be on the other end of it.

josteink• 15 years ago

I love living in a country where the government realizes it is too technologically inept to try to legislate and regulate the internet.

It just creates normal laws for the normal world, and whenever things from the internet crosses borders to the real world (like Amazon-orders) that just falls under the normal laws for mail-order businesses.

That seems reasonable and fully sufficient to me.

SOPA sponsors return: "think of the children"

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