Oregon Senator effectively kills Internet censorship bill | Hacker News Reader

Oregon Senator effectively kills Internet censorship bill

rawstory.com

189 pointsScott_MacGregor38 comments

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Send him a thank you for defending freedom of speech on the internet:

http://wyden.senate.gov/contact/

Sent. Good idea. Politicians normally only hear from us when we are mad. A nice twist.

And, if you can at all spare it, donate to his campaign. We need people like this to stay in Washington.

http://www.standtallforamerica.com/

Well, he did just win reelection two weeks ago (by a large margin), so isn't facing another election until 2016.

Doesn't matter - if politicians realize that their constituents are willing to pay to keep them in office when they go against corporate interests, we are going to see some real change in Washington.

Can we really compete on that point? Corporations have quite a lot of money compared to most generous private citizens... even those private citizens combined.

That's an interesting point to ponder - do corporations really have more money than private citizens combined? Aren't corporations ultimately owned by private citizens? Certainly the wealth of individuals is spread more thinly and so is harder to mobilise for a particular cause.

There's an important distinction between the set of "private citizens" and "private citizens willing to donate funds to government officials." The latter is a much smaller subset of the former.

Here's what I sent; please feel free to pick and choose. I hope this'll help anyone contemplating sending a letter but too busy to do so.

Dear Senator Wyden,

I would like to thank you for taking a stance for defending freedom of speech in a society that has forgotten what that phrase means. COICA is the digital equivalent of a lynching, allowing people in positions of power and favor to manipulate the internet and limit our freedoms, in the name of limiting piracy. Like similar measures in the past (such as the DMCA, which is the first to come to mind, but many others as well), it is a misguided attempt at reducing piracy at the cost of individual liberties; usually furthered by politicians who don't really understand the way the internet is run and the implications their decision/support would have, or else are trading the constitutionally-protected liberties and freedoms of their constituents in order to please big businesses across America.

We've seen with the DMCA that these measures, first and foremost, don't work. When treating a disease, doctors will try and treat the root cause - simply stifling the symptoms rarely works. But COICA goes even further, and we feel it is akin to treating a flu with radiation and chemotherapy. Thank you for saying "No" to a bill that would have been misused (the DMCA has a history of being used by businesses to shut down competitors and to limit Fair Use) and abused (people pushing through requests to companies and in local courts, taking advantage of the ignorance of many company owners as to their constitutionally protected rights and the definitions of Fair Use) to scare people and organizations alike into giving up their liberties.

Thank you for standing up to freedom in America.

While I'm not lucky enough to be one of your voters (as I do not reside in Oregon), I thank you all the same.

Sincerely,

xxxx

Just did thanks for the text

>COICA is the digital equivalent of a lynching

The analogy isn't obvious to me.

I just did. Thanks for the url.

Maybe I'm biased as a VT resident, but Leahy (as the co-sponsor of the bill) deserves a little shout-out, too:

http://leahy.senate.gov/contact/

Senator Wyden is a good man. I told this story in yesterdays post but I have a friend that used to take the same Portland to DC flights every Monday (to DC) and Friday (to PDX). senator Wyden, even though he had probably earned millions of frequent flyer miles, always sat in coach, always in the same spot.

If any of you were paying attention to the national health care debate, it was Wyden and then Senator Bennett's proposal before Obamacare that made the most sense. In fact we would be much better off if Congress would consider their changes instead of complete repeal.

This is the part of the story where folks acknowledge how great the U.S. Senate is for allowing one member to block offending legislation.

But I doubt that will happen.

So often the story is that the U.S. Senate has stupid rules that allow one member to block legislation when the legislation being blocked is thought of as a good thing - such as unemployment extension, aid to Haiti, etc.

So it cuts both ways. We should be careful about praising this rule too much since often we criticize it when we like the legislation being blocked.

That is a very good point. It seems like we forget the good uses when bad comes up. (Free speech has the same problem.)

i wish i was a US citizen so I could send him a note of appreciation and some chocolates, or a box set of mad men, or something... this bill would have gone global (and might do, one day)

Please do anyway. I'm sure he'd be gratified to know others outside the US are paying attention, care, and appreciate it. I would.

I'm from England but I still sent him a short email in thanks. Just use something like 90210 for the zip code on the form.

I already sent him a message from England, and depressingly 90210 was the first zip code to come into my mind too. (But went with 90017, last ZIP code I stayed in.)

Yeah it's pretty embarrassing/depressing but there's not really any other famous zip codes.

Oregon is 97xxx just so you know :-)

Thanks, but I use 90210 for all ZIP code forms because it's easy to remember. :P

I wouldn't be surprised if this was a direct result of the Senator hearing from his constituents about this issue. Regardless, job well done!

Well done by Senator Wyden! The headline's a little too optimistic, though. The bill will be back next session -- and the new Congress is likely to be just as friendly to the content industries (who are driving the bill). So it's a great time to support Wyden, EFF and others who are on the right side of this issue.

He was reelected right? So he can block it next congress too.

i'm not an expert on the processes, but i believe it only gets blocked for a finite period of time

Sadly it appears as though the only legislation which unifies both sides of the political aisle (be it in favor of or against a given piece of legislation) is that which is completely asinine and backward. The seemingly basic bills are inevitably deadlocked in recent years.

Then again, that's not entirely unexpected.

I think this is mostly due to the low impact on votes that these kind so of bills have. These bills can usually go undetected.

<spam>I think this again shows that groups like the EFF are invaluable. Donate today! </spam>

Yeah, sadly I don't think this is a priority for most of the public, and many who do have an opinion support the "shut down the pirates, whatever it takes" approach.

Take Wyden in particular: he just won reelection two weeks ago, 57-40%. If this sequence of events had taken place before the election, would he have won by a larger margin? I think it's unlikely. Probably it would've turned out the same, but if anything it's possible he would've done slightly worse, since his opponent could attempt to portray him as a pro-piracy "extremist" who blocked a bipartisan bill that had passed the relevant committee unanimously.

I live in Oregon. Wyden had that election won long before election day. The focus was in the governor's race here and even Wyden's opponent, a Lewis and Clark University law professor named Hoffman, admitted the state Republican party put all its money into the gubernatorial race. The outcome of this bill wouldn't have made a difference one way or the other.

"Deploying this statute to combat online copyright infringement seems almost like using a bunker-busting cluster bomb, when what you need is a precision-guided missile," Wyden said.

As far as I understand the article does not explain Wyden doing anything else than saying that particular sentence. How is that effectively killing Internet censorship?

Individual senators may place holds on legislation and there are only a few woking days left in the congressional calendar this year.

If it doesn't pass this year, it will have to be reintroduced by Lahey next year.

Would this system block websites at the IP level or at the DNS level?

Doing it at the DNS level would mean you could roll your own DNS or use a non-US DNS provider.

Doing it at the IP level would mean banned IPs and reverse-lookups of IPs back into domain names, checking against a list of banned domains. This one could only be bypassed through proxies.

My understanding of it is that US nameservers couldn't resolve banned domains. Anyone with the tiniest bit of technical knowledge could use an untainted nameserver, or run their own. However, the spirit of the bill is terribly misguided, no matter how easy it is to circumvent.

Thats exactly what they did with the free-speech filter in Denmark (which they said was only supposed to block child-porn). I know at least one dorm where the geeks just changed the DNS servers for everyone.

One of the downsides of allowing legislation like this that imposes compliance requirements on organizations is that it creates widespread law-breaking by the otherwise law-abiding. It can also inadvertently stifle key technical standards. Would you be willing to switch on DNSSEC validation in client side software (browsers, operating systems) if it only talks to nameservers that are compliant with government censorship?

Yes, this is a stupid law, but it's technical implementation is possible because there is a single root for public DNS.

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