The Senate’s SOPA Counterattack? | Hacker News Reader

The Senate’s SOPA Counterattack?

cato-at-liberty.org

51 pointsjdp239 comments

TL;DR: the key part is in this bit:

“Consistent with the Constitution of the United States and notwithstanding and other provision of law,” it says (emphasis added), entities may act to preserve the security of their systems. This means that the only law controlling their actions would be the Constitution.

It’s nice that the Constitution would apply</sarcasm>, but the obligations in the Privacy Act of 1974 would not. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act would be void. Even the requirements of the E-Government Act of 2002, such as privacy impact assessments, would be swept aside.

Don't forget:

The Constitution doesn’t constrain private actors, of course. This language would immunize them from liability under any and all regulation and under state or common law. Private actors would not be subject to suit for breaching contractual promises of confidentiality. They would not be liable for violating the privacy torts. Anything goes so long as one can make a claim to defending “information systems,” a term that refers to anything having to do with computers.

Elsewhere, the bill creates an equally sweeping immunity against law-breaking so long as the law-breaking provides information to a “cybersecurity exchange.”

Whenever I suspect that politicians might be writing a "power-grab" law, the one sure way I know to confirm it, is to start looking for immunity clauses. They know they are doing something bad that would require the "immunity" or else they wouldn't preemptively put it there.

Whenever I suspect that politicians might be writing a "power-grab" law, the one sure way I know to confirm it

A second way to detect it is to look for the word "bipartisan". If politicians on both sides support it, there's a very good chance that the group being screwed is the public.

> A second way to detect it is to look for the word "bipartisan".

My key is the word "reform". It's almost always used to label something that's going to make things significantly worse.

Bipartisan just means whatever is in the middle of the window of acceptable discourse, which then shrinks further into nothing, until they're no longer debating what policy should be, but merely who should implement it.

There seems to be a good supply of legislators that are willing to take donations for laws that benefits special interests at the expense of the many.

If this legislative problem persists I believe there are only three ways of fighting back:

Entrepreneurship: inventions that speed up the demise of the companies funding this and remove the dependency legislators have on special interests.

Legislation: increase cost of enforcement. Donate to legislators that increase friction to these processes by adding requirements and process to:

      - the submitter of a request (e.g a copyright holder). 
      - the processor of a request (e.g the FBI)
      - the executor of a request (e.g the dns system)

Technology: make the laws unenforceable by:

      - making information untrackable (e.g making it X%      
        likely that trackable information is incorrect) 
      - changing the trust model of the internet (e.g replacement to dns).

> Elsewhere, the bill creates an equally sweeping immunity against law-breaking so long as the law-breaking provides information to a “cybersecurity exchange

There's a germ of something that could be useful in there. If you a) have knowledge of a security issue and b) can't get the vendor to respond, the options available aren't great. Being able to get men with badges to go bang on doors before full disclosure could help users, and provide a certain amount of satisfaction for security researchers. Maybe a commemorative helmet-cam dvd could be included.

If we can't censor at the dns level because of protesting, maybe we can get some tsa like government agencies to oversee internet security. Start it simple and meaningless, give it a nice name like "sharing" and "information". It will pass.

Then we'll slowly build its power and establish its rightful duty to preserve the security of the internet, loyal to the Federal reserve and Congress. Thus establishing ownership of the global net. Then we can tax the hell out of every imported and exported byte we don't like.

Sigh... Its an improvement over sopa at least!

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