[ih] Fwd: [IP] EFF calls for signatures from Internet Engineers against censorship

[Noel Chiappa]

FYI. I hope many (most?) here can sign: the attempt to interfere with the
operation of DNS is particularly problematic, as it will 'break' DNSSEC.

	  Noel

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Begin forwarded message:


From: Peter Eckersley
Date: Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Subject: EFF call for signatures from Internet Engineers against =
censorship
To: David Farber <dave at farber.net>


(For the IP list)

Last year, EFF organized an open letter against Internet censorship
legislation being considered by the US Senate
(https://eff.org/deeplinks/2010/09/open-letter).  Along with other activists
efforts, we successfully delayed that proposal, but need to update the letter
for two bills, SOPA and PIPA, that are close to passing through US Congress
now.

If you would like to sign, please email me at pde at eff.org, with a one-line
summary of what part of the Internet you helped to helped to design,
implement, debug or run.

We need signatures by 8am GMT on Thursday (midnight Wednesday US Pacific, 3am
US Eastern).  Also feel free to forward this to colleagues who played a role
in designing and building the network.

The updated letter's text is below:

We, the undersigned, have played various parts in building a network called
the Internet. We wrote and debugged the software; we defined the standards
and protocols that talk over that network. Many of us invented parts of it.
We're just a little proud of the social and economic benefits that our
project, the Internet, has brought with it.

Last year, many of us wrote to you and your colleagues to warn about the
proposed "COICA" copyright and censorship legislation.  Today, we are
writing again to reiterate our concerns about the SOPA and PIPA derivatives
of last year's bill, that are under consideration in the House and Senate.
In many respects, these proposals are worse than the one we were alarmed to
read last year.

If enacted, either of these bills will create an environment of tremendous
fear and uncertainty for technological innovation, and seriously harm the
credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key Internet
infrastructure. Regardless of recent amendments to SOPA, both bills will
risk fragmenting the Internet's global domain name system (DNS) and have
other capricious technical consequences.  In exchange for this, such
legislation would engender censorship that will simultaneously be
circumvented by deliberate infringers while hampering innocent parties'
right and ability to communicate and express themselves online.

All censorship schemes impact speech beyond the category they were intended
to restrict, but these bills are particularly egregious in that regard
because they cause entire domains to vanish from the Web, not just
infringing pages or files.  Worse, an incredible range of useful,
law-abiding sites can be blacklisted under these proposals.  In fact, it
seems that this has already begun to happen under the nascent DHS/ICE
seizures program.

Censorship of Internet infrastructure will inevitably cause network errors and
security problems.  This is true in China, Iran and other countries that
censor the network today; it will be just as true of American censorship.  It
is also true regardless of whether censorship is implemented via the DNS,
proxies, firewalls, or any other method.  Types of network errors and
insecurity that we wrestle with today will become more widespread, and will
affect sites other than those blacklisted by the American government.

The current bills -- SOPA explicitly and PIPA implicitly -- also threaten
engineers who build Internet systems or offer services that are not readily
and automatically compliant with censorship actions by the U.S. government.
When we designed the Internet the first time, our priorities were
reliability, robustness and minimizing central points of failure or
control.
We are alarmed that Congress is so close to mandating censorship-compliance
as a design requirement for new Internet innovations.  This can only damage
the security of the network, and give authoritarian governments more power
over what their citizens can read and publish.

The US government has regularly claimed that it supports a free and open
Internet, both domestically and abroad.  We cannot have a free and open
Internet unless its naming and routing systems sit above the political
concerns and objectives of any one government or industry. To date, the
leading role the US has played in this infrastructure has been fairly
uncontroversial because America is seen as a trustworthy arbiter and a
neutral bastion of free expression. If the US begins to use its
central in the network for censorship that advances its political and
economic agenda, the consequences will be far-reaching and destructive.

Senators, Congressmen, we believe the Internet is too important and too
valuable to be endangered in this way, and implore you to put these bills
aside.

--

Peter Eckersley                            pde at eff.org
Technology Projects Director      Tel  +1 415 436 9333 x131
Electronic Frontier Foundation    Fax  +1 415 436 9993

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