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

[Bob Hinden]

I sent email to pde at eff.org as instructed.

Bob

On Dec 14, 2011, at 5:16 PM, Noel Chiappa wrote:

> 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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>