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

[Alan Maitland]

Looks like the open letter at EFF is now public.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/12/internet-inventors-warn-against-sopa-and-pipa

Hopefully those on this list and some others with credible experience 
will prevail in turning lawmakers away from what seems pretty bad law.

Alan

>> 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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