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

[John Curran]

On Dec 21, 2011, at 8:03 PM, Paul Vixie wrote:

> no good, and much harm, is what would come from mandated DNS filtering
> at the ISP level.

Paul - 

Agreed that it would be both ineffective and do great harm. I never said
otherwise.

My point, however, is simply that the technical implications of SOPA
are meaningless to the current debate in Congress.  There are parties
that feel that their cause (reducing illegally copyrighted material) 
is important enough to warrant these remedies & potential consequences,
and unless folks start proposing some alternatives via constructive 
engagement that at least tries to consider their position, we're going 
to find it very difficult to dilute the support behind the present bill
by rational argument about technology limitations.(*)

The nature of most elected officials is assumption that the technology
will simply have to change to comply with law, as opposed to law having
having to be bound by the limitations in today's technology.  That may
not make sense to us, but it makes perfect sense if you write laws for
a living.

/John

(*) p.s.  The one wild card in this all is the level of public calls 
      on the SOPA matter received by these congressman.  If the level 
      gets high enough that they feel their job would be endangered
      by voting for SOPA, then indeed we could win.  I've called my
      congressfolks, and had every family member to same.  Please do
      direct everyone you know to <http://americancensorship.org/> or
      similar sites asap.