Hijexx asked me what I wrote to my Senators and Congressman regarding SOPA, but I had thrown the text of the post out. I thought I would link this writeup, which I posted in the comment section of the Tennessean last month in response to a Pro-SOPA oped from Marsha Blackburn. The text I sent my own representatives was much much shorter, only a paragraph, but it touched on many of the same themes.
Rep Blackburn - I went to high school in your district many years ago. Your support for this bill is not surprising given the large number of music industry people in Williamson county. I work in a different industry - I'm an information security professional. I work on protecting computer networks from the sort of Internet criminal groups you describe in this oped.
Your oped presents this as a black and white issue - if we don't support SOPA our Intellectual Property rights will have no meaning or value at all! In reality, we both know that there are a myriad of different policy options available for pursuing intellectual property rights internationally. The question is whether this specific approach is the right approach.
Many people in my industry have come out against this particular approach because it would hamper our present efforts to improve the reliability of the Internet naming system, steps we feel are necessary to prevent Internet crime. But there are other negative consequences that are probably even more important.
SOPA involves building, in the US, a system from preventing Americans from accessing banned foreign websites, similar to systems presently used in other countries, such as China, to prevent citizens from reading foreign news and information critical of their governments.
Although the American blacklist will obviously be more narrow than China's, many feel that the establishment of any Internet blacklist in the United States will be a dark day in our history. It means we've given up on trying to reach a mutual understanding with the rest of the world regarding issues such as intellectual property and have turned instead to closing ourselves off.
Furthermore, the technology that we develop here in the United States order to implement this blacklist will be adopted in other places in the world who have different types of content that they want to ban, driven by different political interests and different value systems. Ultimately, the scope of our own blacklist will expand. Once this system exists it will be a very temping tool for any future Administration that wishes to prevent Americans from accessing information in the midst of a political crisis. Even an unconstitutional ban might operate for months or years pending a court challenge.
SOPA will have tangible negative consequences for freedom of speech that cannot be addressed simply by prepending a silly little "hear no evil" savings clause to front of the bill. The only way to prevent abuse of the sort of censorship infrastructure that SOPA will create, is not to create it in the first place.
There are myriad options for pursuing Intellectual Property rights internationally. Please, pick a different one.
