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.

Lawless Internet is crushing U.S. creators | The Tennessean | tennessean.com

Red State managing editor and influential Tea Party activist Erick Erickson lamented how he supports Rep. Blackburn on many issues, yet still would pledge to support a primary challenge against her if that’s what it meant to stop SOPA. “Sometimes a fight is that important,” he said. 

Blacklist Bills Becoming Hot Button Issue in 2012 Election | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Here is a detailed breakdown of the SOPA alternative "OPEN Act."

The OPEN Act: significantly flawed, but more salvageable than SOPA/PROTECT-IP

I've been hearing the observation that Microsoft isn't exciting people with their products a lot lately.

Enterprise has been built to the point where it is replacement cycles, not innovation driving their profits. Consumers are migrating from desktop to mobile to handheld — none of which plays into their strengths.

Microsoft, Value Traps and the Paradigm Shift | The Big Picture

If we want Protect-IP to die in the Senate, we need to step it up. SopaOpera.org has a list of people who are for, against, and undecided on PIPA. If your representative is undecided, contact them immediately! All of them are potential allies. Tell them about the damage PIPA could do to free speech, and to the American economy. Even the ones in favor of PIPA are worth contacting. If they think that enough people will vote against them in the next election, they might just change their minds.

Both of my senators have signed on as cosponsors of PIPA. I sent them both emails today using the web forms on their respective sites, and asked them to reconsider their support for this approach. I also contacted my Congressman, who is on the House judiciary committee, but doesn't seem to have taken a position on SOPA.

Fight PIPA, SOPA's Senate cousin, with this Senate scorecard - Boing Boing

Very interesting:

Flowers are sprouting in January in New Hampshire, the Sierra Mountains in California are nearly snow-free, and lakes in much of Michigan still have not frozen. It's 2012, and the new year is ringing in another ridiculously wacky winter for the U.S...

This winter's remarkable AO/NAO pattern stands in stark contrast to what occurred the previous two winters, when we had the most extreme December jet stream patterns on record in the opposite direction (a strongly negative AO/NAO). The negative AO conditions suppressed westerly winds over the North Atlantic, allowing Arctic air to spill southwards into eastern North America and Western Europe, bringing unusually cold and snowy conditions. The December Arctic Oscillation index has fluctuated wildly over the past six years, with the two most extreme positive and two most extreme negative values on record. Unfortunately, we don't understand why the AO varies so much from winter to winter, nor why the AO has taken on such extreme configurations during four of the past six winters.

Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog : Remarkably dry and warm winter due to record extreme jet stream configuration : Weather Underground

Our legislators are still amused by their own lack of internet prowess, indicating that they still believe the web to be some sort of "outlier" whose opinions can be easily dismissed. It's a cognitive gap, but it explains why the mainstream TV news so willingly ignores SOPA and the building momentum of its opposition: it's just the internet. It can be either humored or feared, but never respected.

Study Confirms: News Networks Owned By SOPA Supporters... Are Ignoring SOPA/PIPA | Techdirt

The headline here is possibly a bit misleading.

Its not clear that Paul Ryan had previously taken a position on SOPA. However, Paul Ryan faces a credible challenge in the upcoming election from Rob Zerban, and that makes him vulnerable. Zerban had taken a clear anti-SOPA position. Therefore, a great deal of support flooded in to him from grassroots opponents of SOPA organizing via Reddit. Ryan has therefore announced that he does not support SOPA.

A sustained campaign coordinated by redditors has evidently convinced Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI), the House Budget Chair, to drop his support for the Stop Online Piracy Act.

More here:

On the heels of this news, Paul Ryan has announced he will not support SOPA legislation. After receiving large contributions from pro-SOPA interests, Paul Ryan was put on the defensive. Rob Zerban lent his full and early support to the independent effort to stop this legislation, and joined the movement to stop this online on sites including Facebook, Twitter, and the online community of Reddit. Zerban's efforts received the attention of many online, especially the Reddit community, resulting in significant unexpected contributions and thousands of new volunteers and supporters.

Paul Ryan's decision, as a partisan leader and head of the Budget Committee, to back away from legislation actively pursued by another Republican Committee Chair, is a major accomplishment. Americans organized online and achieved significant policy impact in very little time. It showed even a high and mighty leader, considered by many as extreme, realizes he is accountable to the public through their online efforts.

Lamar "I Can't Hear You!" Smith does not seem to have a serious challenger in the upcoming election.

Congressman drops support for SOPA - Boing Boing

Why are evangelicals overwhelmingly the largest block of Tea Party supporters?

This poorly understood and carefully limited alliance of libertarians and the religious right can be partly traced to a strategic shift by Paul Weyrich during the Clinton years.

The Moral Majority Becomes the Tea Party | FrumForum

Its not clear to me why the NYT chose today to publish those two Gitmo editorials.

They are an important reminder of why it was wrong for the US to operate a policy of detaining people apprehended anywhere in the world forever without so much as a habeas hearing.

But why today? What are the politics behind the timing?

Perhaps its a reminder that Obama promised to close Gitmo and hasn't. Frankly, a continued advocacy of this is stupid - it doesn't matter where the prison is. Whats important are the policies that apply there.

Since Boumediene's case we've got Habeas hearings. Since then, honestly, I've seen the detention issue as having been resolved. What else do you want?

Greenwald is claiming that since Boumediene Obama is routing suspects to Bagram in order to avoid Habeas review, but its not clear that such a loophole actually exists.

The government couldn't have transferred them to Bagram for the express purpose of avoiding habeas review. In fact, the court implies that had the government done that in this case, they might have ruled differently, and they might do so in the future should a case of that nature reach them. "Perhaps such manipulation by the Executive might constitute an additional factor in some case in which it is in fact present."

Greenwald raises other concerns about drone strikes and dishonest partisan enforcement by liberal activists that are much more difficult to dismiss... (Emphasis mine.)

Thus, so goes this reasoning, to demand that issues like indefinite detention and civilian deaths be prioritized in assessing the presidential race is to subordinate the importance of other issues such as abortion, gay equality, and domestic civil rights enforcement on which Obama and the Democrats are better. Many of these commentators strongly imply, or now even outright state, that only white males are willing to argue for such a prioritization scheme because the de-prioritized issues do not affect them...

...it’s much easier to... insist on their de-prioritization in favor of other policies because their white, non-Muslim privilege means that they aren’t the ones who are going to be indefinitely detained, assassinated without due process, or have their homes and children targeted with drones and cluster bombs.

But, these things aren't really about detention policy, unless you reckon we're doing more drone strikes because if we captured people we'd have to explain why in court, and even the most shrill voices aren't going there as far as I've seen.

On the other hand, conservatives, to a man, seem to have completely forgotten their vocal opposition to habeas hearings for terrorism suspects and their protes... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]