Mr Abrams,

In comments made this week at the Center for American Progress, MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd called comparisons between proposed American Intellectual Property laws and censorship of political speech by foreign repressive regimes "absolutely reprehensible" and an "outrageous and false comparison." He went on to reference an oped that you published in the Washington Post, in which you wrote "The proposition that efforts to enforce the Copyright Act on the Internet amount to some sort of censorship, let alone Chinese-level censorship, is not merely fanciful. It trivializes the pain inflicted by actual censorship that occurs in repressive states throughout the world."

In November of this year, a security researcher named Trevor Eckhart discovered that a computer program developed by a firm called CarrierIQ was collecting information from consumer's mobile telephones without their permission. CarrierIQ responded to Mr. Eckhart's criticism of their software by threatening to sue him. CarrierIQ sent Mr. Eckhart a letter in which they made a number of bogus Intellectual Property claims and demanded that he remove his criticism of their product from his website.

These events directly undermine your assertion that there are no legitimate concerns about the abuse of Intellectual Property laws for the purposes of stifling criticism and dissent in the United States. Unfortunately, Mr. Eckhart's experience is not usual. Bogus Intellectual Property claims are often made by large firms to quash criticism and other undesired but Constitutionally protected speech. These tactics are successful because individual citizens often don't have the financial resources to defend themselves against bogus legal threats.

This is why it is so important that Intellectual Property laws contain safeguards that prevent their abuse. The original draft of the Stop Online Piracy Act required payment processors and advertising networks to pull the plug on websites they serve within 5 days of receiving an allegation of wrong doing from an alleged copyright holder. Absolutely no independent third party was placed in the process to evaluate the legitimacy of the allegations. Such a process is ripe for abuse, and abuse of these processes does actually happen in practice.

Hollywood and its allies would be well served by pulling their heads out of the sand and acknowledging that serious, documentable First Amendment problems exist with these processes in the United States. If Hollywood truly cares about freedom of speech on the Internet, they should invest their vast policy analysis resources into developing proposals that contain real, functional safeguards and severe consequences for those who would abuse them.

Regards,
Tom Cross
Individual Citizen

The Center for American Progress provided a forum earlier this week for the MPAA to spend an hour promoting SOPA.

Former Senator Chris Dodd demonstrates in these comments that he either does not understand the objections to SOPA or that he prefers engaging oversimplifications of his opponents arguments to directly addressing our legitimate concerns. He does a great job here of directly supporting the mechanisms of SOPA in the language of his prepared statements while simultaneously claiming that he is unable to address questions about those mechanisms due to his status as a former Senator.

Ars put it this way:

Comparisons between SOPA and censorship in repressive regimes enrage MPAA chairman, and former Senator, Chris Dodd. Speaking at the Center for American Progress on Tuesday, he called such comparisons "absolutely reprehensible." Dodd cited a recent op-ed by famed First Amendment advocate (and frequent Hollywood lawyer) Floyd Abrams, who said that such comparisons "trivialize the pain inflicted by actual censorship that occurs in repressive states throughout the world."

Abrams' essay glosses over the very complicated and controversial interface between freedom of speech and copyright issues involved in sampling, criticism and scientific use, and other fair use questions, which often factor into these takedowns. However, Ars takes a different tact that is more directly relevant to SOPA:

Dodd and Abrams seem to be attacking a straw man. No one claims that the blacklisting scheme envisioned by SOPA would be as bad as the the political censorship in force in China or Iran. But the proposal does use many of the same means—blacklists, intermediary liability, technology bans—as are employed in repressive regimes. If the US government adopted these techniques in the United States, it would obviously weaken its credibility to criticize other governments when they use the same means to pursue what everyone agrees are more reprehensible ends.

As I've stated elsewhere I think the problem is actually much more serious than that. SOPA obviously does not create a political censorship regime in the United States. It creates the technical infrastructure for political censorship, and sets the stage, so that when that sort of censorship is desired, creating it is merely a matter of flipping a switch.

Eventually, in the midst of some crisis, we'll see this infrastructure used in a manner that is unconstitutional, and baring a preliminary injunction, that unconstitutional ban will remain in place for years pending resolution in the courts. The only way to prevent unconstitutional use of the sort of censorship infrastructure that SOPA would create, is to avoid creating that infrastructure in the first place.

A country that truly values the free exchange of ideas can develop ways to enforce intellectual property laws without creating an infrastructure that will inevitably be used for political censorship.

Creativity and Copyright: A Conversation With MPAA Chairman and CEO Chris Dodd

The White House is signing off on a controversial new law that would authorize the U.S. military to arrest and indefinitely detain alleged al Qaeda members or other terrorist operatives captured on American soil.

Obama is no longer going to veto the inexplicably timed NDAA language that tries to eliminate law enforcement from anti-terrorism investigations but is now sufficiently loopholed, apparently.

Supporters seem to argue that the law doesn't actually do anything. But obviously it does something. Whether that something is actually useful is highly suspect.

I originally thought that this was a ploy to get the whole bill derailed. Another possibility is that its election year posturing. If they put in a radical detention provision and Obama vetoed, they could spend the whole year calling him soft on Terrorism. If he doesn't veto, he looks like a hypocrite and leaves his supporters questioning his principals. Obama can't win on Terrorism because the left has failed to develop a principled counterpoint to the conservative position and have instead focused on meaningless symbolism like closing gitmo.

WH OKs military detention of terrorism suspects - CBS News

Lets make this clear - SOPA, even the revised version, calls for Internet companies to build a technical system that can be used to deny people the ability to view certain foreign websites.

Presently, you offer a narrow range of sites that might be blocked via this mechanism.

However, once this infrastructure is in place, other groups, besides copyright interests, will want to use this infrastructure to ban other types of content. This won't strictly happen at the federal level, state governments will also get into the act. It will be easy to add to the list of banned sites once the infrastructure is in place.

Initially, the categories of things that are banned will probably be quite narrow. Very little content is actually illegal in the US, and so there are very few categories of foreign sites that could be Constitutionally added to the list. But eventually, everything that can be added, will be added, and some things that shouldn't be added, will also be added, and there will be controversies about that.

Then, one day, there will come a crisis.

Perhaps, classified information will find its way onto a website outside the US, as occurred with Wikileaks.

The government will find it attractive to use the infrastructure that SOPA created to ban access to this website in order to deny Americans access to this information, which may be politically relevant and available to citizens of other countries.

In the Wikileaks case, for example, the Department of Defense warned employees not to access classified information on Wikileaks, asserting that it was still classified even though it had been widely disseminated. Joe Lieberman called for payment processors to stop processing payments for the charitable interest that funded the Wikileaks site. It is not hard to imagine these interests, in a similar situation, calling for the site to be blocked if an infrastructure for blocking access to foreign sites was readily available.

Doing so would have created a situation where Americans were prohibited via a technical mechanism from reading information relevant to their government which is readily available to people who live in other countries.

In a country with a strong commitment to the freedom of speech, and open political discourse, this sort of government paternalism with regard to politically relevant information is unacceptable. Perhaps such an action might even be found unconstitutional after a lengthy court process, but a temporary ban on access to information, even if later considered illegal, might nevertheless be effective at furthering the interests of those who wish to keep the American people in the dark for a time, and would be consequence free for those who established it.

That is why SOPA is not acceptable, and will never be acceptable regardless of what changes you make to it. SOPA creates an infrastructure for censorship, and that infrastructure will eventually be used, regardless of whether or not that use is ultimately considered legitimate in hindsight. The only way to prevent illegitimate use of the sort of censorship infrastructure that SOPA would create, is to avoid creating it in the first place.

"This stuff is badly over-classified," he said.

"Business, for reasons of competitive advantage and liability, is reluctant to share; government, for reasons of classification, is reluctant to share. We probably have to recalibrate openness and sharing between a government and the private sector."

I agree with this.

Former CIA chief speaks out on Iran Stuxnet attack - The National

Great post by Rob Graham on basic economic principals in the context of cybersecurity.

Cybersecurity Economics

Fatal Crashes vs. Cell Phone Subscibers from 1994 to 2008

Total Crashes: 0.9% Decrease
Fatal Crashes: 6.2% Decrease
Cellphone use: 1,262.4% Increase

See also - why cellphones don't cause brain cancer.

Cellphone use versus crash statistics.

States should ban all driver use of cell phones and other portable electronic devices, except in emergencies, the National Transportation Board said Tuesday.

The board made the recommendation in connection with a deadly highway pileup in Missouri last year. The board said the initial collision in the accident near Gray Summit, Mo., was caused by the inattention of a 19 year-old-pickup driver who sent or received 11 texts in the 11 minutes immediately before the crash.

At the time Missouri had a ban on people under the age of 21 sending text messages while driving. So this was already illegal. In other words, you've already got a ban on the thing that you're saying caused this accident, and that ban didn't prevent that accident, and you're saying that this somehow justifies a broader ban on other things that didn't contribute to this accident?!

It gets worse, its not clear that text messages caused this accident at all:

Driver distraction wasn't the only significant safety problem uncovered by NTSB's investigation of the Missouri accident. Investigators said they believe the pickup driver was suffering from fatigue that may have eroded his judgment at the time of the accident. He had an average of about five and a half hours of sleep a night in the days leading up to the accident and had had fewer than five hours of sleep the night before the accident, they said.

What if he fucked with his stereo at the time instead of fucking with his phone? Why aren't you calling for a ban on car stereos? What if he glanced at a map? Why aren't you calling for a ban on maps? Why make any reference to this case at all, which has absolutely nothing to do with the ban that it supposedly justifies?

Oh, I see, because it will result in a bunch of news media outlets running photographs of a school bus in a pileup.

Hey, if you can't make a reasonable argument for your policy recommendations, why not try terrorizing people?

At any given moment last year on America's streets and highways, nearly 1 in every 100 car drivers was texting, emailing, surfing the Web or otherwise using a handheld electronic device, the safety administration said. And those activities spiked 50 percent over the previous year.

Have accidents increase 50 percent over the previous year? Have laws banning cellphone use reduced accidents? Where is the data justifying these bans?

Clue: They aren't talking to the data anymore because its not clear that the data justifies these reactionary bans.

More mindless draconian calls for cellphone bans.

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) introduced amendments late Monday to the Stop Online Piracy Act — changes that dramatically water down the controversial measure’s scope.

Some improvements have been made that address specific counter arguments, but the remaining bill still calls for ISPs, nation wide, to create a national Internet censorship infrastructure.

Lawmaker Waters Down His Online Blacklisting Bill | Threat Level | Wired.com

You can use the linked app, called "Bookmarklet Free" to get MemeStreams working in Android.

1. Install the app.
2. Create a Custom Service.

Service Name: MemeStreams
Base URL: http://www.memestreams.net/recommend/

The other defaults should work. Make sure you enable the new service.

3. Browse to a page you want to recommend. Pull up the browser menu and choose "share page." Select "My Services." You should get a MemeStreams recommend window with the URL you were viewing.

Unfortunately, the URL often seems to appear in the Title as well as the URL entry fields. This appears to be an idiosyncrasy of Android - there is nothing MemeStreams can do about it.

Bookmarklet Free - Android Market (Posting to MemeStreams from Android)