SOPA on a Rope

The current bill in Congress known as SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) or as it’s known in the Senate, PROTECT IP (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property) is just beginning to get coverage in the non-technical press. In draft, this was called the E-PARASITE Act (Enforcing and Protecting American Rights Against Sites Intent on Theft and Exploitation Act). Seriously, who names these things?

From the names, it all sounds like goodness right? Theft, exploitation, piracy, who wants that? If only it were that simple.

The intent of the bill is to crack down on illegal online file sharing. There’s ample room for debate about how damaging online piracy truly is, and whether or not it makes business sense for content providers to aggressively attack their customers, but that’s a topic for another day. Even if we accept that online piracy threatens to destroy the music and movie industry (just like VHS tapes and writable CDs did), the proposed bill is absolutely not the way to go about preventing it.

There are lots of articles out there on why this is so. You can read the bill yourself, or read others’ analyses here, here, or here. However, let me try and boil down the basics for you.

The Great Firewall of the USA: Enforcement of SOPA will require the creation of a Internet filters by all domestic ISPs to control what sites you are allowed to visit. This may be well intentioned censorship, but it’s still censorship, and it puts the mechanisms in place for less benign intentions. Do we really want to head down that slippery slope?

Online Security: Let’s face it, once the firewall goes up, many of us will find ways around it. This will involve a combination of foreign or rogue DNS servers, proxies, or VPN services. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to believe that once you start getting your Internet delivered through black market servers that your online security will be at greater risk.

No More Safe Harbors: The current law allows web site owners some protection under the “safe harbor” clause. That means that if you were to post a comment on this article containing some illegal content, the owner of the content could demand I take it down, and I would be obliged to do so. But if the owner wanted to sue for damages, he couldn’t sue me as the website owner. Rather, he’d have to come after you as the one who posted it. Under SOPA, that protection is gone. If you upload a funny Big Bang Theory clip to Facebook, CBS can sue Mark Zuckerberg for damages. SOPA will undoubtedly result in far fewer sites taking on the risk of letting you post things on them. The web will become a lot less participatory.

Loss of Due Process: This is perhaps the most egregious implication. Under SOPA, website owners are guilty until proven innocent. Based only on an accusation of having illegal content on your site, anyone can demand that the ISPs block access to your site, and may further demand that all banks stop doing business with you. Sure, you can appeal to the court, but that could take months or years to settle. In the meantime, you’re out of business.

As the major backer of SOPA, the entertainment industry is making lots of assurances that the provisions of SOPA would never be used for anything but the most noble of causes. They are full of it. These same people have already collaborated with the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to stretch the In Rem Forfeiture clause (allowing for the immediate seizure of property used in the commission of a crime) to include domain name seizures of websites with no warning or due process. They are wielding this with a broad brush and have repeatedly seized domains eventually found legal by the courts, but by then put out of business. Oops.

This whole SOPA mess has also created some strange bedfellows. The tech community and most high tech companies have come out against it. Along side them are Michele Bachmann and her Tea Party Coalition. Ironically, the Tea Party and the Techies were on staunchly opposite sides of the Net Neutrality debate, so this is a somewhat uneasy alliance.

On the other side we find the Hollywood studios, music companies, and the organizations like RIAA and the MPAA that lobby for them. We also find VP Joe Biden and several key Democratic legislators who have historically been supportive of anything Hollywood wants. To her credit, Hillary Clinton has expressed some concerns about SOPA, and Obama claims to be on the fence.

To that end, Obama is currently taking input on the issue. If you want to oppose the bill, go to the White House website and sign the online petition. As of this writing, we are still a few thousand signatures short of the “pay attention to me” threshold. Yes, you have to create a White House account to sign the thing, but it only takes a minute.

On the other hand, if you think SOPA sounds like a great idea and want to know how to support it, please write a long letter and mail it to your local animal shelter. They are always looking for material to line the bird cages with.

Forward to the Past

Current Conservative dogma is that Federal government is bad. The belief is rooted in the premise that it is the wrong level at which to govern. Policy should be made at the state level, or better yet, at the county or town.

There is a visceral appeal to this position. If government is about me, I want it close to me so I can be heard. I don’t wish to be one of millions of voices, but rather one of hundreds or thousands. That way, what’s important to me and my neighbors will get done. Someone will care about me.

The result of this view is Conservative opposition to federal meddling in education, roads, health care, commerce, environmental conservation, banking, and almost anything else excepting the military.

And a century and change ago, this view made perfect sense. But the world has changed since then, and policy needs to change with it. In fact, decentralization is decidedly the wrong trend in today’s world.

Back in the day (circa 1900), you could spend the better part of a day searching your hometown for something made more than a few hundred miles away. When someone left town, they moved to the next county. Living your life in that time involved a largely local dependence. Events happening half a continent or half a world away were interesting news items, but bore no real consequence on your life.

Look around your town or workplace today. Try to find something of local origin. Hell, try to find something strictly made in the USA. Your dependence is easily national, and rapidly becoming global. You may live in New York, but you care that roads are maintained in Kansas so that a truck can bring you a new Samsung TV. Your car runs on imported oil. Your new boss telecommutes from a different state. And your Internet tech support comes from Mumbai. Whether you like it or not, and even whether you realize it or not, you are dependent on a national and international infrastructure. An infrastructure encompassing transportation, safety, education, economy, and much more.

Yes, local control is dwindling, but not because larger governments are usurping power. Rather, it’s because where local governments used to contain all the dependent pieces, now larger governments do. And effective management and control is only achieved if all the dependent pieces are under the umbrella. The inevitable trend is toward consolidation.

Interestingly, this globalization trend has been recognized and embraced on the business side for decades. No one is arguing that Microsoft should be broken up and managed as a loose confederation of state-specific companies. (“I’m sorry, you’re running Windows 7-Virginia, so I can’t read those files.”) That the scale and scope of business and government should trend in opposite directions is nonsensical, and ultimately bad for both.

That said, there are still monumental dysfunctions in the way the federal government operates. Early attempts at inter-country governments like the European Union or even the United Nations demonstrate that we are a long way from knowing how to govern effectively at scale. The key point being that we have to set our collective mind to finding a way to make this scope of government work, and give up on the foolish notion that we can live in a 21st-century capitalist world, ruled by a 19th-century political system.

I’m calling “bulls*%t” on John Kyl

First rule of holes: when you’re in one… stop digging. This is a lesson Sen. John Kyl (R-AZ) has not yet grokked.

Kyl has been lampooned in recent days after his office clarified his wildly inaccurate comments about Planned Parenthood on the Senate Floor last week by telling CNN it was “not intended to be a factual statement.”

Not content with looking like a world class ass, Kyl has now compounded his lie by saying yesterday that he merely “misspoke” on the floor, and that he had not approved his aide to utter the now classic Twitter hash-tag. (#notintendedtobeafactualstatement)

There’s only one little problem Senator: if we take you at your word that you meant to say 3% of Planned Parenthood activity is abortions, but the 90% number slipped out instead, we have to accept that when you got up on the floor to speak, you intended to offer statistics that didn’t support your point. Your whole speech was basically an assertion that Planned Parenthood pretty much only existed to kill babies and didn’t serve any other useful purpose. The truthful 3% number doesn’t really support that position now does it?

Let’s face it, you lied. You lied with the intent to persuade the ignorant. And you got busted… big time.

Politically, it seemed you were better off with the “not intended as a factual statement” excuse. While it was an admission that you were prone to fits of wild hyperbole, at least it didn’t admit that you were a lying sack of s*%t willing to intentionally deceive the public to get your way.

Would Jesus be a Conservative?

I’ve been having a protracted email discussion with someone who’s a very fervent Christian and also a staunch conservative. Anyone paying any attention to American politics will be quick to observe this is not exactly a rare breed—a point which I have trouble reconciling in my feeble brain. It seems to me that Christian Conservative should be an oxymoron, at least within the context of what the conservative agenda has revealed itself to be in this country.

To that end, I posed the following question to my pen-pal this morning, and I’m posing it here as well in the hopes of generating some conversation and insight.

Presumably a Christian’s worldly politics are aligned with what they feel Jesus would advocate for if he were here today. In essence, WWJD? Yet most of the fundamentalist Christians seem strongly aligned politically with the conservatives. I would go so far as to say there is a pretty strong correlation between those who profess to model their lives on Jesus and those who vote conservative.

It strikes me that in his day, Jesus was a flaming liberal. He advocated for the poor, the downtrodden, and the sick. He accepted everyone. He turned the other cheek. He taught to give away your worldly possessions, help your neighbors, and love everybody. He was persecuted precisely because he stood as an organizer of the people and was seen as a threat to the power structure of the day.

While I can understand Jesus might be strongly pro-life on abortion, most of the remaining conservative agenda seems to me to be against what Jesus would do.

Reduce or eliminate social security (meaning many elderly will live in poverty)
Reduce or eliminate Medicare/Medicaid (meaning most poor and elderly will not receive adequate medical care)
Place the tax burden disproportionately on the backs of the non-rich
Eliminate unions (removing the voice of the people)
Eliminate environmental regulations (leading to pollution, extinctions, ecosystem damage)
Reduce spending on education
Reduce spending on assistance for the poor
Increase militarism, don’t negotiate with our enemies

Note that all the bullets above are references to policy positions, proposals, or legislation backed by conservative politicians within the last year. This is not about what they are saying, but about what they are actually doing. (It seems Jesus would be big on the whole doing part as opposed to just giving lip service to high ideals.) I can’t fathom Jesus entreating his followers to get behind any of this.

In that light, if good Christians are truly trying to create a world Jesus would be proud of, why are they primarily standing behind people and policies it seems Jesus would have reviled? I don’t get it.

America needs a 12-step program

Politicians have made it a habit to invoke American exceptionalism at every opportunity. President Obama has been repeatedly reviled by his detractors for not aggressively asserting that the rest of the world should bow to our obvious superiority. Meanwhile, pundit Sean Hannity is now famous for frequently uttering his catch phrase, “America is the single greatest nation that God ever gave man on this earth.”

That’s not to say that America doesn’t have a reason to be proud, but a little humility might help us to realize that in some ways we are quite a bit less than we imagine.

Compared to a group of our peers, the 20 most affluent countries in the world, we are number 1 in some embarrassing categories:

The highest poverty rate, both generally and for children;
The greatest inequality of incomes;
The lowest government spending as a percentage of GDP on social programs for the disadvantaged;
The lowest number of paid holiday, annual and maternity leaves;
The lowest score on the UN’s index of “material well-being of children”;
The worst score on the UN’s gender inequality index;
The lowest social mobility;
The highest public and private expenditure on health care as a portion of GDP;
The highest percentage of our population in jail;
The highest carbon dioxide emissions and water consumption per capita;
The highest rate of failing to ratify international agreements;
The lowest spending on international development and humanitarian  assistance as a percentage of GDP;
The highest military spending as a portion of GDP;
The largest international arms sales;
The lowest scores for student performance in math (except for Portugal and Italy) (and far down from the top in both science and reading);
The highest high school drop out rate (except for Spain);

These are not problems that have just come about in the last few years. We have been building our dysfunction in these areas for decades. Problems like these are at the core of our decline, not deficits. And problems like these will not be solved with budgetary adjustments or minor policy changes. These are fundamental behavioral issues.

As with any person or organization exhibiting self-destructive behavioral problems, the first step is admitting we actually have a problem. This does not require that we declare ourselves worthless and unworthy. On the contrary, a sense of self-worth is required such that we believe ourselves worth saving. But we desperately need to embrace the notion that we could be better, much better, than we are now, and further that this transformation requires dedication and sacrifice. Until we’re ready to own up to that, nothing will change.