GOP senators to feds: Leave the Internet alone

It’s this sort of thing that really pisses me off. The intention is exactly right. The Internet should be free of interference. It should continue to be accessible by anyone, empower content and service creators, and foster innovation. Yet excluding all government regulation of the Internet is exactly contrary to achieving that goal.

In fairness, the issue of Net Neutrality is a bit complicated. Most people don’t know how the Internet works. And this leaves open the opportunity to exploit that lack of understanding through politi-speak gems like this

“There are exceptions of course, but far too often, when you hear someone say, ‘We need regulations to protect the Internet,’ what they’re actually saying is they don’t really trust the entrepreneurs and Internet technologists to create the economic growth and to increase public welfare.”

Net Neutrality regulations don’t stifle entrepreneurs and technologists. Rather, they keep the network available for them. Net Neutrality reigns in big ISPs from exploiting their effective monopolies for increased profit and offering preferential treatment for other large companies who can afford to pay to play. It protects the consumer and the entrepreneur from big business.

In a very real way, keeping the government from regulating the Internet is simply paving the way for a few large private business to regulate it. There’s no way that ends well for small businesses and consumers.

All regulations are restricting someone else’s freedom. That doesn’t make them all bad. Net Neutrality regulations are all about preserving the freedom of the Internet. If you would rather trust AT&T, Time Warner, Verizon, and Comcast to keep your network a free and open egalitarian network… you’re more than a little naive.

CISPA – Big Brother Never Sleeps

It’s likely you’ve never heard of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, also known as CISPA. It is the latest round in the never-ending litany of SOPA-like bills designed to clamp down on the scourge that is the Internet. And it just cleared the House last week by a pretty comfortable margin. Comfortable that is, unless you’re a user of the Internet.

Much like the Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011, CISPA cloaks itself with a title that’s hard to be opposed to. Cyber-terrorism is a very real threat, and who in their right mind would be against a measure to protect us from a cyber-attack? Ahhh… if only it actually achieved that goal.

What CISPA actually does is provide immunity to ISPs and online service providers for responding to government requests for information about the cyber-activities of anyone related to cybersecurity, cyber crime, protecting people from harm, protecting children from exploitation, and national security. Note that the bill does not compel companies to turn over such information, and because it’s a voluntary request, it requires no court approval or any other sort of burden of reasonable cause. But keep in mind that during the post 9/11 illegal wiretapping scandals, AT&T, Verizon, and other companies were only too willing to hand over your data. So much so that there were efforts to prosecute the telecom companies for violating citizen’s rights, which ultimately required that the telcos be granted immunity. Under CISPA, they will have permanent immunity as CISPA explicitly states that companies may provide requested information “notwithstanding any other provision of law.” In other words, CISPA trumps all other laws.

CISPA would “waive every single privacy law ever enacted in the name of cybersecurity,” Rep. Jared Polis, a Colorado Democrat and onetime Web entrepreneur, said during the House debate. “Allowing the military and NSA to spy on Americans on American soil goes against every principle this country was founded on.”

Yet all this begs the question, will it make us safer? After all, in the last decade Americans have repeatedly shown that they are willing to sacrifice considerable freedoms in the interest of domestic security.

The fundamental issue would seem to be that this is a bill about cyber-security. Yet the allowances to deploy the law for purposes such as protecting children from exploitation seem pretty hard to defend as essential to preventing cyber-terrorism. Still, it’s hard to argue that protecting children is a bad thing.

Moreover, the issue would seem to be the relative ease by which potential cyber-terrorists could thwart the efforts enabled by CISPA. VPN tunnels and anonymous proxy services are well known technologies, and would make it impossible for anyone monitoring network traffic to even determine who was talking to whom, much less eavesdrop on the conversation. You could certainly argue that the average citizen might not have the geeky skills to set up such a secure Internet connection. But certainly anyone with the mad tech skills to conduct cyber-terrorism is going to be able to handle an encrypted network tunnel. Don’tcha think?

So who are we catching here? One possibility is that this is all just more security theater. We’ll spend a lot of money and politicians will use CISPA as a campaign slogan, but it will have very little net impact on security. Another possibility is that CISPA will be exploited for less noble purposes, unrelated to cyber-terrorism. Instead of hunting down Chinese hackers, it will be used to hunt down your spouse streaming an illegally broadcast Celtics game on her laptop.

The bottom line is that this bill will not accomplish what it purports to. The bill is highly focused on domestic surveillance, and there is no evidence that we are at risk of a domestic cyber-attack from citizens with poor tech skills. Further, there are ample laws on the books now that allow the government a pretty wide berth to eavesdrop on citizens when they can show cause. And those laws have already been routinely circumvented in the name of national security. If anything, we need to be shoring up the Fourth Amendment, not tearing it to shreds.

Just because technology provides the means to unobtrusively invade our personal privacy does not mean we should be surrendering those rights.

Fortunately, while CISPA started out with bipartisan support, it has become a partisan issue. It may have been passed by the House, but its chances of getting through the Senate are slim, and Obama has already threatened a veto. Yet this is no time for complacency. These sorts of bills just keep on coming, and sooner or later, one of them will slip through.

Be vigilant.

Big Brother Likes to Watch

SOPA and PIPA may be dead, but the battle is far from over. The dust had barely settled from the online community’s successful revolt against Hollywood’s attempt to toss out due process in an effort to protect it’s Luddite-like business model when Rep. Lamar Smith, SOPA’s author, introduced the Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011.

That doesn’t even sound related does it? Further, it’s obviously about protecting children, and who could be against that? Well, that’s kind of the point. The problem is, this bill doesn’t really introduce any additional protections for children or make any bold new strides to stamp out child porn. At least not directly.

What the bill does require is that your ISP maintain a record of what IP addresses are assigned to you for 18 months. It is required to keep those records sealed, unless the government, and only the government, requests them.

Some sites are reporting the bill requires ISPs to keep a record of every site you visit. That’s not true, unless you live in Hawaii, where a separate and unrelated state bill has been proposed requiring your ISP to keep tabs on your every YouTube view and Facebook stalking venture. The federal bill makes no such requirement.

This means the Fed won’t have the ability under this bill to demand your Internet history as part of an investigation. But, if it is monitoring network traffic or if it seizes a web server and the logs on that server, they can trace your activity back to your house.

So in theory, FBI agents bust a child porn provider, find out that someone at the address 123.123.123.123 has been a heavy user, and grab the ISP records to find out that on the day in question, that address was assigned to your house. Then you hear a knock on the door. Okay, if you’re into child porn, then someone should knock at your door and haul your ass away. But what if it wasn’t you? What if your neighbor jacked your WiFi, and he’s the real pervert? What if you own a coffee shop and provide free WiFi to your customers? Are you now suspect because of their actions?

And you’d have to be completely naive to think this tactic only applies to child porn. Gee, have you been to Megaupload or Pirate Bay lately? And there’s the SOPA/PIPA tie in. Once this data is being collected and is at the government’s disposal, it will be used for all manner of things. This isn’t about protecting the children. That’s just the ruse to get the law passed.

And before someone argues that if you’ve got nothing to hide you shouldn’t be worried… that’s not the point. The Forth Amendment guarantees a right to privacy. The Supreme Court recently ruled that your car can’t be GPS tagged without a warrant. This means the police can’t decide to electronically track and log wherever you go in the real world so that just in case they uncover a crime, they can go back and see who was near the scene when it was committed. The virtual world should not be different.

As ill-conceived as they were, SOPA and PIPA were at least upfront about their intentions and motivations. Hiding behind the specter of child porn to erode constitutional rights is despicable. The children deserve better.

Former Senator Chris Dodd breaks promise not to become a lobbyist

Chris Dodd Bobblehead — Chris Dodd's ethics bobble with the breeze (Photo by DonkeyHotey on Flickr)

Recently retired Senator from Connecticut Christopher Dodd said upon leaving office he would not seek to become a corporate lobbyist. But that was two months ago, and times change. The former five-term Democratic senator announced yesterday he accepted a job as head of the Motion Picture Association of America.

Technically, Dodd is legally barred from becoming a lobbyist for two years after leaving the Senate. However, like so many retired legislators before him, he skirts that rule by not officially being hired as a lobbyist. Still, as the head of one of the most high profile lobbying groups in the country, it’s a distinction without a difference.

Interim MPAA CEO and president Bob Pisano told Hillicon Valley last month that his organization’s unwavering focus was on increasing the federal government’s efforts to stop online film piracy. Pisano also talks up the importance of COICA and how happy he is that Homeland Security has been seizing domains in violation of the First Amendment and basic due process, even taking down tens of thousands of perfectly innocent sites.

It remains to be seen how or if Dodd’s new million dollar job will change his previously professed positions on related issues. He was on record as a big supporter of Net Neutrality. However, the MPAA has come out against net neutrality, claiming it would hamper its efforts to “fight piracy.” He was also against ISP data retention, which the MPAA has supported (again as a way to fight piracy). On copyright he was somewhat non-committal, but did talk about how fair use rights are important. A position likely to disappear once he takes the role formerly filled by Jack Valenti—the man who once declared that fair use doesn’t exist.

Dodd co-authored the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. This legislation was targeted at improving the accountability and ethics of the banking system. Too bad Dodd’s own ethics now seem to be bobbling in the breeze.

Boehner says Net Neutrality is reinstating the Fairness Doctrine

Speaker John Boehner — Boehner ties Net Neutrality to a political agenda

Speaker Boehner addressed several tech points in his speech to the National Association of Religious Broadcasters on Sunday. He railed against Net Neutrality and new FCC regulations that he characterized as a government takeover of the Internet. He went on to say:

“Now, you know the old saying: ‘If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.’ Well in Washington, it’s more like, ‘If you can’t beat ’em, tax ’em and regulate ’em,” Boehner said in his speech. “So, some members of Congress and the federal bureaucracy are still trying to reinstate – and even expand – the Fairness Doctrine. To them, it’s fair to silence ideas and voices they don’t agree with, and use the tools of government to do it. “

Opposing Net Neutrality has been pretty standard Republican boilerplate. Much like with the healthcare debate, the GOP prefers that corporations make decisions for consumers rather than the government. The new twist here is the conflation of Net Neutrality with the Fairness Doctrine.

The Fairness Doctrine was introduced in 1949 and required that broadcasters present controversial issues of public importance in a manner that was honest, equitable and balanced. Reagan overturned the policy by executive order in 1987.

Republicans are apparently afraid the Internet might become a place of fair and balanced treatment of controversial issues. This is a confounding stance, not to mention that the distributed nature of content creators on the Internet would make such a rule impossible to enforce. Yet the larger issue is that Net Neutrality has absolutely nothing to do with editorial content.

Net Neutrality simply guarantees that the ISPs who provide the backbone for and access to the Internet cannot preferentially treat one content type over another. This assures that you have equally speedy access to Fox Nation and the Huffington Post. It means your access to Netflix won’t be throttled by Time Warner, or that Comcast will cut a deal with Microsoft to make Bing twice as fast as Google.

There is nothing about any proposed or existing Net Neutrality rules that in any way attempts to legislate editorial content on the web. Nothing. Tying Net Neutrality to the Fairness Doctrine is either an act of colossal ignorance or a blatant attempt to mislead and confuse voters.

We report, you decide.