Days after an unbalanced Congressional hearing on a bill to
crackdown on online copyright infringement, a government cybersecurity expert has written to Congress warning H.R. 3261 would “negatively
impact” cybersecurity -- and not be effective at the stated goal of reducing
piracy.
So far House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith has not responded to news
media inquiries about the warning letter from the director of Sandia
National Laboratories.
The House held a
hearing on SOPA November 16.
Five of the six witnesses testified in favor of the bill, which is no
surprise given their immense and
long-standing lobbying power.
Opposition
was growing leading up to the hearing, as numerous prominent organizations
submitted official letters expressing various reservations about the misguided
means—censorship—chosen
to achieve the end goal of stopping piracy. Content
industries pushing misguided legislation rather than update their business
models is certainly nothing new, but it is possible that this iteration is
different. For one thing, the
response of individuals and organizations speaking out via the Internet has
been astounding. An initiative by Tumblr led to
87,834
phone calls to Representatives.
In addition, according to the anti-SOPA activism hub americancensorship.org, over 1,000,000 emails
were sent to Congress, as well as over 3,000 handwritten letters. AmericanCensorship.org also reports
that 6,000 websites signed up to censor their logos or various parts of their
sites, which included the Mozilla Start Page, the Tumblr dashboard, 4chan,
Boing Boing, the homepage of Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), and reddit. This phenomenal effort not only
effectively used the Internet for grassroots organizing, but it demonstrated
the actual harms that this bill could cause to Internet users relying on free
online services for speech in their daily lives.
During the hearing, in addition to the expected opposition from
Reps. Lofgren and Issa, Reps.
Lungren, Jackson Lee, Waters, Cohen and Johnson “expressed significant concerns”
about issues including the harms to DNS, the impact on entrepreneurs and
innovation, and the international ramifications of setting a precedent for
other nations’ censorship. Nancy
Pelosi and Darrell Issa had this memorable exchange on Twitter:
@NancyPelosi: Need to find a better solution than
#SOPA #DontBreakTheInternet MT @jeffreyrodman: Where do you stand on Internet
censoring and #SOPA?
@DarrellIssa: If even we agree... RT @NancyPelosi:
Need to find a better solution than #SOPA #DontBreakTheInternet Cc
@jeffreyrodman
Also, after the hearing, Senators Rand
Paul, Jerry Moran, and Maria Cantwell pledged that they will support Ron
Wyden in his hold on the bill.
Michele
Bachmann had spoken out about PROTECT IP last month, before SOPA, and SOPA
is even worse than PROTECT IP.
