Slashdot Mirror
White House Pressuring Registrars To Block Sites
An anonymous reader writes "While the Senate is still debating a bill that would force registrars and ISPs to block access to sites deemed 'infringing,' it appears that the White House's IP Czar is already holding meetings with ISPs, registrars and payment processors to start voluntarily blocking access to sites it doesn't like. Initially, they're focused on online pharmacies, but does anyone think it will only be limited to such sites? ICANN apparently has refused to attend the meetings, pointing out that they're 'inappropriate.' Doesn't it seem wrong for the US government to be pushing private companies to censor the Internet without due process?"
Meet the new boss, same (worse?) as the old boss.
Goddamn idealogues seeing everything in black/white terms. This is your fault.
I wonder how many WH officials worked for or intend to work for Big Pharma companies that don't want Americans to pay the same CHEAP prices for medications that the REST OF THE WORLD pays?
I'm guessing most of them.
Single payer - what we should have done.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Does it seem wrong? Yes.
Is it surprising with this Administration, coming from a made-up post that was not vetted by Congress and is not supposed to have any operational power? Not in the least.
When the Obama Administration claims the right to ASSASSINATE CITIZENS without due process, I'm not surprised that a little thing like blocking websites doesn't merit due process either.
It often seems the US is trying to turn itself into a has-been ghetto on the world stage. Due process is one of those pillars of democracy that they fight so hard to bring the rest of the world.
...what's to prevent us from then just building a new one requiring more technical acumen to get to, putting them back at square one. It's a minor setback for us, but really, where is the horror?
Money.
Son, I am disappoint. Did I get magically transported to Iran during the night and not notice? If a site is doing something illegal, then by all means shut them down, but you do NOT get to arbitrarily censor things just because you don't like them.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Is ICANN tied to the UN or the USA?
This all seems very bad and very wrong. Using online pharmacies as the primary reason just doesn’t wash with me. No one country should 'own' the internet. And without due process you have to really wonder what the hell is going on here. I thought the Australian government was going to far with mandatory censorship but this is pretty frightening.
Those who can, do. Those who cannot, sue.
Screw the reason for the censoring. ISP's shouldn't be making decisions on content AT ALL. Today it's online pharmaceuticals. Tomorrow it'll be sites pertaining to Islam, or in opposition of the government. How long do you think it will take our leaders to demand a system by which THEY can add sites or domains to the blacklist directly?
Meet the new boss, same (worse?) as the old boss.
I voted for Obama based on my belief that he would make better decisions than McCain. We tend to forget that the election was not a yea or nay vote for Obama. It was a contest between two contenders.
Has Obama done everything I want him to do? No. Has he made decisions (like this one) that I disagree with? Yes. Am I still happy that I voted for him rather than McCain, the guy who wanted to put the freak from Alaska a heartbeat away from the Presidency? Abso-freakin-lutely.
As for being worse than the old boss, your memory must be failing. Bush was the most corporate-friendly President we've seen. Undoing the damage he did to civil liberties and the environment alone will take years.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
"Doesn't it seem wrong for the US gov't to be pushing private companies to censor the internet without due process?"
If Bush had been president, this headline would have read: "Doesn't it seem wrong for the Bush Whitehouse to be pushing private companies to censor the internet without due process?" But the Slashdot editors voted for Obama, so they can't make him look bad, even if they disagree with him
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Yes, it's wrong. Those powers should only be used to kidnap American citizens and ship them off to be tortured and killed in secret.
Besides, why not just have Cyber Command hack their domain registration accounts? Much simpler.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Down with Bush Hitler! Wait...
Do you even know what socialism is? Because it isn't this.
Socialism - Anything political that is disliked by a conservative.
Fascism - Anything political that is disliked by a liberal.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
That is generally a right-wing attitude, the "I love my country, but I fear my government", many vehicles that have that slogan as a sticker also have something about right to bear arms.
I've said this before and I'll keep saying it...
If you are in the U.S. and you want change, and I really mean serious change, then you have the power to make a difference. All it takes is for you to do a little bit of research and maybe 30 minutes of your time to VOTE. The biggest problem is that we have these two parties who are totally out of touch and/or basically just don't give a rats ass, about the citizens.
Make a change and do the following:
Sure, your guy might not make it in, but hopefully you can sleep better at night and send a message to these scummy politicians that we are fed up.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
There are legitimate safety and regulatory reasons for limiting the import of overseas drugs, it's possible that these reasons do not warrant the increased cost for many patients, but that doesn't change the fact that the reasons exist. The same argument can't be made for movies, music, and video games so I would argue that since their current actions have a logical basis and the slippery slope does not, the slippery slope is far worse.
This seems to be blocking by obscurity -- i.e. removing DNS listings, but IP addresses persist and would still reach the site if you knew which one to type in. How long before OpenDNS morphs into FreeDNS (or AltDNS) or some other service that you can apply to in order to be listed in a manner free of government interference? There is, to my belief, no technical reason why one can't subscribe to the DNS listing service of one's choice. We all use the standard DNS system at the moment just because it gets us to everywhere we want to go. When it stops doing that then an alternate DNS systems becomes viable and attractive. Can the government ban that?
Can they ban a local to your machine (hey, hard drives are LARGE these days) DNS database that distributes listings by P2P for "banned sites"? I may be wrong, but it is a truism that the Internet routs around damage, including censorship.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Second verse same as the first, if this is the "Change" everyone wanted... wow... I'd rather have had bush for another 8 years, started 2 more wars (North Korea and Iran) than have a censored internet, be forced to buy something by the federal government (I have health insurance already, but being FORCED to pay money for something, anything besides taxes, by the government is a step WAY BEYOND the freedoms this country is supposed to stand for).
And he hasn't even rolled back any of the Bush "secret" stuff, or closed Guantanamo. Instead as soon as he was in office he decided all that stuff was great!
Never been a worse president than Obama.
Next time think before voting for a President who believes we have 57 states. Second grade kids know better than that.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Does the Obama Administration Hate Free Speech?
It started with a half-hearted campaign against Fox News. They couldn't censor them so they tried to discredit them. Next the White House called liberal commentary on MSNBC and invaluable public service.
Then comes the Citizens United case. They hate the idea of first amendment rights being given to corporations, but they love it for non-profits and labor unions.
Next, Obama couldn't bring himself to criticize the backers of the ground zero mosque but he couldn't resist trying to prevent a preacher in Florida from exercising his first amendment rights.
Now we come to web sites. Time to try to eliminate the ones we don't like.
Never before have we had such a thin-skinned president, nor an administration so openly contemptuous of rights for those who disagree with them. I suppose tha't not really true, America once passed the Alien and Sedition Act.
This hostility to free speech is a far greater threat to your and my civil rights than the Patriot Act ever was. The current White House threatens freedom more than Dick Cheney and Karl Rove ever imagined. Where is the outcry? Where are the demonstrators? Where are the media campaigns? WTF?
Sure I'll blow all my mod points for daring to post anti-Obama stuff. So be it.
Sadly, this is likely the case. People love to tout the mantra about getting around these things. "We'll just use encrypted channels" they proclaim, but realistically, that only works so long as the government stays within some level of sanity.
There comes a point - not saying we'll get there mind you, just saying that it exists - when that doesn't matter. All they have to do is one simple piece of legislation: it's a felony to engage in the transmission of any content not readable by the government. Then it's not a matter of proving that your transmissions are bad - it's a matter of being able to prove that they're NOT. If they can't read them, then you're guilty and you go to jail for long periods of time (or are executed, depending on the brutality of the regime).
As I said, I'm not sure we'll ever get THAT far, but the government - from BOTH political spectrums, has been showing more and more signs lately that their attitude is shifting towards "Shut up, we're the government, we'll do whatever we want, law and constitution be damned.".
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
You always see people on the left trying to censor political opinions using laws with misleading fuzzy titles like "fairness doctrine". This is nothing more than a tool to silence the opinions of people the government does not agree with. It reminds me of a saying I once heard:
Conservatives are afraid you don't understand what they're talking about, liberals are afraid you do.
The 1st amendment was first for a reason, and when you start censoring anyone by fiat, and by an unelected political appointee no less, you've opened the flood gates for abuse of power. Why is it that the democrat party and the federal government no longer have a clearly defined line, but rather act in each others own best interest. For example the EPA: The EPA rules by fiat and is a political ally of the democrat party. The EPA does what it can do make sure democrats do well in the polls because the EPA - a branch of the government mind you - knows that when democrats are elected that more money and power will flow into the EPA apparatus. And that's just the EPA. All agencies in the government, unless specifically labeled 'conservative' are run by the democrat party. Many of the agencies are so large that they have taken on a life of their own and operate as a company that seeks power and glory rather than to serve the greater public good. And to that end they know that a vote for democrat is a vote to increase funding, scope and power of the federal government.
The only problem is that the government does not produce anything. All the government can do is tax people who do produce something and spend it on something else, filtering through a never-ending maze of bureaucratic red tape, nepotism and corruption and when it finally reaches its destination, only a fraction of what was taken from the taxpayer actually goes towards the problem in the first place.
No, really, I'm going somewhere with this.
I'm sure there are tons of people who want to rip holes in my argument and tell me that the EPA and the federal government aren't part of the democrat party. Whatever, you have your right to be wrong. Others will say that there is a military industrial complex that is beholden to conservatives. That's wrong too. You have privately owned defense contracting companies that actually produce something. Even if what they produce rubs you the wrong way, they are a hell of a lot more productive than the EPA. They are also private citizens and corporations of the US that are totally within their rights to lobby congress to their own best interests as it is every citizen and corporations[group of citizens] right in this country. Besides all that, Boeing isn't run by the RNC and doesn't really care who is running the country so long as they keep buying death rays from them they are happy to do business with whatever party is in the WH. I'm sure they are very happy with Obama because Obama means more sales for them. And it's hardly controlled by conservatives.
In the supreme court, the last bastion of conservatism. The two ideologies play out here with one side, the conservative side claiming to be strict constitutionalists. And the liberal side of the court is more happy to say the constitution is a living document that can be reinterpreted from time to time as the language changes - in direct contradiction of the framers. I'm not saying that the court shouldn't revisit old decisions and undo precedent, Dred Scott v Sandford for example. But we must adhere to some rule of law. Long ago liberals stopped adhering to the constitution and only bring it up as a weapon to strike out at their opponents with and is something to be ignored while it suits their agenda.
How can you say that the changing meanings of words in a language changes the sprit of the contract that was written long ago? When you
Because it certainly isn't any Europe in reality.
"And yes, Europe's politics are better than America's. Much better. And yes, it's not just because they're Left, but because they're less authoritarian."
Would this be the same "non-authoritarian Europe" that just banned Burqas in France, that has a mass-surveillance state in the UK, and bans firearm ownership in much of the continent? The same Europe where the EU has not only allowed but directedauthorities to gather and save the communications data of European citizens for an indefinite amount of time? THAT Europe? Authoritarianism with good intentions and a velvet glove is still authoritarianism.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel