Congress's Techno-Ignorance No Longer Funny

pigrabbitbear writes "Since its introduction, the Stop Online Piracy Act (and its Senate twin PROTECT-IP) has been staunchly condemned by countless engineers, technologists and lawyers intimately familiar with the inner functioning of the internet. Completely beside the fact that these bills, as they currently stand, would stifle free speech and potentially cripple legitimate businesses by giving corporations extrajudicial censorial powers, there's an even more insidious threat: the method of DNS filtering proposed to block supposed infringing sites opens up enormous security holes that threaten the stability of the internet itself. The problem: key members of the House Judiciary Committee still don't understand how the internet works, and worse yet, it's not clear whether they even want to."

Comments

They don't want to

[Anonymous Coward]

Ignorance is bliss. And when shit hits the fan, they can claim plausible deniability.

Re:They don't want to

[forkfail]

To be more specific, their supposed ignorance allows them to allow the (paying) lobbyists to write the bills in the manner that most benefits our purported representatives true constituency - the corporations and their owners who aren't satisfied with the majority of the pie, but who want the whole damn thing.

Re:They don't want to

[Anonymous Coward]

And when shit hits the fan, they'll either be retired, promoted or have a nice position on the board of some nice corporation.

FTFY

Re:They don't want to

[bws111]

Congress is not a technical organization, they are a political one. They have no need to know 'how the internet works'. Most members of Congress also don't know all of the technical details of engines either, but that doesn't mean they can't create laws specifying average fuel economy. It is up to the experts in those fields to make the laws reality.

Do you have any idea how many different subjects Congress has to deal with? Do you really expect the members of Congress, elected from the general public, to be experts in all of those areas? If YOU were elected to Congress, how many areas are YOU an expert in?

Re:They don't want to

[alexborges]

Change:
"...it's not clear whether they even want to" [understand how the internet works]

To:
"....its clear they dont even want to"

I saw ALL the discussion yesterday. This is ridiculous, the people advocating this act are entirely ignorant of any and all issues regarding WTF they are doing and they dont even realize it will ALL backfire. I ended yesterday thinking this could even be good for "us" (freedom loving people all over the world): its clear that if SOPA passes, bitcoins, tor proxies and ways to monetize darknet access will be a good way to make money.

They want their broken internet: let them have it.

Re:They don't want to

[GrumpySteen]

While members of congress may not know the technical details of how a combustion engine works, they have a general idea of how it works.

This is the equivalent of adding in a provision to the fuel economy laws that allows any company that produces gasoline to arbitrarily shut down any gas station they say is selling their company's gas without permission without any proof and no consequences for being wrong. Give that power to any gas company and you'll quickly see every competing station in town shut down and the costs at the one brand that's left skyrocket.

It doesn't take an expert to understand that giving someone arbitrary judicial powers with no consequences for the abuse of those powers is a horrible idea. Even the dumbest congressman understands it, but they don't give a fuck because the consumers don't donate as much money as the corporations that stand to benefit from the bill.

Re:They don't want to

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you really expect the members of Congress, elected from the general public, to be experts in all of those areas? If YOU were elected to Congress, how many areas are YOU an expert in?

I think the problem here isn't that they are not experts, its the fact that experts are not involved.

Re:They don't want to

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is the thing, if you are legislating something. You HAVE to understand how it works. You can't just pass a law saying that all cars must get 100 MPG, and then leave it to the engineers to make your law so. It would obviously lead to disaster.

Re:They don't want to

[Anonymous Coward]

Most members of Congress also don't know all of the technical details of engines either, but that doesn't mean they can't create laws specifying average fuel economy. It is up to the experts in those fields to make the laws reality.

"If I ordered a general to fly from one flower to another like a butterfly, or to write a tragic drama, or to change himself into a sea bird, and if the general did not carry out the order that he had received, which one of us would be in the wrong?" the king demanded. "The general, or myself?"

Re:They don't want to

[betterunixthanunix]

If YOU were elected to Congress, how many areas are YOU an expert in?

If I had to make a decision on matters that I have no expertise in, I would get the opinion of a panel of experts. Our politicians are not even going that far -- they are dismissing the need for a panel of experts while admitting that they have no clue about the technical matters they are voting on. It is funny when they try to paraphrase expert testimony and get it wrong; it is not funny when they do not bother to listen to expert testimony because their real goal is to give a hand-out to some industry.

Re:They don't want to

[Old97]

Because "corporations are people too". (Mitt Romney)

Re:They don't want to

[lgw]

Corporations are made of people. Get together with a million other geeks to throw money at this problem, and you'll be able to buy serious ad time and lobbying power for a small amount of money each. But guess what - you'll need to incorporate somewhere along that path.

A corporation is a tool, nothing more than a way for many not-so-rich people to fund an effort and own the result, rather that the prior model where only the 0.01% could play. Like any tool, it can be used for good or evil.

Re:They don't want to

[PopeAlien]

Get together with a million other geeks to throw money at this problem

This is the problem with allowing money to act as a form of 'free speech'. It's an arms race with more and more money trying to buy the 'right' laws and the people (corporations) that financially benefit from those laws will always have more money to buy more laws.

Re:They don't want to

[Red Flayer]

Corporations are made of people.

No, corporations are made of *money*.

Corporations are bodies created to remove people from the equation. When an entity is incorporated, the shareholders are absolved of personal responsibility for the actions of the corporation (aside from their financial interest).

A corporation is a tool, nothing more than a way for many not-so-rich people to fund an effort and own the result (...) Like any tool, it can be used for good or evil.

No. Corporations also shelter the investors from personal responsibility. If a corporation is made of people, why is that those people are not personally liable for the actions of the corporation?

Corporations are likely to be used for evil because the perpetrators (the investors) are not personally responsible for the evil outcomes of the corporation's activities.

Re:They don't want to

[Jawnn]

Bullshit.
Corporations are business entities. There mission is not to represent n% of the populace "banding together and funding an effort" as you so romantically put it. A corporation's mission, it's sole reason to be, is to make money for it's shareholders. As a matter of principle and law, all other priorities are secondary. If doing "the right thing" reduces profit, the corporation is obliged to avoid doing the right thing if it can legally do so. This is not a case of the corporation being "evil". As you say, it is only a tool.
Alas, more often than not, this places corporations at odds with the interests of the citizens, you know, the actual living, breathing, and voting people. Corporations have their place, but it is not anywhere near the role of citizens. Since we have allowed corporations to essentially co-opt the men and women WE elected to represent US, we no longer live in a representative republic. We could debate the name, but it is nothing like what we were taught in school. Wake the hell up.

Re:They don't want to

[jedidiah]

Corporations are a legal fiction meant to shield it's members from liability. It removes the accountability that ANY morally aware entity should be subject to.

A corporation is effectively a (rioting) mob. It has no self awareness or moral awareness or even any social encouragement to be a good citizen.

Anyone that tries to conflate a corporation with a person is an idiot.

If rights can be blindly transferred from individuals to a collective, then the reverse should also true. The corporate veil should vanish and all members of the collective should be jointly and severally liable for any harm the collective causes.

The rights of a limited liability entity should be limited too.

Re:They don't want to

[lgw]

consumers don't donate as much money as the corporations that stand to benefit from the bill.

As an individual voter, your vote carries far more power than your dollars. All the corps can do is help the congresscritters buy ad time, but ultimately it's the voting that maters.

The problem here is that the general public doesn't know or care how the internet works, but they could probably understand your car analogy. The voters still don't care about this issue - if they did, campaign donations wouldn't matter (unless the voters were split very close to 50/50). Sure, we've been whining about this on /. for a decade now, but the average guy still doesn't give a shit about this copyright business. And I think ultimately that's an age thing - I suspect your average teenager/college-age person "gets it", but my generation not so much, and my parents' generation still subscribes to newspapers. Most people simply don't see the problem in letting a copyright owner police YouTube, because they've never been affected by such things.

Re:They don't want to

[lgw]

I'm not in the top 1%, but I own some micro-% of the means of production in this country through my stock ownership. It's not a lot, but it's more than 1/300,000,000th.

What percentage of basketball players get to play in the NBA? What percentage of drivers drive in Formula-1 races? Sure, investing is by nature competitive, but it's actually less concentrated at the top than most competitive groups. Scrape together a few bucks to buy some shares of an S&P500 ETF fromm a discount broker, and you're in, making capital gains and owning part of major corporations.

Everyone certainly does get to play, it's just that most people spen their money on toys instead, then whine about the inevitable results. Your television, cable bill, sneakers, new rims, and iPod - none of these pay a dividend. It's not some secret that this is how money works, no special handshake is required to start investing, and in fact the majority of americans own stock indirectly, through a pension plan or 401k. Being good at investing is a different matter, of course.

Re:They don't want to

[Old97]

That is the origin of Mitt's thinking, yes. It's the single worst decision they ever made in that it creates a grave threat to personal freedom and the healthy functioning of democracy. The fact that a few managers, not shareholders, can take money invested for an economic enterprise and spend it on their political agenda without their consent is appalling. As a shareholder, I've never been asked for or given consent to any political spending.

Re:They don't want to

[ffflala]

I understand your outrage, but you've overgeneralized it past any point of accuracy, let alone usefulness. What you're saying is simply incorrect. Don't believe me? Ask the Electronic Frontier Foundation for starters, which is a (gasp!) corporation.https://www.eff.org/about

Non-profit corporations are every bit as much corporations as are for-profit corporations. By definition, corporate charter, and law the overriding mission of these CORPORATIONS is to actively accomplish some sort public good. US nonprofit corps currently control ~1 trillion dollars, and last stats I saw indicated they disseminated about $50 billion in *direct* financial support annually (this doesn't include the public services they provide.) This isn't some uninformed romantic fantasy; it's reality. There isn't a lot of profit in public services, yet 501c(3) corps and related foundations do indeed "band together and fund" all sorts of efforts that, while financially unprofitable, serve some actual good.

Grandparent was both correct and informed: the corporate form *is* a powerful type of group organization, and it can be used for good or evil. It can be abused, and obviously is, has been before, and will in the future. It is also a form that can be used to diminish or even eradicate the influences of the worst of the for-profit corporations.

This is because, again, a corporation is a form of group organization to achieve a common goal, and that goal doesn't *have* to be profit.

Re:They don't want to

[GrumpySteen]

To avoid making a complete idiot of themselves when voting on fuel economy legislation, all congress members need to know is "Cars burn gas which creates pollution. Burning less gas creates less pollution."

They might not be able to make a nuanced decision with that little information, but they wouldn't vote to require all cars to be painted blue in order to reduce pollution.

SOPA is a stunningly bad piece of legislation and the problems aren't subtle or nuanced. Congress has lobbyists from Google and a lot of other heavyweight companies telling them it's a bad idea. There is absolutely no way they are clueless about the problems with the legislation, but certain congress members are trying to push it through none the less.

Fuck them

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously.

Re:Fuck them

[Zaphod The 42nd]

End the two-party system. That is the only way we're going to get ANY kind of accountability or responsibility from the American government. We need the alternative vote NOW, and we need to end the electoral college.

The United States aren't a democracy, and we're not even a republic anymore. We don't have the right to vote on matters of policy, nor do we have the right to vote for the president and his cabinet. We participate in a shell game they set up through gerrymandering and the threat that your vote will be meaningless if you don't vote for one of the two approved party candidates.

There is NO legitimate excuse why we shouldn't have the alternative vote in America, except that the Democrats and Republicans don't want it. There is NO legitimate excuse as to why we need the electoral college in America, we don't even have ballots anymore, it is all done electronically.

Re:Fuck them

[Zaphod The 42nd]

Also incumbency is way too powerful in the house and senate, terms should have limits.

And maybe you should have to pass a basic political quiz before you're allowed to vote. I'm not talking about "literacy tests" to keep out minorities, I'm talking about do you even know which party this person is a member of? Do you know this person's view on ____ important policy?

A matter of who pays for the campaign

[walterbyrd]

Congress just rubber-stamps bills that are written up by lobbyists. That has been fairly well proven.

That's because

[Bogue]

all of Congress is made up of lawyers. Where are the engineers and scientists? There are none.

Re:That's because

[rrohbeck]

Engineers and scientists don't promise pink unicorns to everybody and are generally not very interested in money and power.

Re:That's because

[Grishnakh]

President Carter, IIRC, wasn't really a bad president the way Bush II and Obama have been; he was just an ineffectual president for the most part, and didn't handle the Beirut problem that well, leading to Reagan winning the 1980 election.

However, there's a problem with your comparison: Carter was President, head of the Executive branch. The previous poster was talking about the lack of engineers and scientists in Congress, the lawmaking Legislative branch. The two branches have very different functions, and different skills are needed in them. Someone that makes a great lawmaker (e.g. because of their great understanding of the issues due to their background in the field, for instance, as opposed to some stupid lawyer who doesn't know squat about the things he's writing and passing laws to govern), might not necessarily make a great President, who needs to have leadership qualities different from someone who spends all their time sitting on committees and poring through pages and pages of bills. An engineer in Congress, for instance, might be great for writing or pushing through bills that deal with technology (or helping kill bad bills dealing with technology), but he might not be that great at acting as the Commander-in-Chief and dealing with other world leaders on a 1-1 basis.

Re:That's because

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

It's not that they're incapable, it's that they have little incentive to do so. They spend all their time fundraising, and SOPA brings in funds. So for them to not support it, it would have to be something that they would actually lose a decisive number of votes for. Guess what? Everyone intelligent has now heard of it and knows it's bad, but even most of them won't stop voting for the incumbent in their own district.

Re:That's because

[CanHasDIY]

Engineers and scientists don't promise pink unicorns to everybody and are generally not very interested in money and power.

This is precisely why I fervently believe we should only elect people to office who don't want the job.

Re:Confusing positions

[fightinfilipino]

those aren't mutually exclusive at all.

the whole point of net neutrality is to say, "hey! you conglomerate of ultra powerful ISPs and media outlets can't just unilaterally control the internet!"

the whole point of SOPA opposition is to say, "hey! you conglomerate of ultra powerful media and content producers can't just unilaterally control the internet!"

Re:a hypothetical

[flirno]

Willfull ignorance.

You Americans need more parties.

[Kristian T.]

It's just to cheap for coorporate america to hedge it's bets when they only have to bribe.... errh I mean make campaign contributions, to 2 parties. Try to elect some representatives from the pirate party, like sweden has.

Have you seen the full title? Honestly...

[drb226]

To promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property, and for other purposes.

"Combating the theft of U.S. property"...honestly? The words "theft" and "property" are HUGE red flags that these people have no clue what they are talking about.

Bill will backfire and create political awareness

[Anonymous Coward]

As a non American I hope this bill backfires and makes the younger and smarter more concerned and aware of politics. Yesterday tons of 4channers had streams of the amendment hearings and saw how ignorant politicians really are. Pissing off the internet is never a good idea.

Obama isn't going to pass it and if he did I see it causing major sites to simply change from American ownership to somewhere else. Of course really big sites like google would just be heavily censored like youtube.

Wouldn't be a bad time to go ahead and create some foreign sites now though.

I wouldn't mind going back to IRC personally.

It was never funny.

[sstamps]

The ignorance of our elected officials was never funny. It was sad and grossly pathetic, and still remains so.

Given the democractic system, it is a direct reflection on who we are as a people. As much as people piss and moan about the retards we end up electing, vanishingly few of said people either vote for non-retards, or run against the retards. As such, we get the government we deserve; the government that WE THE PEOPLE voted for.

Just like the corporatocracy/plutocracy/Fascist state that we're fast becoming (which is an obvious symptomatic effect of the problem), people don't get how they are empowering the very evil they rail against. Corporations would have NO power if people stopped feeding them.

Re:You reap what you sow

[Grishnakh]

It seems to work just fine in other countries where the government isn't so corrupted by corporate interests.

What exactly is your proposed solution to the problem of corporations controlling what you can and can't do on the internet? Trusting in the benevolent, all-seeing Invisible Hand?

Re:Confusing positions

[betterunixthanunix]

I would phrase it more like this:

"Don't let the Internet turn into a fancy cable TV system"

When I was a kid, people spoke of "illegal cable" -- modified set-top boxes that allowed them to receive cable TV without paying, or to receive premium channels without paying. Some of the earliest DRM systems were designed to prevent people from accessing cable TV channels and satellite broadcasts without paying. The entire cable TV system is the antithesis of the PC and Internet revolutions: centralized control over users and their actions, permission required to do anything, and extra fees left and right.

Now the mainstream media wants to turn the Internet into the same sort of system: centralized control, DRM, fees, and users being pigeonholed as passive consumers of everything. At issue with net neutrality is whether or not websites should be treated like "channels," and forced to negotiate with ISPs for the right to transmit over the ISPs' networks. At issue with SOPA is whether or not there should be a central authority that is allowed to disconnect systems from the network when those systems do not follow the rules imposed by the central authority.

Level of knowledge applied elsewhere

[Jason Levine]

Imagine if they applied their level of tech knowledge to other areas. Like the economy:

"Congressman, how do you counter the charge that the 150% tax rate on the middle class and 0% tax rate on anyone making more than a million dollars in the Save Our Poor Affluent bill will result in millions going bankrupt?"

"Well, I've been assured by the good folks in the Rich Individuals Association of America that this tax rate change will result in people buying more summer homes, yachts, and expensive cars. So obviously, it will highly boost the economy!"

"But won't it...."

"Look, I just pass the laws written for me by powerful lobbying organizations. I'm not an economics nerd!"

Re:a hypothetical

[mwvdlee]

Criminal negligence

Re:a hypothetical

[aztektum]

If it can be held to a citizen that ignorance of the law does not excuse them from liability for breaking it, we should hold our elected officials to account for legislation they vote for in ignorance of sound judgement and reason.

Note I say "we". It's obvious Congress is not listening. It is up to the people to make them.

Re:a hypothetical

[MLRScaevola]

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair. I think this describes our situation, and your hypothetical, quite nicely.

Re:a hypothetical

[Genda]

And if a "citizen" through acts of collusion with a member of the federal legislature attempts to have a law passed which fundamentally damages the national infrastructure and security, the rights of the country's citizens, and the ability for millions of businesses to rightfully function, then that "Citizen" has committed a crime against the nation (corporation or not) and the representatives that have colluded with that citizen should be censured and if necessary charged with criminal offense.

Time and time again, the arguments presented by the media have proven to be hollow, without basis in fact, and utterly grounded in the need to lay white knuckled fists on all intellectual property (including that which does not belong to them.) This is offensive at best and almost certainly should be considered illegal. Its time to wake up. You can't monopolize other peoples work anymore, and get away with it. There are simply too many ways to circumvent you. You are no longer significant in this equation. You better hustle up a new way to get relevant, or prepare yourself to go the way of buggy-whips and whale bone corsets.

For the love of all that's holy, please get the bankers and lawyers out of entertainment. They've been screwing it up for years and now they're trying drag the whole world into the black hole they've created. Just do us all a favor and go away please.

Re:Confusing positions

[Zaphod The 42nd]

Wrong. Net neutrality says ISPs have to treat any content equally, they can't meter it out so that their websites go faster.
SOPA says if you do something infringing, or if you just seem like you've infringed, or if somebody who has infringed uses your website, then that website can be taken down FOR EVERYBODY. Nobody, anywhere on the internet, using ANY ISP, can connect AT ALL. Your site has been blocked, shut down, banned.

Net Neutrality is about controlling corporations who might try to squeeze extra money from certain major providers. ISPs would want to control traffic going over THEIR network. It would unfortunately massively hamstring the internet, whose value comes from the ability for so many people to put up their own content. But having net neutrality so that companies can't control their own traffic and give preferential treatment doesn't mean you can't have other regulations.

SOPA is about the government being able to control THE INTERNET ITSELF, ALL NETWORKS, ALL ISPs and shut down anything they don't like.

Re:In case anyone has not yet heard it..

[inglorion_on_the_net]

in all areas, we're just focused on SOPA and Protect-IP because they are closer to our hearts.

That is actually the part that scares me the most. If things are this bad in areas that I actually have some knowledge about, how much badness am I not seeing because I am too ignorant? How many horrible ideas have we silently let be implemented, just because we didn't know?

What's the Technical Solution?

[Phoenix666]

OK, folks, let's concede that the government has ceased to be anything but an extension of the kleptocracy. Let's drop the left-vs-right, Republican-vs.-Democrat BS that is a dangerous distraction. Let's drop all the BS memes that have been focus-group tested by the 1% to take everyone's minds off what's really going on. OK? Let's stop pretending that Congress or any part of the government will listen to any level or form of input or bitching and change its ways. Let's just drop that stuff because it's unproductive.

Instead, let's approach this problem like the scientists, engineers, geeks, nerds, and can-do people we are and see it as a technical challenge we can solve. Society is broken, the economy is broken, government is broken. How do we fix it?

If SOPA is threatening the traditional internet, how do we route around the damage? Can we dramatically grow the number of nodes and routing capabilities? Can we design an open source ad-hoc mesh network that makes any attempt to shut it down an impossible project of confiscating every router, cellphone, car, and thing in the world that can communicate with each other?

Can we design crowd-sourcing tools that allow the 99% to track and neutralize the 1% far more effectively than they could ever do to us? Can we make it possible to in every way tell them that their BS is no longer welcome on Planet Earth?

Can we re-wire technical systems to promote and support the Steve Jobs & Woz's of the world to create a brighter future for us all?

That's really the conversation we ought to be having on /. every day, not endless hand-wringing about the supposed government and big companies who JUST WON'T LISTEN TO US.

Let's work the problem, folks.

Horiible idea

[rsilvergun]

what good is knowing about it if you can't do anything about it? Congress has an approval rate of 9%, and they still get elected. You're completely missing the point with your suggestion, which is that these people are our ruling class. You are not free. They own you.

The correct solution is to only allow individuals to donate, and then cap the donations at a reasonable amount. If everyone has the same opportunity to express your view with money, then you have real free speech. Also, you only get to donate to an election you can vote in. No donations if you can't legally vote. Corporations can't vote, so they don't get to donate. Period. Problem solved.