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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."
Ignorance is bliss. And when shit hits the fan, they can claim plausible deniability.
Seriously.
if one is receiving insane amounts of money and political clout to deliberately ignore severe problems in a proposed bill, is it still ignorance?
Congress just rubber-stamps bills that are written up by lobbyists. That has been fairly well proven.
The opposite of Progress is Congress.
I don't think they are as willfully stupid as people make them out to be, but tend to let lobbyists and industry representatives do a lot of their thinking for them - in all areas, we're just focused on SOPA and Protect-IP because they are closer to our hearts.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
all of Congress is made up of lawyers. Where are the engineers and scientists? There are none.
They're perfectly consistent positions. The position is:
"Don't allow people to fuck with the internet"
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!"
Net Neutrality isn't the government regulating internet traffic. Net Neutrality is the government forbidding corporations from doing so.
No, that's not Net Neutrality at all. Net Neutrality is a whole bunch of rules that boils down to "Don't mess with internet traffic"
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.
Run with the lemmings, and you'll get your feet wet.
Can't tell if you're trolling or just dim.
It's very simple. Net neutrality isn't regulating the Internet, it's regulating providers. Furthermore, it doesn't change what's on the internet, just how it gets to you. Fiddling with the DNS servers is 100% different. The analogy (not even an analogy...) is requiring the telephone company to let you call their competitors without an additional charge, vs blocking you from saying particular things.
The only thing the two have in common is the word 'internet'. Even a cursory glance shows that "don't throttle for profit" and "turn off this site" are completely different.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Vote with lead, if you see an elected official, shoot them.
Well there is a diversity of opinion on Slashdot, so you're inherently building a strawman, here.
Nevertheless, it's perfectly consistent to be pro-net-neutrality and anti-SOPA. The underlying principle here is to maintain equal access to communication technology, in particular to not allow consolidate power bases (in particular, corporations) to control the flow of information. The purpose of net neutrality is to force companies to not discriminate between information seekers and providers; this maximizes the amount of information everyone can easily access. The purpose of striking down SOPA is to prevent companies from having yet more legal power to issue takedowns, censor material, and discriminate between information seekers and provides; preventing SOPA from being passed also maximizes the amount of information everyone can easily access.
Your strawman was implicitly painting this as a debate about whether regulation is good or bad. But that's incorrect. The question is not whether we should have laws. The question is what laws.
We had the samw try here. The result was a new party in the parliamental race.
If you don't break the grip of the two party system, you will have a ruling aristocracy in less than a generation.
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.
Stupid.
I don't know why I'm typing this since it's been typed countless times before: He never said he invented the Internet.
If there were more politicians with Al Gore's level of understanding stuff we would't have all these problems.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
What else do you expect?
They aren't the computer generation.
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.
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.
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
Like post to Facebook ;-) should not be crafting any laws that affect the internet in anyway. Period.
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?
I mean, I would much rather having accomplished scientists, engineers, and other professions representing me than someone who majored in law in college with the sole intention of being a politician. There is a breakdown in the system, and it was completely intended - when individual senators represent and are elected by up to 60 million people (Cali) they have no connection to their constituents at all.
I mean, the process to fix it is an arduous process. We need to take money out of politics, take it out of campaigning, and we can easily use technology to develop a mutually agreed upon open platform on the internet to market representatives. Like, say, each county could host a site called elections.XXXX.gov and it would allow people to apply and run for the office. Probably have a tiny $10 running fee to keep people from flooding the sites, but besides that make it open to all constituents and all it takes is the ability to type in ones positions and appear at public debate. And then outlaw the spending of money on political advertising, because once we have an easy to access platform for knowing all the candidates where they can respectively give their standings on different political topics, we can move away from the grossly unintended 2 party system and more towards electing people and not parties that don't work in the publics interest.
Problem is, the entrenched powers have absolutely no desire to move towards a system where anyone but the in crowd of each party could ever get nominated and handed to the public. They want 2 partys because they are easier to control and mutually benefit from the status quo.
/. view of the issue is shortsighted, believing that the government system is actually there for any purpose different from enriching the politicians and everybody with access to the politicians.
This is not an aberration, is what I am saying, this is the DESIGN, this is the purpose of what government does. Think about a little issue of taxes - does any sane person understand the entire tax structure that is now on the books in USA? Is it even humanly possible for a single person to understand it at all in one life time?
The issue is not this small (and this is a small issue compared say to your right to life and liberty), the issue is that the system is now completely subverted, the government operates outside of the law boundaries imposed upon it by the Constitution and the people bought into the idea that this is acceptable and not challenging the status-quo.
You can't handle the truth.
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.
Palm trees and 8
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!"
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
the backlash against usage-based billing as a consequence of network neutrality
The only acklash against usage-based billing I've ever seen is from proponents of network neutrality who point out that usage-based billing without neutrality is asking for the system to be gamed (eg your provider drops every other packet and bills you for twice the data).
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
The problem: key members of [strike]the House Judiciary Committee[/strike] Congress still don't understand [strike]how the internet works,[/strike] anything at all, with the possible exception of money, and worse yet, it's not clear whether they even want to.
There. Fixed that for ya.
Either you're paid for your opinion, or you're being obtuse on a level that is reaching record heights.
Net Neutrality: make sure that the corporations who control the infrastructure do not abuse their control.
SOPA: corporations get to control who says what and how on the Internet, without any interference from due process, free speech or the fact that they didn't pay into building the Internet.
It's a perfectly consistent position. The fact that you refuse to consider that says more about you than about anyone else.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Surely packet-dropping would be nacklash, not acklash.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"Let's get ignorance off the streets of America and back into Congress where it belongs!"
Why can't these Congress folks just contact a University in their constituency for advice in such matters? Professors would love to get the opportunity to advise Congress for free. Great PR for the school and their department.
The Congress folks can brag about the local "technical expertise" and that the constituency will benefit with economic growth, more jobs, and free coke and hookers for all . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
Congress can't even comprehend the Constitution. How can we expect them to comprehend technology.
Term Limits..
RUGBYRUGBYRUGBY
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.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Usage-based billing is NOT a consequence of network neutrality. The two have absolutely no relationship. Network Neutrality is being used a a pretext for usage-based billing, but that is very different. I could claim that a warm day is a pretext for playing WoW, but that would not mean there was any relationship between the two. It's fiction.
The complaint that some pipes are getting overloaded is stupid beyond belief. AQM doesn't violate Network Neutrality but is quite capable of handling pipe overload at the ISP level. Above that, most of the problem is caused by Tier 1 backbone providers oversubscribing and/or going for a Spanning Tree topology rather than mesh.
Blaming customers and locking them out until they pay protection money would be like airlines overbooking an aircraft then demanding surplus passengers cough up the cash for a chartered plane to rescue them. Sorry, but as malign, degenerate and corrupt as the airlines are, even they don't demand that! I see bugger all reason to allow any network provider to get away with what we'd never allow any other industry to excuse.
Going for a Spanning Tree when network loads were rising exponentially -- a problem caused by the network providers themselves NOT providing multicast to the home but demanding that everyone use P2P for audio and video, for profit reasons* -- rather than going for a mesh meant that pipes were bound to be saturated. They knew that when they started cutting back on routes, but fat profits meant more than good service. That's their business decision. They're allowed to make it. But they should ALSO be allowed to suffer the consequences. This is one bail-out the tax payer has NO reason to fund.
*ISPs wanted to charge customers for content in a way multicast doesn't allow. Since P2P is more network-intensive, not only did ISPs hope to charge more for the content being delivered but they also hoped to force customers to buy fatter pipes than actually needed. This is all well-documented history, anyone using the MBone prior to it being enabled by default on Tier 1 will be familiar with this. The problems of P2P were well-known to everyone the moment Cornell University released its client (yes, that's what CU stands for in the name), which is why clients and the reflectors supported multicast streaming. It was a game of chicken, in essence - the ISPs would back down or the users would back down. The game continues to this day, only the users are now so used to content-on-demand via YouTube et al that they have forgotten any other way ever existed. The ISPs still won't enable multicast because the moment they do, caching and distributed video delivery becomes easier and the network usage will plummet, killing their argument that they need to charge more to handle demand. Their argument is fiction and their issues are self-caused and self-sustained, but the moment that becomes obvious even to the most idiotic of anti-nerds, the ISPs will be absolutely dead in the water as far as milking the market is concerned.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It's not just technolgy that politicians are ignorant of, it's pretty much everything outside their political sphere. This is why central planning always collapses eventually; every stupid new law passed by people who don't understand what they're doing without considering the consequences adds more cost and complexity to society until it can no longer sustain itself.
I doubt most bill authors on technical subjects write much of the copy themselves. The congressman sets forth the general policy and lets a specialist flesh it out. I heard something on NPR about lobbyist firms that specialize in writing bills for a fee. So when an omnibus bill opportunity comes up they spam the bill with tons of earmarks on short notice.
I'm not a doctor, but you look like your spleen is broken. It's gotta come out. Good thing I have my Swiss Army knife. Now just lie down on that table there, bite down on something, and let's do this.
Now what does a spleen look like again, and where it is? Oh well, I'll just go digging -- I'm sure I'll find it sooner or later!
Surely you don't object to me performing surgery without a medical license or any sort of medical training? After all, like I said, I'm not a doctor ... but you're "not a nerd", and that didn't prevent you from backing SOPA, right?
It never was particularly funny and it's hardly new. More like a very sad old tradition that we can't get rid of.
Today it's the internet or stem cells. Before that, it was genetic engineering in general and a whole host of scientific and technical topics.
I can remember it going back to the 70s. My science teacher father assured me it went back prior to WW2 and that was even ignoring evolution.
It's a bipartisan problem. No party will allow another to out-ignoramus it.
And I'm sure it goes back at least to the Continental Congress.
Its about any field, the more you study any particular area, the more you realize how wrong congress is about it. I started really noticing about 20 years ago that it seemed that I disagreed with the vast majority of their activity, back then, I wrote some of it off as my own personal ignorance, but the more I learn about economics, technology, etc the more I understand just how wrong they are about those areas. From that I am forced to cynically extrapolate that they are probably just as wrong about areas in which I am not knowledgeable.
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.
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Sure, they should only be allowed to weigh in on bills that they understand, but how often can the Corruption and Graft Bill come up for vote?
Bark less. Wag more.
On the one side you had a few (very few) congressmen/women, namely Mr. Issa, Mr. Polis, Mr. Chaffetz, Ms. Lofgren and Ms. Jackson. They spent the entire hearing pleading with the chairman and the rest of the committee to allow experts (nerds as they often said) to essentially come in and explain the internet to them, because it was obvious that 99% of the members of the committee had no idea what they were talking about. They made reasonable, logical arguments and put forth one amendment after the other trying to clarify some really vague areas of the bill, all of which were shot down by the rest of the committee usually by a vote of ~6 to 24.
On the other side you had 5 or 6 members of the committee who also admitted several times that they had zero understanding of the technical aspects of the bill, but that the bill was awesome anyway. This group was mainly the chairman of the committee Mr. Smith, Mr. Berman, Mr. Watt, Mr. Johnson, Mr. Goodlatte and Ms. Waters. They made no arguments beyond "We have to do something. This is something. Therefor we should do this". Unlike the first group they didn't care that they were ignorant on the subject, they just wanted to get the damn thing passed. I doubt anyone here would be surprised to learn they all received large campaign contributions from the TV/Music/Film industry. Check the contributions of the first group and you'll find the same industry conspicuously absent. It's also worth noting that more than half the committee never said a word during the entire session that wasn't "No" in response to an amendment vote. This third group cared so little they couldn't even be bothered to take part in the debate.
So when you're condemning this committee for being willfully ignorant just keep in mind that 5 or 6 of them don't deserve to be thrown in with the rest like that. I'll end with a quote from a frustrated Darrell Issa, speaking to the chairman of the committee half way through the second day:
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
TCP has no NAKs, only ACKs.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Many members of Congress (especially the WASPy old men) wilfully flaunt their ignorance about all things tech as some atavistic badge of honour. Remember, we're dealing with boring old farts who still use their female aides to fetch their coffee and dry-cleaning. They're of a generation who views it as unmanly to type one's own memos, schedule one's own lunches, and so forth. So they sit on their thrones and let their underlings dirty their hands on those doodads and thingamawhatzits.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
I don't see a single comment on top that says what needs to be done.
Vote Ron Paul 2012, he'll veto all of this nonsense and he'll work to reduce the federal agency and shut down federal departments and reduce federal spending, which means transferring the power from the elites back to the people.
You can't handle the truth.