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White House Opposes Key SOPA Provisions
twdorris writes "Is this an example of our 3-part government actually working as intended? It seems the executive branch doesn't agree with the legislative on a key piece of SOPA. From the article: '"While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global internet," the White House said in a blog post.'"
They can say they oppose it, but do they oppose it enough to actually Veto it when/if it gets passed? Or will it be "We'll sign it, but we'll say we disagree adamantly on this post-it not attached to it!"
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
But it looks like a click-through to access the site on the 18th and a banner on every page for a couple weeks. That's about as much as Wiki can do, as they're pretty essential. No word yet on Google. Facebook has scheduled a press event for the day, but no clue whether it's related.
More and more big sites are getting in on the game.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Seriously, this is news that deserves to be on slashdot. But a link to an article behind a paywall, which just gets a popup pushing subscriptions, is NOT the proper way to submit this story!
With a meaningless signing statement of course.
nah his blog was vague enough to make both sides happy, he never says that he opposes SOPA
http://informationliberation.com/?id=37993
This is merely propaganda doublespeak. Nothing has changed:
from the link above:
The Huffington Post is wrongly reporting the White House will not support SOPA or PIPA. If you read the White House's actual statement, it's full of strongly worded language, but absolutely nowhere does it say they will not support the bills. On the other hand, it does state, "we will continue to work with Congress on a bipartisan basis on legislation that provides new tools needed in the global fight against piracy and counterfeiting."
How anyone could believe the same White House which passed the NDAA into law after claiming they would veto it should be taken by their rhetoric and not even by their word is beyond belief. With the NDAA, Obama was on record saying he would veto the legislation, this statement from the White House says they're in full support of passing copyright crackdown bills, but they must "defend an open Internet based on the values of free expression, privacy, security and innovation."
That's pure rhetoric (and it's contradictory on its face).
The author of the White House's statement, Obama's 'IP czar' Victoria Espinel, has already overseen the seizures of hundreds of websites without any due process, including websites which were deemed legal by their own respective countries. This White House is actively engaged in violating our internet freedoms, to completely ignore this attack on internet freedom and turn around and take a vaguely worded statement promising nothing as an explicit denouncement of these censorship bills is foolish and naive to the extreme.
The only concrete information to come out from the White House's statement is they will move forward "on legislation that provides new tools needed in the global fight against piracy and counterfeiting."
That means the current censorship supporting DMCA laws are not enough, the current unconstitutional seizures of hundreds of websites without due process is not enough, they want even more power and they're expecting congress and the internet community to get in line and give it to them.
Update: There is one policy statement in her writing where she says the White House will not support DNS blocking, that provision was already removed from the SOPA bill yesterday, so it changes nothing.
where is the WH statement vague? They support legislation to stop foreign piracy on the internet. They do not support all the moronic crap in SOPA that would allow entrenched business interests to shut down any site they want by nodding at an ISP via breaking the way the internet is built to work.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111005/10082416208/monster-cable-claims-ebay-craigslist-costco-sears-are-rogue-sites.shtml
monster cable may even try to take down monoprice as well.
> Is this an example of our 3-part government actually working as intended?
No, not really. "As intended" would mean that:
Instead we have:
It's the sound of elections nearing...
Really? I thought maybe they read yesterday's Slashdot posts and acquired a clue.
[Warning: be wary of that whooshing sound you may be hearing right now.]
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The NDAA has to be signed into law. It funds the entire military. If he vetoed it, we'd spend the rest of the year watching non-stop ads about how he took away healthcare from wounded veterans and refused to give guns to troops on the front lines. He'd lose reelection in the biggest landslide in history, because frankly, the average voter is woefully uninformed. So to say he "willingly" signed it into law is a vast oversimplification.
SOPA isn't a big omnibus bill. If he opposes provisions in it, he can veto it without all the collateral damage. And it's not like there were specific things he opposed that could be taken out. It was a pretty broad statement: "we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global internet." You'd basically need a complete rewrite to avoid doing any of those things.
I dunno - maybe Ethanol is racist, maybe he isn't. But, Obama DID "reluctantly" sign that fucking NDAA, did he not? Ethanol's point stands, racist cockbag or not.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I love the cookie I'm getting both for this and the DHS X-Ray article:
Hacker's Law: The belief that enhanced understanding will necessarily stir a nation to action is one of mankind's oldest illusions.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It was passed by a veto proof majority. Refusing to sign it would have been an empty gesture, and would have allowed Republicans to run ads against him stating that he vetoed health care for wounded veterans.
So no, his point does not stand. And FYI, when someone uses the phrase "Supreme Leader Baraq Hussein Sotero", there is no "maybe" about their racism.
No, this is not our 3-part government working as expected, it's the new style of government aborning. With the rise of the internet and ubiquitous communications, the public at last has a way to influence government decisions.
We see it here in its early form.
At the moment the effect is fairly weak - Obama is only taking a position because he wants public support for reelection.
But despite self-serving motives, he is taking notice and he is opposing legislation, largely because of widespread grassroots opposition.
This will be the wave of the future. If community opinion, widely distributed and echoed on the internet, can presage community action, it will become increasingly difficult for political corruption. Corporations and politicians will be unable to do "bad" things for fear of being discovered by hackers, publicized by social media, and punished by public backlash.
It's the new boss. Curiously different from the old boss.
If he vetoed it, it would have passed anyway, because it was passed by a veto proof majority.
Please at least try to learn about these issues before coming to your conclusions. Congress would not have been forced to do anything.
I think someone forgot to give the President his cut.
If he vetoed it, we'd spend the rest of the year watching non-stop ads about how he took away healthcare from wounded veterans and refused to give guns to troops on the front lines.
Obama doesn't know how to counter that kind of political attack? Then either he is an incompetent politician, or he didn't really care about NDAA. My guess is on the latter.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I think he just lost a bunch of campaign contributions with that blog.
Not that it matters. The GOP can't find a candidate who can defeat Obama in 2012 anyways. None of the candidates who have a remote chance of winning the nomination are demonstrably more conservative than the actions of President Barack "lawnchair" Obama. If Hollywood completely turned off the tap, Obama could still phone in his re-election campaign and win it easily.
The real loss here, though, is that some people will vote for Obama expecting something to change, in spite of the fact that since 2008 (and really, much further back than that) nothing has.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
You do not think that this counts as a change:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Authorization_Act_for_Fiscal_Year_2012
I guess "continuing to lose rights and freedoms" might not be a second order change (i.e. the rate of change remains unchanged).
Palm trees and 8
You were not "lampooning" racists. There was nothing sarcastic about your statement, nor was there any indication that you didn't mean what you said. You're simply backpedaling now, perhaps out of shame, but more likely because you wanted an opportunity to show how awesome and high minded you are (unlike those yokels at Reddit amirite?).
Or, if you pay a bit of attention: The indefinite detention paragraphs are most likely illegal under the US constitution. By noting his reservations the comming court cases (appeals all the way up to the supreme court) will be quite a bit simpler. After all, it is the executive branch (where the president is), which has to prosecute in favour of the law, and the president stating reservations is a boon to any defense attorney. This is obvious, and has been covered in the news, but hey, most people complaning doesn't seem to know what the NDAA act really is.
The court cases, in case you don't know, will be judged by the judiciary part of the US system. Of course, if you and the republicans get their way the next president will be a republican, and the one or two new supreme court justices which will be appointed in the next presidential period will be really, really conservative. Then, the indefinite detention will most likely become law.
I'm not an American, but this should be obvious even with the most cursory glance.
You may not have noticed, by the Obama administration is full of people who have ties to Hollywood. What reason is there to think that he will not sign the bill into law?
Wake up -- the Democrats are just as quick to ignore individual rights as the Republicans are, they just have a different (but not even close to disjoint) set of corporations that they prefer to give hand-outs to.
Palm trees and 8
Empty gesture? No, it would have been saying "I do not give a fuck about stupid politics, and would prefer to stick to my guns about something that really matters for a change."
When you act out of concern for your re-election rather than what is best for the nation, you are acting as a traitor to your country.
Good lord. The public is owned by the media, they vote the way they are told to vote. They are told red/blue, black/white, oh look Dancing with the Stars!
In the meantime the real power buy their influence in advance. By the time red/blue puppets get into power it's a done deal:
Obama (blue choice of 08):
University of California $1,648,685
Goldman Sachs $1,013,091
Harvard University $878,164
Microsoft Corp $852,167
Google Inc $814,540
JPMorgan Chase & Co $808,799
Citigroup Inc $736,771
Time Warner $624,618
Romney (red choice of 12):
Goldman Sachs $367,200
Credit Suisse Group $203,750
Morgan Stanley $199,800
HIG Capital $186,500
Barclays $157,750
Kirkland & Ellis $132,100
Bank of America $126,500
PriceWaterhouseCoopers $118,250
EMC Corp $117,300
JPMorgan Chase & Co $112,250
Deleted
It was passed by a veto proof majority. Refusing to sign it would have been an empty gesture
Not all gestures are empty. Sometimes it is important to have it be known what you stand for.
What you're saying, basically, is that Obama has said "fuck you" to everyone who disagrees with NDAA, to appease a bunch of Republican nutjobs who hate him anyway. I don't even see how this could possibly be smart in any sense.
I guess "continuing to lose rights and freedoms" might not be a second order change (i.e. the rate of change remains unchanged).
Even more so. the direction of change remains unchanged. President Lawnchair has yet to do a single thing as POTUS that his predecessor would not have done as well. Not. One. Thing.
Repeal Don't Ask Don't Tell.
There's one. There are a lot of others. Yes, he's a moderate Republican, but moderate Republicans aren't welcome in the modern Republican party.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
The insidiousness of the law in question is that it puts into question if there even *will be a court case*. If civilian courts can be avoided, civilians do not have all their rights. Yes, military courts are bound by some rules, but they are not bound by all the rules civilian courts are, and the different rules make it easier to ignore the rights of the accused.
And a law's constitutionality unfortunately is academic if you are unable to challenge it in court.
Obama even agreed to the most horrifying parts of the clearly unconstitutional bill.
Our politicians are just playing games with us, and we allow it.
And no problem that Obama has not kept his campaign promises?
This is the same White House that promised to veto the NDAA, yes?
Liberty in your lifetime
When will the media companies and government realize that the proliferation of piracy is not the internet it is the outrageous prices they try to extract. The fact is that if they didn't keep trying to sell every stinking CD at $17 when we all know most aren't worth $5. Sell the product at what the market wants to pay for it, if you don't then the incentive to steal goes way up.
There have been several recent examples of artists releasing their work at reasonable prices with no DRM. Rather than being ripped off by the public at large, their fans have put down the money.
Louis CK has made over $1,000,000 off his most recent video. You can download it without DRM for $5. And yes he is Hilarious.
"Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most." ~Ozzy Osborne
If you read what was written idealistically and at face value, the president is advocating the repeat of DMCA's circumvention prohibitions.
Not that I really think the president holds that position, but all that stuff about not inhibiting innovation, "prevent[ing] overly broad private rights of action that could encourage unjustified litigation," etc all points to repealing that law.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.