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From Piracy to Privacy - a new piece of legislation as threatening as SOPA


LuketheXjesse
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http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/08/the-legislation-that-could-kill-internet-privacy-for-good/242853/

A better name for the child pornography bill would be The Encouragement of Blackmail by Law Enforcement Act. At issue is how to catch child pornographers. It's too hard now, say the bill's backers, and I can sympathize. It's their solution that appalls me: under language approved 19 to 10 by a House committee, the firm that sells you Internet access would be required to track all of your Internet activity and save it for 18 months, along with your name, the address where you live, your bank account numbers, your credit card numbers, and IP addresses you've been assigned.

Tracking the private daily behavior of everyone in order to help catch a small number of child criminals is itself the noxious practice of police states. Said an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation: "The data retention mandate in this bill would treat every Internet user like a criminal and threaten the online privacy and free speech rights of every American." Even more troubling is what the government would need to do in order to access this trove of private information: ask for it.

I kid you not -- that's it.

As written, The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 doesn't require that someone be under investigation on child pornography charges in order for police to access their Internet history -- being suspected of any crime is enough. (It may even be made available in civil matters like divorce trials or child custody battles.) Nor do police need probable cause to search this information. As Rep. James Sensenbrenner says, (R-Wisc.) "It poses numerous risks that well outweigh any benefits, and I'm not convinced it will contribute in a significant way to protecting children."

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d112:h.r.1981:

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We stop SOPA, and guess what. We've landed in some deeper feces.With the recent seizure of megaupload.com, the govenrment has access to the information of hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of people, American citizen or not. Just by downloading or uploading stuff from/to this website, you can be fined $150,000 per copyright violation, or be incriminated, possibly indefinitely. This is a much more serioius problem, because how many of us has downloaded from Megaupload?

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I've never once had a single ounce of worry that something like this or SOPA/PIPA will actually happen. there's no way any of these bills could ever work, even if they somehow passed. I feel like I'm tripping balls or in some weird alternate universe when I read this shit. am I insane?

A) every time you mention "tripping balls" or some other drug thing, your avatar becomes like 100x funnier and more appropriate.

B) They probably won't pass, but if there's even the slightest possibility of these seeing the light of day as law, we have to snuff it out as quickly as we can.

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We stop SOPA, and guess what. We've landed in some deeper feces.With the recent seizure of megaupload.com, the govenrment has access to the information of hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of people, American citizen or not. Just by downloading or uploading stuff from/to this website, you can be fined $150,000 per copyright violation, or be incriminated, possibly indefinitely. This is a much more serioius problem, because how many of us has downloaded from Megaupload?

I'm not worried. If the government really wanted to bill every one $150,000 and harass people, all they have to do is search Google or go to Galbadia Hotel or something. Sometimes people do get fined for it, but, hell, many of us here openly admit to piracy or have at some point - why weren't we fined in the last 10 years?

I'm not trying to defend Big Brother, I'm just trying to squash out unnecessary stress and fear-mongering everytime the guvment does something getting the counter-culture's Paul Revere screaming BIG BROTHER BIG BROTHER BIG BROTHER!

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Is it as appalling as SOPA/PIPA? Perhaps. I don't necessarily believe it's as destructive, though.

Don't get me wrong, I'm against this bill, too, since privacy is a basic right, but I don't see it being nearly as cataclysmic as SOPA in the public's eyes... and therefore less likely to generate the heat that SOPA did. It's also not going to generate the same negative response from the bigger players that were on our side before - the likes like Google, Wikipedia and Facebook (hell, Facebook has arguably done similar things, in it's own right) - so if we want to fight we're going to be on our own.

I'm interested in seeing how this plays out, myself; if it's brought to enough people's attention, I'd like to see if people could really band together and fight it in a similar manner. To be perfectly honest, though, I'm not quite as worried about it as SOPA, simply because the government has bigger fish to fry than any of us and our pirating ways (MPAA and RIAA would fry everyone in a heartbeat - but they don't have access to the information, I assume).

I suspect with this and SOPA this Smith guy is not likely to have a future in the political realm. At least, I hope he doesn't.

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regardless of whether or not anything will actually come of either SOPA/PIPA or the bill being debated in this thread, it's becoming increasingly obvious (at least in my opinion) that congress doesn't know what the fuck it's doing and is overstepping it's boundaries as a result. I agree with those that think child porn is incredibly bad from a moral perspective, but do we really have to keep jeopardizing the rights and privacy of innocent people just so we can catch "the bad guys"?

This is getting so god damn ridiculous that I'm starting to believe that the Mayans weren't predicting the end of the world at all, but rather the end of America as we all know it. Either that or I'm going a little cuckoo from my frustration with congress. Whichever makes more sense.

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I once heard that the definition of a terrorist was one who declared an entire group of people their enemy, without paying attention to the fact that the part does not equal the whole, that not all in the group are part of the group they want to eliminate.

What this bill does is declare EVERYONE WHO USES THE INTERNET as the enemy, as one who may harbor child pornography and therefore must be investigated.

So doesn't this basically mean that this bill itself enables the government to terrorize its citizens? Doesn't this make the entire branch of law enforcement terrorists?

I mean, I could be overly simplifying things, but I think the point stands. We are trying to fight a war on terror and these bills are making us terrorists ourselves.

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I'm not worried. If the government really wanted to bill every one $150,000 and harass people, all they have to do is search Google or go to Galbadia Hotel or something. Sometimes people do get fined for it, but, hell, many of us here openly admit to piracy or have at some point - why weren't we fined in the last 10 years?

I'm not trying to defend Big Brother, I'm just trying to squash out unnecessary stress and fear-mongering everytime the guvment does something getting the counter-culture's Paul Revere screaming BIG BROTHER BIG BROTHER BIG BROTHER!

Let me reiterate this. The government has direct access to the IP address of every computer that has ever downloaded anything from Megaupload. Meaning that it not only has access to all the illegal downloading you have done at Megaupload, but also the illegal downloading of any and all other sites you have done on that computer. If the government so wanted to,your life could considered financially forfeit (considering you are not rich, or have never downloaded from Megaupload).

I'm not trying to instill fear into anybody. However, people need to realize that the implications of this is severe. Why should we be individually fined for this if we are not important? However, if you do move onto your life, become important, and a potential threat to the government and corporations, you not only have NDAA to worry about, but also a clean internet record as well. Whether anybody likes it or not, we live in a world were we ARE being watched, and our destinies are controlled in order to prevent any potential threats from arising.

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God damn it, you know I'm tired of these arbitrary laws that give government and cooperations more power. I mean crap, I could see something like this making it casually easy for ISPs to just sell our information to Google if they haven't done so already. I am really tired of private interests meditating crap through government...

And way to cut your nose of to spite your face congress. Next thing you know there'll be a bill proposing we lock up every single citizen until they prove themselves to be a productive citizen.

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This is just SOPA under a different name. No really! SOPA wouldn't pass, but everyone will support a law against child porn right? I mean, you'd be insane NOT to support legislation against child porn! With this there would be access to all sorts of incriminating information concerning copyright violations.

This is nuts.

The government shouldn't force this on service providers. Lamar Smith has NO idea what he's doing with the internet, and I hope he instills the full wrath of the internet against him (you know, without screwing us over too hard). I'm in a dilemma over Mass Effect 3 on Origin because of privacy issues, and now I might have to worry about ISP's storing my info? This is just bullcrap.

OT: So I definitely downloaded some things on an anonymous school account on mega upload. I wonder what would happen to them if action were to be taken...

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It's sad how anyone that's read a history book at any point in their lives should see this shit coming and yet so many people still go "well I'm not a pedophile so this doesn't affect me herp". The executive branch has already claimed the power to arbitrarily detain people without due process and even to assassinate american citizens, again without any kind of due process. People don't notice that this is patterned behavior?

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Let me reiterate this. The government has direct access to the IP address of every computer that has ever downloaded anything from Megaupload. Meaning that it not only has access to all the illegal downloading you have done at Megaupload, but also the illegal downloading of any and all other sites you have done on that computer. If the government so wanted to,your life could considered financially forfeit (considering you are not rich, or have never downloaded from Megaupload).

Not true. Downloading files from Megaupload is not illegal. Using Megaupload to distribute copyrighted works certainly is, but a lot of legitimately sharable material was stored on Megaupload as well. That's my biggest complaint with the Megaupload shutdown (well, second biggest--biggest legitimate one anyway). Lots of people used Megaupload for legit storage and their files are now just gone with no warning because of circumstances they may have had no part or even awareness of. That's not okay.

And to anyone saying this bill isn't very likely to succeed, I think you're right, so long as we, the Internet, make a big stink about it the way we did SOPA and PIPA. But to think that some variant of this wouldn't happen is pretty naive. I mean, look at the individual privacy rights they've been willing to waive in the War on Piracy alone. Once you've got someone "thinking of the children", all bets are off.

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Google controls the spice, Google controls the internet. They are the ones who got SOPA put on hold. Just wait until this becomes an issue again and vote on www.google.com

Politicians can't be trusted. You can trust Google.

I don't trust anyone absolutely, but yeah if this gets on the floor the internet will pummel this bill to the ground.

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