I hope everyone here read this blog post from Open Congress. If not please DO!

PIPA first on Senate agenda on Jan. 24th, 2012

http://www.opencongress.org/articles/view/2458-PIPA-first-on-Senate-agenda-on-Jan-24th-2012

The battle is about to heat up again SOON!

And remember they were elected to supposedly represent us, the people.

It seems that it’s a bit redundant to say that. Other comments say almost the same thing. A +1 should suffice :)

Over three million for one senator :P

How about if I use a walkie-talkie to talk to someone and it has wires inside?

@gamerLEN
“You do realize nobody is paying attention to you anymore right?”

Did they EVER pay attention? Online and offline pornography will soon require authenticated adult viewership and that viewership dates/times be stored local to the computer used to display adult art.

Did you catch the online and offline part of the above? It is already technically trivial and has been trivial for twenty years or more.

Michael Henri Page Esq misled the Western District of Arkansas Magistrate Judge Honorable Erin L Setser and described the Google Inc search engine as, “For one thing, search is completely automated. It goes out, it crawls the web, it sees what’s there, and it reports it back. The machine has no way of knowing whether a picture is nude…”, as is totally incorrect and malicious. See Dkt 216 pp(71-75) and read the fairytale told by Google Inc in open Court.

I wonder if wired and wireless mean the same thing too…?

I voted for myself too :)

Y’know, one thing that I noticed… this isn’t the first time the MPAA and the RIAA have pulled a stunt like this.

They did the same thing when the VCR was first invented in the 70s, and again with the CD burner in the 90s, and again with the DVD player and the first Mp3 players.

Yet each time we wound up with things like Blockbuster Video and iTunes and what they tried never went anywhere. Something tells me this will wind up more of the same.

SOPA Solution: Block Congress

Today, I was wondering how easy that would be, and spent about 10 seconds in google to find that Congressional staffer IPs have been outed by Wikipedia for editing their boss’s pages:

Wikinews contributors have discovered that members of the United States Congress or members of their staff have recently been making questionable edits to Wikipedia… To confirm, I put the first IP in an IP Locator tool and got this:

From here you can figure out an IP range to target, and then it’s trivial to serve them different content (perhaps giving them a taste of what SOPA IP blocking would be like). I leave that as an exercise to the reader.

To be effective it needs to be done by sites that Congressional staffers actually depend on or on enough smaller sites to get media attention.

http://loufranco.com/blog/files/sopa-block-congress-ip.html

@Requests are already stored by all ISPs for months

IF you use their DNS servers!

@Your VPN or privacy software is utterly useless because they are all connected physically somewhere to the wire called the Internet.

Well that all depends on the encryption strength between your PC and the server of your choice, and if they can break it in the middle somewhere…

I am reminded of a time when I has a ISP tech at my house because my bandwith seemed less that I paid for. I watched his screen as he tried to pull up my surfing history. He gave me a rather perplexed look that day…

There is far more involved this time, such as the DNS servers I am using right now that would become illegal under this bill because they are not from any ISP, and could bypass the blockade.

Feds at DefCon Alarmed After RFIDs Scanned

The reader, connected to a web camera, sniffed data from RFID-enabled ID cards and other documents carried by attendees in pockets and backpacks as they passed a table where the equipment was stationed in full view.
It was part of a security-awareness project set up by a group of security researchers and consultants to highlight privacy issues around RFID. When the reader caught an RFID chip in its sights — embedded in a company or government agency access card, for example — it grabbed data from the card, and the camera snapped the card holder’s picture.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/08/fed-rfid/

Personally I don’t give a damn about downloading free music or porn. I DO care about being forced to surf naked with a camera on my head recording everything I do for eternity, and a sign on my back with my all my personal information on it for anyone in the world with the capability to see at will!

Maybe some don’t care if they have to give their name, address, date of birth, social security number, drivers license number, credit card numbers, and life history, to any stranger that walks up tho them on the street and wants it, but MANY do!

This bill makes many tools we have to protect our privacy illegal!

They threw around just as much money all those times too I’m betting. In fact, they even tried pushing legislation just like SOPA, as in the same damn internet business, before and it fell flat on it’s face.

That and we’ve got twenty days as of posting to drum up more support against it. Keep at it people.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2011/12/23/the-great-sopa-conspiracy-theory/

While I’m not too sure about the conspiracy angle I found it surprising that most of the top supporters of SOPA were ten years ago distributing the software that people used to download copyrighted material.

A stranger snaps a picture of you with his iPhone camera while you’re walking down the street on your way to work in the morning. You don’t see him. He uses a mobile app to analyze the photo he just took of you. The app scans your face and searches the web for matches. In less than a minute, the stranger knows your name and contact info, is scrolling through your Facebook albums, and is reading your Twitter timeline. Predicting your social security number—and thus stealing your identity–is one small step away.

Sounds like science fiction? It’s science fact.

http://www.abine.com/wordpress/2011/the-top-6-facial-recognition-faqs/

US Lobbying Against New European Privacy Law

A document obtained by a European civil liberties organization indicates that the US Department of Commerce is actively opposing efforts by the European Union to update and strengthen its privacy law. The “Informal Note on Draft EU General Data Protection Regulation” argues that the proposed updates to the EU Data Protection Directive could adversely impact the “global interoperability of national and international privacy regimes.” The US assessment follows a multi-year effort by the Europeans and others to establish a comprehensive framework for privacy protection, which the US has opposed, opting instead for "self-regulation.

http://epic.org/2011/12/us-lobbying-against-new-europe.html

We can only hope it turns out to be nothing but unfortunately money talks

Federal Court Revives Suit Over NSA Dragnet Surveillance
A federal appeals recently revived a lawsuit, Jewel v. NSA, challenging the NSA’s use of the nation’s largest telecommunication providers to conduct suspicionless surveillance of Americans. The three-judge panel reversed a lower court decision that rejected claims based on lack of standing. The case will now return to the district court for a decision on the merits. The same three-judge panel also rejected a related suit against the telecommunications providers, Hepting v. AT&T, based on the “retroactive immunity” provided by Congress in 2008.

http://epic.org/2012/01/federal-court-revives-suit-ove.html

The Security Threat of Unchecked Presidential Power

This isn’t about the spying, although that’s a major issue in itself. This is about the Fourth Amendment protections against illegal search…
In defending this secret spying on Americans, Bush said that he relied on his constitutional powers (Article 2) and the joint resolution passed by Congress after 9/11 that led to the war in Iraq. This rationale was spelled out in a memo written by John Yoo, a White House attorney, less than two weeks after the attacks of 9/11. It’s a dense read and a terrifying piece of legal contortionism, but it basically says that the president has unlimited powers to fight terrorism. He can spy on anyone, arrest anyone, and kidnap anyone and ship him to another country … merely on the suspicion that he might be a terrorist. And according to the memo, this power lasts until there is no more terrorism in the world.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/12/the_security_th_1.html

O RLY? OvO

EPIC Demands Release of Classified Answers on Privacy and Internet Standards from Cyber Command Nominee : EPIC has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the National Security Agency (NSA) seeking the “classified supplement” that Director Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander filed with his answers to questions from the Senate Armed Services Committee regarding his nomination to be the Commander of the newly formed United States Cyber Command. Several of Lt. Gen. Alexander’s classified responses were to questions regarding the privacy of Americans’

http://epic.org/privacy/nsa/epic_v_nsa.html

EPIC Urges Court to Order Disclosure of CyberSecurity Authority: EPIC filed papers urging a federal court to order the National Security Agency to disclose National Security Presidential Directive 54, a key document governing national cybersecurity policy. The directive grants the NSA broad authority over the security of American computer networks. But the agency has refused to make the document public in response to an EPIC Freedom of Information Act request. EPIC noted that "The NSA’s position amounts to a claim that the President may enact secret laws, direct federal agencies to implement those laws, and shield the content of those laws from public scrutiny.

http://epic.org/privacy/nsa/epic_v_nsa.html

How to bypass #SOPA if/when it passes.

What SOPA would do to censor the internet is force internet companies to block their DNS servers from sending you to the sites you want. When you type in donttreadonmike.com, your request is sent to a DNS server which then sends you to the website’s true address, or IP address, which just looks like a bunch of numbers. Under SOPA, if a site is blocked or blacklisted, it will still be there, but DNS servers will no longer process your request. The site can still be accessed directly through it’s IP address.

You may want to start building a list of your favorite site’s IP addresses just in case SOPA passes so that you’ll still be able to visit them.

http://donttreadonmike.com/2012/01/03/how-to-bypass-sopa-ifwhen-it-passes/

The Internet is probably the most important technological advancement of my lifetime. Its strength lies in its open architecture and its ability to allow a framework where all voices can be heard. Like the printing press before it (which states also tried to regulate, for centuries), it democratizes information, and thus it democratizes power. If we allow Congress to pass these draconian laws, we’ll be joining nations like China and Iran in filtering what we allow people to see, do, and say on the Web…

“I worry that it is vague enough, and the intention to prevent tunneling around court-ordered restrictions clear enough, that courts will bend over backwards to find a violation,” says Mark Lemley, a professor at Stanford Law School who specializes in intellectual property law.

http://thehackernews.com/2011/12/tor-anonymity-will-become-illegal-with.html

(ii)against any entity that knowingly and willfully provides or offers to provide a product or service designed or marketed by such entity or by another in concert with such entity for the circumvention or bypassing of measures described in paragraph (2) [blocking DNS responses, search query results, payments, or ads] and taken in response to a court order issued under this subsection, to enjoin such entity from interfering with the order by continuing to provide or offer to provide such product or service. § 102©(3)(A)(ii)

http://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/archives/2011/12/15/stopping-sopas-anti-circumvention.html