Senator Wyden’s going to be reading names of censorship opponents from the floor of the Senate during his expected filibuster of the PROTECT IP Act. You can ask to have your name read — and ask your Senators to vote no — by visiting StopCensorship.org.

The hope is that the uglier we make a prospective filibuster look, the less likely it becomes that leadership will call for a vote before Christmas break. It’s already passed through Senate Judiciary, and the understanding is that Reid wants to push for a vote soon, so he can claim a bi-partisan victory on a (bogus) jobs bill.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) would ruin so much of what’s best about the Internet: They will give the government and corporations new powers to block Americans’ access to sites that are accused of copyright infringement, force sites like YouTube to go to new lengths to police users’ contributions, and put people in prison for streaming certain content online.

Senator Wyden just issued this new statement on the fight against Internet censorship, and you can check out his call-to-arms video at StopCensorship.org

The filibuster affords senators an opportunity to stand up for what they believe in and there are few things I believe in more than ensuring that every American has a voice and an opportunity to get ahead.

Right now, the Internet gives every American that voice while making it possible for every entrepreneur, thinker and innovator to compete alongside the biggest and most moneyed interests.

It is my hope that — with your help – my colleagues in Congress will realize that a free and open Internet is something that we as Americans should celebrate and not allow those special moneyed interests to quash.

It is my hope that – with your help – my colleagues in Congress will realize that PIPA/SOPA are the wrong way to protect intellectual property because the price they exact on the Internet is too high.

With your help, I believe we can get that word out and prevent these misguided bills from every reaching the House and Senate floor, but if they do reach the floor you can count on me to stand up and make our voices heard.

"Access Denied 2008" by Mike Licht, Notionscapital.com on flickr

It was twenty years ago this week that Tim Berners-Lee, while working at CERN, put the world’s first website online.  It announced his new creation: the World Wide Web.  Last year while urging Internet users to sign Demand Progress’s petition against the Internet Blacklist Bill, Berners-Lee wrote this about the principles that underpin his project:

“No person or organization shall be deprived of their ability to connect to others at will without due process of law, with the presumption of innocence until found guilty. Neither governments nor corporations should be allowed to use disconnection from the Internet as a way of arbitrarily furthering their own aims.”

The Internet Blacklist Bill — S.968, formally called the PROTECT IP Act — would violate those principles by allowing the Department of Justice to force search engines, browsers, and service providers to block users’ access to websites that have been accused of facilitating intellectual property infringement — without even giving them a day in court.  It would also give IP rights holders a private right of action, allowing them to sue to get sites prevented from operating.  Demand Progress’s new mash-up, posted here, explains the bill in more detail.

S.968 has passed the Senate Judiciary Committee, but Ron Wyden (D-OR) is temporarily blocking it from getting a floor vote by using a procedural maneuver known as a hold, noting that “By ceding control of the internet to corporations through a private right of action, and to government agencies that do not sufficiently understand and value the internet, PIPA represents a threat to our economic future and to our international objectives.”

The House is expected to take up a version of the legislation in coming weeks. Read the rest of this entry →

"Save the Internet..." by Steve Rhodes on flickr

“A direct assault on Internet users” is what the ACLU is calling it.  Yesterday a U.S. House committee approved HR 1981, a broad new Internet snooping bill.  They want to force Internet service providers to keep track of and retain their customers’ information — including your name, address, phone number, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses.

The American Civil Liberties Union, the American Library Association, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Demand Progress, and 25 other civil liberties and privacy groups have expressed our opposition to this legislation.  Will you join us, by emailing your lawmakers today?

They’ve shamelessly dubbed it the “Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act,” but our staunchest allies in Congress are calling it what it is: an all-encompassing Internet snooping bill: The logs of users’ information would be accessible to police no matter the alleged crime.  And while it was initially asserted that the bill only required IP address storage — which would have been bad enough — an amendment was offered to clarify that this was the case was rejected on a 7-16 vote.

For a few minutes, it looked like a groundswell of opposition from progressives and right-wing libertarians might derail the legislation:

Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, who led Democratic opposition to the bill said, “‘It represents a data bank of every digital act by every American’ that would ‘let us find out where every single American visited Web sites.

“The bill is mislabeled,” said Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the panel. “This is not protecting children from Internet pornography. It’s creating a database for everybody in this country for a lot of other purposes.”

Rep. Sensenbrenner said: “I oppose this bill…It can be amended, but I don’t think it can be fixed…It poses numerous risks that well outweigh any benefits, and I’m not convinced it will contribute in a significant way to protecting children.”

But the bill eventually passed on shameful 19-10 bipartisan vote and now moves to the full House.

Today more than 50 venture capitalists — from forty firms which have funded many of today’s most popular Internet companies — have announced their opposition to S968, Senator Leahy’s PROTECT IP (PIPA) Act. In a letter to Congress, the financiers noted PIPA, “will stifle investment in Internet services, throttle innovation, and hurt American competitiveness.” The new business opponents join free speech advocates and companies like Google in pushing back against this dangerous legislation.

You can read the letter and urge your lawmakers to oppose PROTECT IP by clicking here.

PIPA would give the government the power to force Internet service providers, search engines, and other “information location tools” to block users’ access to sites that have been accused of copyright infringement — initiating a China-like censorship regime here in the United States.

As one signer of the letter noted, “The signatories to this letter work for firms that manage over $13B. We are early investors in services like Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, Skype, Groupon, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Foursquare, and a host of other important web services. The services we have backed now reach over a billion users.”

In particular, the letter’s authors worry that:

1) By requiring “information location tools” — potentially encompassing any “director[ies], index[es], reference[s], pointer[s], or hypertext link[s]” — to remove access to entire domains, the bill puts burdens on countless Internet services.

2) By requiring access to sites to be blocked by Domain Name System providers, it endangers the security and integrity of the Internet.

3) The bill’s private right of action will no doubt be used by many rights-holders in ways that create significant burdens on legitimate online commerce services. The scope of orders and cost of litigation could be significant, even for companies acting in good faith.  Rights-holders have stated their interest in this private right of action because they worry that the Department of Justice will not have enough resources to initiate actions against all of the infringing sites.  Yet, why should costs be shifted to innocent Internet entrepreneurs, most of whom have budgets smaller than the Department of Justice’s?

The more Americans have heard about the details of Leahy’s PROTECT IP bill, the more we’ve seen them come out against this dangerous Internet censorship effort. The very people who made the Internet as we know it today possible are opposing this bill — and that should trouble anybody who claims to care about protecting American jobs.

You can read the letter and urge your lawmakers to oppose PROTECT IP by clicking here.

More than 350,000 people have signed Demand Progress’s petitions against PIPA and the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act — an earlier version of the same bill. Over 50,000 members emailed their lawmakers last week to demand that they join Senator Wyden in opposing the bill. And more than 6,000 Demand Progress members have called their lawmakers to urge them to oppose PIPA.

Facebook will do anything to get China to accept its friend request. As China cracks down on dissidents and Google condemns that country’s authoritarian leadership, Facebook is considering a partnership with Chinese censors.

Will you make sure your Facebook friends know? Click here to share it on Facebook.

Facebook’s lobbyist Adam Conner just told the Wall Street Journal, “Maybe we will block content in some countries, but not others….We are occasionally held in uncomfortable positions because now we’re allowing too much, maybe, free speech in countries that haven’t experienced it before.”

Astounding. And this disregard for civil liberties is nothing new: Facebook has consistently dodged hard questions about free speech. Last year they refused to attend a U.S. Senate hearing on “global Internet freedom” and the company won’t join the tech industry’s Global Network Initiative, which promotes human rights and free speech. Will you demand that Facebook start respecting civil liberties? Click here to sign the petition.

PETITION TO MARK ZUCKERBERG AND THE FACEBOOK TEAM: Your callous disregard for free speech and human rights is completely unacceptable. Partnership with censors in China or anywhere else is counterproductive, bad for business, and just plain wrong.

Click here to sign the petition. We’ll make sure Facebook gets the message.

The government is starting to feel the heat after its series of botched website seizures: For month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has taken down blogs and search engines that weren’t involved in any crimes.   And then a couple of weeks ago they managed to shut down 84,000 sites completely by accident.

The US Government has yet again shuttered several domain names this week. The Department of Justice and Homeland Security’s ICE office proudly announced that they had seized domains related to counterfeit goods and child pornography. What they failed to mention, however, is that one of the targeted domains belongs to a free DNS provider, and that 84,000 websites were wrongfully accused of links to child pornography crimes.

ICE’s flubs have made it clear that they have no business wielding this much power over the Internet.  Now ICE is feeling the pressure, and its director knows that he has a public relations nightmare on his hands: He just took the unusual step of giving an interview to try to justify the seizure policy where he asserted, “We can seize and forfeit [websites] just like we seize and forfeit bank accounts, houses and vehicles that are use in other crimes.”

But ICE has been taking down websites of people who aren’t guilty of crimes, and in so doing they are undermining Americans’ basic free speech rights.  Will you click here to tell ICE that they need to end their seizure program right away?