In principle, a VPN requires some sort of sufficiently fast bidirectional connection. And IP tunnelling can be done through next to everything, including DNS requests or ICMP packets. I can imagine a protocol using low-bandwidth non-filterable connection type for negotiation of a higher-bandwidth VPN-like one.

I expect such laws to be introduced, and to be vague, impotent and entirely unenforceable.

I was the founding executive director of Tor.  We’d been discussing this on Stanford’s Liberation Technology listserv today, and I quoted the current execdir’s response from those public discussions:

Andrew Lewman, the current executive director of The Tor Project, commented on a public listserv, in relation to the BB cited CNET article and a Chilling Effects blog article which Declan quotes on CNET:

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If Tor was marketed as a way to explicitly defeat the SOPA provisions, if SOPA is passed as is, and if the US Attorney General’s office comes after Tor for specifically marketing Tor as a way to defeat the DNS censorship of a blocked url in the US, then perhaps Declan is correct.

Even Wendy’s blog post mentioned in Declan’s blog post is full of ‘could’ and ‘if’ statements. I take Declan’s post with a huge grain of salt.

In some bizarre world where the First Amendment of the US Constitution is gutted, then Tor falling under SOPA is the least of our concerns.

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back to my comments:

It’s probably true that the set of people who care about the future of Tor and the set of people who think that SOPA sucks have a nearly 100% overlap for a huge number of reasons. 

If you care about these things and you live in the US and you aren’t kicking your congressional delegation’s butts on this bill — what are you, dead? And if you live outside the US, and you care about these things, and you know people in the US who are not calling their congressional delegation about SOPA — educate them, and raise them from the dead.

We have enough zombies, we don’t need a further apocalypse in our civil liberties.If they don’t call their congressional delegation to protect their civil liberties, make them listen to this.

(the civil liberties rickroll)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woLQI8X2R6Y&feature=related

2.) Has anyone considered the theory/rant from onecandleinthedark.blogspot.com about how the media giants promoted the spread of piracy tools (since post napster)?  Limewire, Kazaa, Bittorrent, all distributed almost exclusively on affiliate sites owned by SOPA supporters.

As the government shuts down foreign VPN providers, more will pop up in their place, and the Feds will eventually get tired of playing whac-a-mole trying to shut them down.

I expect those VPN laws to possibly be introduced in 2013 or 2014.  

Of course the bills are worded vaguely enough that almost any (future) publication or technology on the net that’s a nuisance to big corporations/government can be obstructed or disappeared. Including ‘stolen’ Lady Gaga MP3s.

Food for thought.

tl;dr
The powerful badly want their secrecy back. And then some.

How easy will it to include Wikileaks under SOPA’s vague language.

TL;DR SOPA will make it so that the US can easily block “illegal” sites such as Wikileaks or Piratebay

SOPA makes provision for punishing Americans who contribute expertise to projects that can be used to defeat its censorship regime

Hmmm.. the entire Internet infrastructure can, indeed, be used to defeat censorship.  I guess SOPA, in essence, bans the entire Internet.

Oh well, no more Internet because of greedy, idiotic, fucktard corporatists…

While onion networks provide deniability, that only works if the potential attacker cares. What if a pedophile request exits the network through my node? Am I aiding and abetting that pedophile’s deniability? Decisions in the 90′s would say no; pure carriers are not responsible for the content. SOPA’s premise makes that a “maybe”.

I want a Tor node virus. All those grannies with brand new boxes they just use for email that are terribly firewalled should be clicking on attachments from their clever grandkids and suddenly, poof, the network spreads.

Really, though, it’s one more attempt for scared little people to put the genie back. The larger the ratio of genie to bottle, the less luck they’ve have. And when half the Internet is running dark and peer-to-peer, well, let’s say I don’t like their odds.

Summary: If Wikileaks – the site hosting classified US documents – cannot be blocked in any case then why, oh why is SOPA needed at all?  

Specifically when it comes to encryption, and more generally with any security technology, the DoD won’t use something it can easily defeat. The attitude is that if the DoD can break it, opposing forces might be able to as well. Especially if classified details or analysis of said technology were to leak. That NEVER happens, right?

Case in point: IBM developed DES and the NSA requested changes. The changes were public but the reason was classified. It turns out the NSA’s work on DES was not to introduce a backdoor, rather they found a weakness and fixed it. Still, the NSA kept their analysis of DES classified for so long because they weren’t sure there weren’t other weaknesses… and more than likely they were using DES as it was the best available crypto at the time.

FYI, “Privacy, Inc.” is an op-ed column by a political correspondent, not political news by said correspondent. Just because CNet puts it under news doesn’t mean it is fact.

The paragraph you put in quotes is Cory’s summary. Specifically, “Tor fits the bill” is his opinion. It is not in the article. Did you read the article?

This is from the article and conveniently not mentioned by Cory:

During last week’s SOPA debate in the House Judiciary committee, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat whose district includes the heart of Silicon Valley, offered an amendment to revise the anti-circumvention language.

“Those very same tools that we have worked to devise, that we have funded to develop in some cases, are the same tools that could also be used by Internet users in the United States to circumvent the blocking of a foreign infringing site under the bill,” Lofgren said.

Smith replied by suggesting that “you and I and others involved could write language that would address your concerns.”

the amendment proposed by Lofgren was that the SOPA anti-circumvention language “does not include any product or service designed or marketed for the circumvention of measures taken by a foreign government to block access to an Internet site.” 
.. which is a disaster in the way that it is worded, in that it says if any foreign govt blocked the same site as SOPA, a tool to circumvent the block would be excluded from anti-circumvention.

Summary: Concerns have been raised. Smith is willing to work with them.

As an aside, I fully expect if Wikileaks could feasibly be blocked, it would be and you don’t need SOPA to do it. Wikileaks is hosting US classified information, there are plenty of existing laws that already apply. And so far it seems untouchable as long as it isn’t hosted in the US or using US-based services.

The ordinary decent people who can bypass this law will be made criminals and subject to severe punishment. It is a direct attack on Freedom of Speech for the profit of private interest. I would hardly call that hyperbole.

*sorry, I don’t think what I’m saying makes sense; too much sarcasm & anger.