You'd think that the proponents of SOPA^[1] would give up that legislative dead parrot's ghost. But they're still doing the rounds on radio and in print, claiming that millions of Americans were 'duped' into opposing their harmless little internet censorship law.

The fresh (!) talking points go like this: Wikipedia, Reddit, Boing Boing and others 'lied' to the public about what SOPA was in the crucial final moments, 'abused our power' by going dark for a day, and thereby tricked legislators and the public into turning on a much-needed new law.

What rot.

First, the facts of SOPA's sloppy definitions, domain takedown provisions and weakening of safe harbor protections are are very well-known; this renewed insistence that everyone misunderstood them is gaslighting performance art. SOPA was an indiscriminate lashing-out at everything the entertainment industry hates, from unrepentant criminals to the technology that turns their castles into sand.

Second, the claim that blanking our websites was an 'abuse' says much about how corporate lobbyists view free expression: as something to be regulated like a rent or privilege. We went dark to make clear to our readers what could happen to websites affected by SOPA and PIPA: darkness.

Finally, SOPA could never have stemmed copyright infringement or anything else that it claimed to address. The only possible outcome was social harm, and the industry would have been back at the congressional trough soon enough.

And yet, post-defeat, here they are on radio stations and TV spots and op-eds across the nation. This lingering of the January fog shows just how certain they were these laws would pass. They thought they'd nailed it, and they just can't give it up.

The important lesson to draw from this is that they don't know why it fell apart.

Would you hold still, please, sir?

The claim that SOPA and PIPA contained no censorship provisions is brow-furrowingly odd. As originally written, the laws explicitly targeted domestic websites, making it even easier to get them taken down than is already the case. Safe harbor provisions in copyright law were superceded, further incenting service providers to kill on demand. Moreover, SOPA provided for courts to interfere directly with the domain name system.

Some of these provisions were changed only after public objections, a superficial fix to an awful law that still contained all the legal frameworks and implied enforcement costs that it was designed to impose.

When proponents of the law call its critics liars, remember why they're so defensive about it. It's because those criticisms were true, even on the proponents' own terms, until the law's passage was in doubt. To the end, it accurately represented the entertainment industry's desired state of affairs.

Because of SOPA/PIPA's vague definitions, for example, even .com and .net sites like Boing Boing could be subject to court order, as we look like search engines if you squint at us just right. We wouldn't have to be the targets of a SOPA claim.

Just today, we've been snarled up in a dispute between hi-fi component distributors fighting over the licensing rights to market a particular foreign brand. One asked us to remove a link to the other. If these laws had passed, they could simply SOPA up the other guys, and the first we'd hear about it is a judge ordering us to remove posts about them from our "search engine."

SOPA was a feast of potential SLAPP tools to indirectly burden websites with. Just as music labels and Hollywood can't figure out why SOPA failed to pass, they can't see how useful it would have been to everyday cranks, bullies and shakedown artists.

Hollywood's so fixated on influencing Washington through campaign contributions and lobbying, it can't imagine that political movement occurs naturally, without being stoked by cash. Listening to spokespeople talk, the very idea of unpaid-for influence seems unfair to them.

A specific example: on Wednesday, Taylor Hackford of the Director's Guild of America spoke to NPR. His dudgeon over everyone's lies was standard fare. But he also cast his organization as little guys silenced by the might of the tech industry. The guild sees itself as the victim of political rough play. But the truth is that the guild spends hundreds of thousands of dollars every year on lobbying. It projects anger at others' advantages because it cannot grasp why graft fails.

Hollywood, let me ask you something. If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?

Was SOPA's defeat a last-minute upset? Like the 'overnight' success of a band after 10,000 hours of toil, the truth is more complex. Its dangers were immediately clear to many, and the outcry built over the course of months. The participation of big guns, which only committed to joining the blackout after many smaller sites had already done so, was the culmination of a genuine netroots campaign.

And yet the public—with more than 10 million petitioners before blackout day—are, in Hackford's view, "dupes". That's what these guys think of you. They loathe you and underestimate you and have no clue at all about why you do what you do.

You should admit your situation

The strangest new development in pro-SOPA argumentation is to remind us that they don't need SOPA to shut down U.S. websites, because they can already do that by other means. It's the most tone-deaf rhetorical talking point yet: "why would be need SOPA to consor you when we already can?"

And censorship is certainly what results. Just yesterday, the U.S. Secret Service, with the help of tech industry lickspittle GoDaddy, confiscated the domain of JotForm, a popular web form service. A single customer was accused of using it abusively. As a result, content was removed from thousands of legal websites, apparently without a court order.

"I told them we are a Web service with hundreds of thousands of users, so this is a matter of urgency, and we are ready to cooperate fully," the site's founder, Aytekin Tank, said in a thread on Hacker News. "I was ready to shutdown any form they request and provide any information we have about the user. Unfortunately, she told me she needs to look at the case which she can do in a few days. I called her many times again to check about the case, but she seems to be getting irritated with me."

SOPA wouldn't have created this kind of bungling censorship, but it would have made it more readily available to the America's most spiteful and shameless litigants.

What's a real shame is that the music and film industry's main strategy is to demand laws that protect them from change. They're the world's most committed investors in new art and new culture, and they've already been shown by companies like Apple and Amazon how to master the new media. But faced with the prospect of selling their products on terms customers get to define, they'd rather screw themselves.

1. SOPA and PIPA were the House and Senate versions of the law, respectively.]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/02/17/oh-my-god-we-are-still-havin.html/feed 57 http://boingboing.net/2012/01/14/boing-boing-will-go-dark-on-ja.html http://boingboing.net/2012/01/14/boing-boing-will-go-dark-on-ja.html#comments Sun, 15 Jan 2012 00:08:07 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=139152 On January 18, Boing Boing will join Reddit and other sites around the Internet in "going dark" to oppose SOPA and PIPA, the pending US legislation that creates a punishing Internet censorship regime and exports it to the rest of the world. Boing Boing could never co-exist with a SOPA world: we could not ever link to another website unless we were sure that no links to anything that infringes copyright appeared on that site. So in order to link to a URL on LiveJournal or WordPress or Twitter or Blogspot, we'd have to first confirm that no one had ever made an infringing link, anywhere on that site. Making one link would require checking millions (even tens of millions) of pages, just to be sure that we weren't in some way impinging on the ability of five Hollywood studios, four multinational record labels, and six global publishers to maximize their profits.

If we failed to take this precaution, our finances could be frozen, our ad broker forced to pull ads from our site, and depending on which version of the bill goes to the vote, our domains confiscated, and, because our server is in Canada, our IP address would be added to a US-wide blacklist that every ISP in the country would be required to censor.

This is the part of the post where I'm supposed to say something reasonable like, "Everyone agrees that piracy is wrong, but this is the wrong way to fight it."

But you know what? Screw that.

Even though a substantial portion of my living comes from the entertainment industry, I don't think that any amount of "piracy" justifies this kind of depraved indifference to the consequences of one's actions. Big Content haven't just declared war on Boing Boing and Reddit and the rest of the "fun" Internet: they've declared war on every person who uses the net to publicize police brutality, every oppressed person in the Arab Spring who used the net to organize protests and publicize the blood spilled by their oppressors, every abused kid who used the net to reveal her father as a brutalizer of children, every gay kid who used the net to discover that life is worth living despite the torment she's experiencing, every grassroots political campaigner who uses the net to make her community a better place -- as well as the scientists who collaborate online, the rescue workers who coordinate online, the makers who trade tips online, the people with rare diseases who support each other online, and the independent creators who use the Internet to earn their livings.

The contempt for human rights on display with SOPA and PIPA is more than foolish. Foolishness can be excused. It's more than greed. Greed is only to be expected. It is evil, and it must be fought.

SOPA Strike is compiling a list of sites that are also going dark for Jan 18. If you want an Internet where human rights, free speech and the rule of law are not subordinated to the entertainment industry's profits, I hope you'll join us on it.

Thank you.]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/01/14/boing-boing-will-go-dark-on-ja.html/feed 155 http://boingboing.net/2011/06/29/talking-about-scienc.html http://boingboing.net/2011/06/29/talking-about-scienc.html#comments Wed, 29 Jun 2011 17:44:06 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker

There were two things I learned watching the Netroots Nation panel on Science Policy in Unexpected Places.

First, more science communication is happening, in more ways. Scientists are taking initiative to talk to the public and to journalists, helping to make sense of the flood of information so that people come away educated, instead of overwhelmed. And advocates are finding fun ways to bring basic science—the stuff that isn't fresh news, but sure does help when you need to actually understand the news—to people who have traditionally been overlooked by science education programs. Sports fans, for instance. That's the good stuff.

The bad stuff: Turns out, it's frustratingly easy for science to become as polarized as politics, with a mentality that divides the world into the Smart People (who already know everything) and the Idiots (who won't ever know anything).

I don't normally go for political conventions. But I did choose to attend this year's Netroots, a gathering of capital-P Progressive bloggers and activists that took place in downtown Minneapolis between June 16 and 19. Josh Rosenau, a science blogger and the programs and policy director at the National Center for Science Education invited me to watch the panel he'd put together, all about how to engage the public on science—especially the sort of science that intertwines with politics. I came away from the experience both charmed and frustrated.

I'll start with the charm, because, frankly, that made up the bulk of the experience. You know that special sort of glee you feel when it turns out that the issues you're concerned about are at the top of somebody else's radar, too? There was a lot of that.

For example, one of the things I love about writing for BoingBoing is that I'm able to reach the portion of our audience that isn't necessarily prone to picking up science magazines or regularly reading science news websites—the only places my work would otherwise turn up. Sure, there's a lot of overlap between readers of BoingBoing and readers of, say, Discover. But it's not a 100% overlap. Come for the cute cat videos, stay for deconstructions of the concept of "peer review." That's what I always say.

But here in the warm embrace of the Internet it's easy to forget how little science news makes its way to the general public. Dedicated science journalists were among the first people laid off at newspapers and TV channels. That's why I like what Dr. Heidi Cullen and Climate Central are trying to do. Most Americans get their news from local television, Cullen said, and they consider local news to be more honest than cable. So Climate Central works with TV meteorologists (often the closest thing to a science reporter or a scientist in an average American's life) to help them find ways to insert quality climate science into nightly newscasts.

Another thing I've been thinking a lot about lately is the problem of context. These politically contentious issues—climate change, vaccinations, stem cell research—we tend to talk about them primarily in the context of political tension. They come across as contests to be won, rather than as actual issues of science and average people end up unsure of who to trust. That's probably why Americans understand controversial science less well than they understand the basic stuff. In 2008, 44% of Americans could correctly define DNA, but only 20% could do the same for stem cells.

I don't necessarily think the key to solving this problem is more (bigger! harder!) repetition about the facts behind controversial science issues. Instead, I think the solution starts with the basics. If you help people understand why peer review is valuable in a context that doesn't press their political buttons, they're probably more likely to respond well when you call them back to that information later, in a more controversial context.

I love what panelist John Abraham and the Climate Science Rapid Response Team are doing—matching scientists with journalists to make sure that science gets its say on controversial topics. But I think that the work of another panelist, Darlene Cavalier, is just as important ... even though it might not seem so at first.

Cavalier is the brains behind the Science Cheerleaders, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. There are cheerleaders. They are talking about science. And you ought to resist the urge to brush this off as fluff. That's because Cavalier is using the concept as a way to get often-ignored populations excited about the basics of science. At Netroots, she told the audience about taking a team of Science Cheerleaders into a Philadelphia bar during a football game to talk about geometry. When you've got a drunk guy swiping your megaphone to yell about vectors, I actually think you're doing something right. (Plus, it was more than a little awesome to watch her video clip wherein several pro-sports cheerleaders discussed their other careers in medicine, biology, neuroscience, and math.)

If you assume cheerleaders are bimbos and bar patrons won't care about math, then you're never going to get those people thinking seriously about the science of climate.

Which brings me to what I didn't like. Shawn Otto has done some good things, including promoting Science Debates for political candidates. But the perspective on science education that he presented at Netroots Nation was way off-base.

No discussion about how to reach the general public with science should start with a clip from Idiocracy.

Otto's message was basically this: Most of America is just stupid and they aren't capable of understanding science in any meaningful way. So we, the enlightened ones, are going to have to push them over to our side on science-based political issues by using fear and a good public shaming.

I might have agreed with that a year ago. But that's before I finished researching Before the Lights Go Out, my upcoming book about the future of energy in America. Along the way, I learned some pretty interesting things. First off, Americans have a lot of reasons to care about energy. One person's list of concerns might not match yours, but they might still be interested in the same solutions. The Climate and Energy Project, a Kansas-based non-profit, found this out when they did a series of focus groups. They expected to find a lot of people who thought climate change was a lie. What they didn't expect was that many of those people would be taking action on energy change, anyway. A guy can call environmentalists liars, and still choose to own a Prius and swap out his light bulbs for CFLs. So, maybe, instead of calling him stupid, we should ask him why he did that and try to find some common ground.

Politicians may have manipulated climate change into becoming a straw man for partisan slap fights, but that doesn't mean Americans are stupid. You can see this reflected in the polls. Between 2006 and 2010, American concern about climate change fell. But during the same years, American interest in alternative energy and sustainable lifestyle choices remained strong.

Today, somewhere on the order of 60% of us believe that climate change is a serious threat supported by evidence. But, depending on the poll and the specific questions being asked, between 70% and 90% of us support things like increasing funding for alternative energy and mass transit, raising fuel efficiency standards for cars, instituting tougher energy efficiency standards on other areas of our lives, and requiring utility companies to get more of their energy from renewable sources. Even a majority of self-described Republicans support alternative energy and energy-change policies that you might suspect they'd be against.

My point here is that writing the majority of Americas off as idiots isn't going to solve your political problems, and it doesn't even reflect the political reality that those Americans profess to believe in. The lack of political action on climate change is a big a problem, but we're more likely to get that solved using the ideas of Heidi Cullen, Darlene Cavalier, and John Abraham, than those of Shawn Otto.

I really like Tevis's approach, his platform, and his ideals. I can't give to his campaign -- I'm a dirty foreigner and I don't even live in the USA (though the IRS is happy to tax the hell out me!) -- but you can!

Running for Office: Option 4 (Thanks, Danjite!)

The Obama administration has undone a few of the Bush administration's worst policies, true. Yet when it comes to Obama's increasingly clear disdain for some core civil liberties and his administration's penchant for secrecy despite cheerful rhetoric to the contrary, Salon's Glenn Greenwald arrives at a dismal -- but sadly, logical -- conclusion:   

After many years of anger and complaint and outrage directed at the Bush administration for its civil liberties assaults and executive power abuses, the last thing most people want to do is conclude that the Obama administration is continuing the core of that extremism. That was why the flurry of executive orders in the first week produced such praise: those who are devoted to civil liberties were, from the start, eager to believe that things would be different, and most want to do everything but conclude that the only improvements that will be made by Obama will be cosmetic ones.

But it's becoming increasingly difficult for honest commentators to do anything else but conclude that. After all, these are the exact policies which, when embraced by Bush, produced such intense protest over the last eight years.  Nobody is complaining because the Obama administration is acting too slowly in renouncing these policies. The opposite is true:   they are rushing to actively embrace them.  And while there are still opportunities to meaningfully depart from the extremism of the last eight years, the evidence appears more and more compelling that, at least in these areas, there is little or no real intent on the part of the Obama administration to do so.

Democrats in Congress and much of the political left have been silent or nearly so despite the evidence. You expect cowardice from Congress, which spent the Bush presidency in a perpetual bent-over posture. The Netroots folks who did so much to elect Obama should be screaming bloody murder by now. Too few are even slightly audible. A shame.

Maybe the Republicans will re-discover civil liberties at some point. Nah.

(photo via Flickr by Marcin Wichary)

Representative Scott Schwab (R-Olathe) has introduced a bill to require politicians to gather and disclose the personal information of small (less than $50) donors, if that politician raises more than $1,000. This is basically the Sean Tevis Campaign Finance Bill, and it will only affect politicians who raise their funds through distributed, grassroots campaigns. As Tevis points out. the main reason for campaign finance disclosure rules is to track money's influence in politics: "You give $1 to a candidate. It’s a pretty safe bet that they won’t feel indebted to you. If you give them $100, they might. You give a candidate $1,000 they will probably drop everything to take your call." Do Kansans have to worry that net-people who paypalled $8.34 to Tevis will lean on him for government pork?

The $1,000 threshold creates an unequal protection of privacy.

If you donate $1 to a candidate, you can expect that your personal information will remain private. If that candidate, however, crosses the arbitrary $1,000 threshold, which is beyond your control, then suddenly your reasonable expectation of privacy that other small donors enjoy is stripped from you.

For example:
• John gives $1 to Candidate A
• Mary gives $1 to Candidate B
• Candidate A *does not* raise more than $1,000 in small donations.
• Candidate B becomes very popular and she raises more than $1,000 in small donations.

The effect of this is that:
John’s personal information is safe.
Mary’s personal information is not safe.

Lessig is rumored to be considering the position and has registered the domain change-congress.com. California's 12th Congressional district is quite possibly the best place for the cyber-intellectual to run for office as it is the epicenter of US tech world and his views on technology, copyright, and corruption are likely to resonate with constituents.

But Lessig needs to know there will be members of his community that will support him if he decides to run, so now is the time to donate (funds will go to CC if Lessig doesn't end up running), buy some t-shirts and watch the videos. We're looking to get 1,000 people committed to volunteer or donate through ActBlue by the end of the week, so please sign up if you're interested in helping out. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2008/02/18/draft-larry-lessig-f.html/feed 8