If The RIAA Wants To Talk About Misinformation Campaigns, Let's Start With The RIAA's Misinformation Campaign

from the misinformation-works dept

We already walked through the ridiculousness of RIAA boss Cary Sherman claiming that the reason SOPA/PIPA were defeated was because of a "misinformation" campaign on the part of some tech companies. Tons of folks who have followed the RIAA for years probably broke out in open laughter when we saw this statement from Sherman:

Misinformation may be a dirty trick, but it works.

Because, if anyone knows that "misinformation works," it's Cary Sherman, who is famous for his ability to run vast misinformation campaigns to get bills passed. Thankfully, Ernest Falcon, over at Public Knowledge decided that if Sherman wanted to open the door to discussing "misinformation campaigns" concerning SOPA/PIPA, we might as well focus on the biggest one of all: the claims by the MPAA and RIAA that DNS blocking was no big deal:

During the legislative hearing on SOPA, House Homeland Security Subcommittee Chairman on Cybersecurity Rep. Dan Lungren (R-CA) questioned MPAA Exec. Vice President Michael O’Leary about the cybersecurity problem.  In response he received the standard misinformation campaign line of there was no cybersecurity problem and that this type of activity “occurred all the time.”  To bolster their misinformation campaign, the content lobby worked hard to manufacture the “truth” by highlighting the work of the very small number of individuals (a grand total of three) who wrote “technical rebuttals.”  These were not so much rebuttals as they were well orchestrated advocacy pieces that ignored the engineering and distorted the studies they utilized in order to dupe Members of Congress to believe the legitimate concerns were in fact unsupported.

Part of the RIAA and MPAA misinformation campaign centered on the argument that DNS filtering and secure networks (DNSSEC) could both exist in the same network.  This was despite the fact that top experts in the field provided an extensive explanation why that would not be technologically possible (a couple of these individuals actually saved the Internet in the past).  In the end, when Comcast (a SOPA supporter) announced they had to shut down anything that filters DNS traffic when they activated DNSSEC and the White House Cybersecurity Coordinator stated that the bills “pose a real risk to cybersecurity,” the jig was up.

Lastly, claiming that censorship concerns in regards to DNS filtering were misplaced completely ignores the fact that SOPA and PIPA moved America closer to censorship oriented regimes.  If these bills were enacted into law, American broadband providers would have been required to install the same filtering technology used in China, Iran, United Arab Emirates, Armenia, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Bahrain, Burma (Myanmar), Syria, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.  This reality triggered the outpouring of opposition from the international human rights community who fight censorship overseas every day and point to the United States as the model.  Summing up the well informed reasoning behind their opposition, Julian Sanchez with the Cato Institute points out that enacting SOPA and PIPA would mean the “only difference between the Unites States and China is what's on the blacklist.” 

Part of the RIAA's favorite tactics is to pull out all the dirty tricks in the book... and any time people call them on it, to accuse the other side of using the dirty tricks that were really being used by the RIAA. It's a classic DC-insider move, but in this day and age, where the internet can route around lies, it's going to backfire, as it did here. All you have to do is look at the comments on the original Sherman NY Times piece, where upwards of 90% of the comments call Sherman out for his ridiculous claims. Sherman has the old playbook, the one where those who knew the truth couldn't speak back. If he had paid attention at all to what happened in the SOPA/PIPA debate he would have know that playbook doesn't work any more. But, it's all he knows. If the major labels were smart (don't laugh), they'd dump Sherman and put someone in place who actually gets the internet.

Filed Under: blocking, cary sherman, dns, misinformation, pipa, sopa
Companies: riaa

SOPA Delayed; Cantor Promises It Won't Be Brought To The Floor Until 'Issues Are Addressed'

from the holding-fire dept

Some late breaking news here: following Lamar Smith's announcement that the new manager's amendment for SOPA will remove DNS blocking (to be added back at a later date after it's been "studied"), Rep. Issa has announced that he will now postpone the "nerd" hearing that he was holding in the House Oversight Committee, which was originally scheduled for Wednesday. The key reason? Majority Leader Eric Cantor has promised him that he will not bring the bill to the floor unless there's real consensus on the bill. That's big news -- though, as Issa notes in his statement, it's worrisome that Senator Reid still seems to want to move forward with PIPA:

"While I remain concerned about Senate action on the Protect IP Act, I am confident that flawed legislation will not be taken up by this House. Majority Leader Cantor has assured me that we will continue to work to address outstanding concerns and work to build consensus prior to any anti-piracy legislation coming before the House for a vote,” said Chairman Issa. “The voice of the Internet community has been heard. Much more education for Members of Congress about the workings of the Internet is essential if anti-piracy legislation is to be workable and achieve broad appeal.”

"Earlier tonight, Chairman Smith announced that he will remove the DNS blocking provision from his legislation. Although SOPA, despite the removal of this provision, is still a fundamentally flawed bill, I have decided that postponing the scheduled hearing on DNS blocking with technical experts is the best course of action at this time. Right now, the focus of protecting the Internet needs to be on the Senate where Majority Leader Reid has announced his intention to try to move similar legislation in less than two weeks."

Indeed. It is still important that Congress hears from "the nerds" and plenty of other experts concerning the implications of these attempts to regulate the internet, but if SOPA is not going to be rushed to the floor, such hearings and education can (and should) happen in due time, rather than rushing to get them in, just as Congress comes back into session. There are more important things for Congress to focus on.

Filed Under: darrell isa, delayed, dns, eric cantor, harry reid, hearings, lamar smith, pipa, protect ip, sopa

Lamar Smith Follows Leahy's Steps With Plans To Delay DNS Implementation In SOPA

from the but-of-course dept

Well this is hardly a surprise given the trial balloons floated on Wednesday and Senator Leahy's announcement yesterday, but Rep. Lamar Smith has now said that, like Leahy, he wants to delay the implementation of DNS blocking within SOPA until it's been "studied." According to a press release:

"After consultation with industry groups across the country, I feel we should remove Domain Name System blocking from the Stop Online Piracy Act so that the Committee can further examine the issues surrounding this provision. We will continue to look for ways to ensure that foreign websites cannot sell and distribute illegal content to U.S. consumers."

Once again... the devil is very much in the details. And, to be honest, Smith technically "removed DNS blocking" from SOPA already. It no longer requires DNS blocking, but merely "reasonable measures" to block access to sites. So, it's not even entirely clear what he means here. Does he mean he'll remove site blocking? Or is he really leaving the document alone since it doesn't have DNS? Either way, it seems clear that the real plan here is to try to delay the controversial part until it's been "studied" and then implement it later...

Filed Under: copyright, dns, lamar smith, patrick leahy, pipa, protect ip, sopa

Don't Be Fooled: Leahy Is NOT Removing DNS Blocking Provisions, Merely Delaying Them

from the bad-reporting dept

We've already written about Senator Leahy's decision to delay the implementation of DNS blocking in PIPA. Unfortunately, despite the clear words in the announcement, it appears that Leahy's staff is going around suggesting to the press that this means he's dropping DNS. Thus you get reports in Wired and in ReadWriteWeb saying that Leahy is offering to remove the DNS blocking provisions. That's exactly what Leahy's staff would like people to believe, in the hopes that this makes the bill palatable. First, it wouldn't actually make the bill palatable, but it's important to read what Leahy actually said:

As I prepare a managers' amendment to be considered during the floor debate, I will therefore propose that the positive and negative effects of this provision be studied before implemented...

That is NOT removing the DNS blocking provisions. It is merely delaying them.

Furthermore, since the DNS blocking was such a key component of the bill and, at the very last minute, Leahy is suddenly claiming that we can all ignore that section for the time being, isn't that reason enough to stop and wait, rather than rushing this bill forward? Leahy is admitting that he did not and still does not understand a key provision in his bill. Do we really think that's the only provision he did not understand? Shouldn't this, alone, be evidence that this bill needs to be rethought entirely? This isn't a reason to move forward. It's the opposite. It's a reason to put this bill aside and spend some time actually understanding the issues at play.

Filed Under: dns, dns blocking, dnssec, pat leahy, pipa, protect ip, sopa

Paul Vixie Explains, In Great Detail, Why You Don't Want 'Policy Analysts' Determining DNS Rules

from the let-the-geeks-be-geeks-please dept

There's been plenty of talk, obviously, about the problems with SOPA and PIPA and how they treat DNS as a tool for blocking, despite the massive problems it causes for security efforts like DNSSEC. Every single working engineer who's spoken out on this issue (that we've seen, at least), has made this same point. We've even heard from techies within the government saying the same thing. And, of course, even Comcast itself (despite supposedly being in favor of the bill) proudly admits that DNS blocking is incompatible with DNSSEC. Even as the House and Senate are trying to punt on DNS issue, they still fully expect to put it in place at a later date, so it's important to discuss why it's a bad, bad idea.

So far, the "pro-SOPA/PIPA" folks haven't been able to find a legitimate working technologist who says that these plans make sense. Instead, they've brought out some "policy analysts" who have some basic technology background, but not a deep understanding of DNS. But, because they can toss around some tech terms, SOPA/PIPA supporters think they sound credible. However, in his latest post on the subject, Vixie walks through a step-by-step explanation for why each suggested method of DNS blocking won't work and/or breaks DNSSEC. Basically, these "policy analysts" keep suggesting different ways that they think DNS blocking could work, and Vixie explains why they're wrong each time, and points out the importance of actually having DNS engineers do DNS engineering -- not policy analysts.

For example an early draft of this legislative package called for DNS redirection of malicious domain names in conflict with the end-to-end DNS Security system (DNSSEC). Any such redirection would be trivially detected as a man in the middle attack by secure clients and would thus be indistinguishable from the kind of malevolent attacks that DNSSEC is designed to prevent. After the impossibility of redirection was shown supporters of PIPA and SOPA admitted that a redirection (for example, showing an "FBI Warning" page when an American consumer tried to access a web site dedicated to piracy or infringement) was not actually necessary. Their next idea was no better: to return a false No Such Domain (NXDOMAIN) signal. When the DNS technical community pointed out that NXDOMAIN had the same end-to-end security as a normal DNS answer and that false NXDOMAIN would be detected and rejected by secure clients the supporters SOPA and PIPA changed their proposal once again.

The second to latest idea for some technologically noninvasive way to respond to a DNS lookup request for a pirate or infringing domain name was "just don't answer". That is, simulate network loss and let the question "time out". When the DNS technical community explained that this would lead to long and mysterious delays in web browser behavior as well as an increased traffic load on ISP name servers due to the built in "retry logic" of all DNS clients in all consumer facing devices, we were ignored. However when we also observed that a DNSSEC client would treat this kind of "time out" as evidence of damage by the local hotel or coffee shop wireless gateway and could reasonably respond by trying alternative servers or proxies or even VPN paths in order to get a secure answer, the supporters of SOPA and PIPA agreed with this and moved right along.

The latest idea is to use the Administrative Denial (REFUSED) response code, which as originally defined seemed perfect for this situation. To me this latest proposal as well as the road we've travelled getting to this point seems like an excellent example of why network protocols should be designed by engineers....

And yet... it's not being designed by DNS engineers at all. It's being designed by policy people, with a smattering of help from some former technologists who don't really understand DNS. That seems like a pretty big problem.

Filed Under: blocking, dns, dnssec, paul vixie, pipa, policy, protect ip, sopa, technology

As SOPA/PIPA Becomes Toxic, Frantic Congress Test Runs Dropping DNS Blocking Provisions

from the scurry-scurry dept

Well, well, well. It looks like some in DC are starting to get the message that there is real concern with SOPA/PIPA. The latest is that the fact that SOPA/PIPA support is becoming "toxic" is starting to make the press. In response to that, plus significant pressure from those within the government who are concerned about online security issues... the folks behind both SOPA/PIPA are doing some trial running of finding out how people would respond if they just completely dropped the DNS/site blocking aspects from the two bills. The goal is to get the tech industry to "stop opposing" the bills (if not actually support them). Clearly, the opposition is having a pretty big impact, and we're hearing that some of the "pressure" to "fix" these bills is coming from pretty high places. Separately, even with the House Oversight Committee hearings scheduled for next Wednesday, it sounds like Lamar Smith has decided he wants to restart the SOPA markup on the same day (perhaps with a new version of SOPA... sans DNS/site blocking).

Of course, while taking out DNS blocking fixes one problem with these bills, it still leaves in place a ton of other problems. Of course, supporters of the bill will falsely claim that taking out DNS/site blocking "fixes all the complaints!" That ignores that this is exactly what they said about the last "manager's amendment" version as well. They figure if they just keep claiming that they responded to all the complaints, maybe people will believe them. But that's ridiculous. The bills still have the super broad immunity provisions that will encourage all sorts of content/site takedowns to avoid liability. On top of that, many of the definitions in both bills remain ridiculously vague and would likely lead to overblocking in other ways -- that is, things like "information location tools" having to block links to sites deemed rogue under the legislation would remain. Also, the anti-circumvention measures remain in the bill (and are not limited to just foreign sites), which is going to continue to create a huge headache for the State Department, which is funding the creation of many such circumvention tools for foreign regimes... even though offering them in the US would be a violation under the bill! On top of that, both bills still include the private right to action, which will lead to numerous unnecessary lawsuits.

The takeaway here: the growing momentum against these bills is having a big, big impact in DC, and it's forced the bills' main backers to go back to the well to see if they can find at least something to compromise on. Taking out the DNS stuff will piss off Hollywood... no doubt, but it hardly solves many of the bigger problems in the bill. Don't be fooled. No one's fixing the bill (hell, it's not clear there's anything that will fix this bill, because no one's shown why this particular bill is needed!). They're simply taking out one provision that is especially bad... while leaving in a ton of other stuff.

Filed Under: congress, dns, pipa, protect ip, sopa

Comcast -- Owner Of NBC Universal -- Admits That DNS Redirects Are Incompatible With DNSSEC

from the well-look-at-that dept

Well, well, well. Here's something interesting. Comcast, who owns NBC Universal (one of the main forces behind SOPA/PIPA), is officially a SOPA/PIPA supporter. However, yesterday, Comcast put up a post congratulating itself (deservedly so!) for completing its DNSSEC deployment, making it "the first large ISP in the North America to have fully implemented" DNSSEC across the board. That's huge, and a clear vote of confidence for DNSSEC, obviously. They also urge others to use DNSSEC:

Now that nearly 20 million households in the U.S. are able to use DNSSEC, we feel it is an important time to urge major domain owners, especially commerce and banking-related sites, to begin signing their domain names. While in the past those domains may have wanted to do so but felt it would have limited effect, they now can work on signing their domains knowing that the largest ISP in the U.S. can validate those signatures on behalf of our customers.

All of this is good... but what may be much more interesting is that, along with this announcement, Comcast has also mentioned that it is shutting down its Domain Helper service. Domain Helper was a somewhat controversial DNS-redirect system, so that when you mistyped something, it would suggest the proper page or alternatives. Many in the internet community complained that these types of redirects mess with the underlying DNS system (which they do). But, as the DNS experts have been saying all along (and NBC Universal has been trying to play down), DNSSEC is incompatible with such DNS redirects. So... that makes this next part a little awkward. Comcast is now admitting, indeed, that DNS redirects, such as Domain Helper, are incompatible with DNSSEC:

When we launched the Domain Helper service, we also set in motion its eventual shutdown due to our plans to launch DNSSEC. Domain Helper has been turned off since DNS response modification tactics, including DNS redirect services, are technically incompatible with DNSSEC and/or create conditions that can be indistinguishable from malicious modifications of DNS traffic (including DNS cache poisoning attacks). Since we want to ensure our customers have the most secure Internet experience, and that if they detect any DNSSEC breakage or error messages that they know to be concerned (rather than not knowing if the breakage/error was "official" and caused by our redirect service or "unofficial" and caused by an attacker), our priority has been placed on DNSSEC deployment -- now automatically protecting our customers...

Let's be doubly clear about this, because it's important. Just as NBC Universal and other SOPA supporters continue to insist that DNS redirect is completely compatible with DNSSEC... Comcast (and official SOPA/PIPA supporter) has rolled out DNSSEC, urged others to roll out DNSSEC and turned off its own DNS redirect system, stating clearly that DNS redirect is incompatible with DNSSEC, if you want to keep people secure. In the end, this certainly appears to suggest that Comcast is admitting that it cannot comply with SOPA/PIPA, even as the very same company is advocating for those laws.

It would appear that the left hand (people who actually understand technology) isn't speaking to the right hand (lawyers/lobbyists) within the Comcast family. But, I think that NBC Universal and anyone else insisting that DNS redirects are fine in DNSSEC owe everyone else a pretty big apology... when their own company's experts are admitting that the two are incompatible.

Filed Under: dns, dns blocking, dnssec
Companies: comcast, nbc universal

Harvard Researchers Explain That SOPA Supporters Are Misusing Their Research To Support SOPA

from the not-so-fast,-daniel-castro dept

We recently discussed how ITIF's Daniel Castro (who's been credited with pushing a SOPA-style censorship program to government officials in the first place) bizarrely used the web censorship done by 13 of the most oppressive governments to support his case that censorship under SOPA would work. The argument was based on a Harvard/OpenNet Initiative to study how the internet is censored and used in various repressive nations. The authors of that study have now come out pretty strongly against Castro for his misuse of their report, and have explained in detail how Castro's assumptions are wrong and his quoting their study is done entirely out of context.

we disagree with the way that Mr. Castro applies our findings to the SOPA debate. His presumption that people will work as hard or harder to access political content than they do to access entertainment content deeply misunderstands how and why most people use the internet. Far more users in open societies use the Internet for entertainment than for political purposes; it is unreasonable to assume different behaviors in closed societies. Our research offers the depressing conclusion that comparatively few users are seeking blocked political information and suggests that the governments most successful in blocking political content ensure that entertainment and social media content is widely available online precisely because users get much more upset about blocking the ability watch movies than they do about blocking specific pieces of political content.

Rather than comparing usage of circumvention tools in closed societies to predict the activities of a given userbase, Mr. Castro would do better to consider the massive userbase of tools like bit torrent clients, which would make for a far cleaner analogy to the problem at hand. Likewise, the long line of very popular peer-to-peer sharing tools that have been incrementally designed to circumvent the technical and political measures used to prevent sharing copyrighted materials are a stronger analogy than our study of users in authoritarian regimes seeking to access political content.

Furthermore, they argue that the bill that Castro is so desperately in favor of would have disastrous consequences, in that it would deny important circumvention tools to those in repressive countries:

Second, our research has consistently shown that those who really wish to evade Internet filters can do so with relatively little effort. The problem is that these activities can be very dangerous in certain regimes. Even though our research shows that relatively few people in autocratic countries use circumvention tools, this does not mean that circumvention tools are not crucial to the dissident communities in those countries. 19 million people is not large in relation to the population of the Internet, but it is still a lot of people absolutely who have freer access to the Internet through the tools. We personally know many people in autocratic countries for whom these tools provide a crucial (though not perfect) layer of security for their activist work. Those people would be at much greater risk than they already are without access to the tools, but in addition to mandating DNS filtering, SOPA would make many circumvention tools illegal. The single biggest funder of circumvention tools has been and remains the U.S. government, precisely because of the role the tools play in online activism. It would be highly counter-productive for the U.S. government to both fund and outlaw the same set of tools.

We noted that Castro's paper read like a joke from the beginning, and the more people dig into it, the more ridiculous it seems.

Filed Under: daniel castro, dns, dns blocking, dnssec, jillian york, john palfrey, pipa, protect ip, sopa

More And More Internet Infrastructure Players Coming Out To Say How Bad SOPA/PIPA Are

from the anyone-support-it? dept

We've noted in the past that most of the people who actually understand the basic internet infrastructure have come out against SOPA and PIPA. That includes both individuals and companies (such as OpenDNS and Dyn), but it appears that we may be reaching a tipping point with tons and tons of internet infrastructure companies speaking out against these bills. We've already talked about the massive GoDaddy backlash... but it's interesting to note that many registrars and hosting companies are using this as an opportunity to speak out against SOPA and PIPA. Hover, Dreamhost, NameCheap and Name.com have all made explicit statements on their blogs. Back in the DNS space, EasyDNS has written a blistering anti-SOPA post on its blog:

If this becomes law, it's a short stretch from SOPA to NODA (No Online Dissent Anywhere) and if you think I'm a nutcase for saying so, I'd like to remind everybody what happened just over a year ago, when US politicians were tripping over themselves to shut down wikileaks (a royal fiasco in which this company was embroiled) and to this day, they have not been charged with a crime anywhere.

Many of the "dirty tricks" employed against Wikileaks would be enshrined in law under SOPA (and someday, NODA):

• A requirement that service providers block access to offending domains, including that they stop resolving their DNS
• Search engines to purge search results for offending domains
• Payment processors to sever ties to offending domains

And they added an extra provision that it will be an offense to knowingly create a service or system to provide a workaround to a banned domain or host. So for example, they would no longer have to hassle Mozilla to remove that firefox plugin that lets you reach ICE blocked websites, it would be illegal to make it or distribute it.

And that's not all. As if to drive home the point, a relatively new group called the SaveHosting Coalition just came out with a letter signed by over 300 execs involved in internet infrastructure companies, saying they're against SOPA. The full letter, embedded below, is well worth a read. It's quite comprehensive, and basically makes it quite clear that SOPA isn't just bad for internet infrastructure, but it's bad for jobs and the economy, as well as pretty much anyone who does anything online. Here's just a snippet:

We write to express that, after careful review of H.R.3261 - the Stop Online Piracy Act of 2011 (SOPA), we believe that this legislation will lead to significant loss of high-wage, high-tech jobs in our industry and other industries that are directly or indirectly supported by our industry. This impact will diminish the attractiveness of U.S. companies to foreign customers, while also reducing the U.S. hosting industry’s ability to compete with foreign competition within our own borders. Further, and of equal importance, weaknesses in SOPA may actually lead to less protection for intellectual property owners by undermining the stability of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Finally, SOPA undermines the U.S. judicial system’s reputation as a fair and transparent method of resolving business disputes.

It's getting more and more ridiculous for anyone to suggest that SOPA isn't harmful to the wider internet infrastructure, when pretty much anyone who knows anything about that infrastructure has come out against the bill.

Filed Under: copyright, dns, hosting, infrastructure, internet, pipa, protect ip, sopa

SOPA Markup Day 1: We Don't Understand This Bill, It Might Do Terrible Things, But Dammit, We're Passing It Now

from the how-congress-works dept

So, if you weren't paying attention, yesterday was a marathon session of SOPA amendments... It ran for 11.5 hours, with just one tiny break, and it looks like they didn't even get through half of the amendments. I'll get into some more details in a bit, but honestly the single best description of the insanity of these hearings came from The Washington Post's Alexandra Petri, who called them "nightmarish."

If this were surgery, the patient would have run out screaming a long time ago. But this is like a group of well-intentioned amateurs getting together to perform heart surgery on a patient incapable of moving. “We hear from the motion picture industry that heart surgery is what’s required,” they say cheerily. “We’re not going to cut the good valves, just the bad — neurons, or whatever you call those durn thingies.”

This is terrifying to watch. It would be amusing — there’s nothing like people who did not grow up with the Internet attempting to ask questions about technology very slowly and stumbling over words like “server” and “service” when you want an easy laugh. Except that this time, the joke’s on us.

That really describes the situation perfectly. Over and over again the people in favor of this bill flat out admitted that they didn't understand the technology -- and when the various people opposed to it asked why don't they get some experts in to answer some questions, the supporters had no credible response. The DNS and security aspects were completely brushed aside. As Rep. Jason Chaffetz (who is fighting the good fight against this) pointed out repeatedly, there's simply no reason to rush this bill when there are such widespread concerns about it and no one has taken the time to get the answers to key questions.

But the supporters of the bill -- mainly Reps. Lamar Smith, Bob Goodlatte and Mel Watt -- simply wanted to push forward at all costs. They rejected every amendment raised, except two minor ones (we'll get to that in a minute). Amazingly they rejected all sorts of quite reasonable suggestions -- while complaining that those opposed to the bill never had any suggestions to fix it! And yet when those actual proposals were brought up, they were rejected out of hand. It really was pretty disgusting. Goodlatte's responses struck me as particularly inane. He kept rejecting amendments because he feared that the amendment could be abused. The fact that most of those amendments were to prevent the much wider scale abuses guaranteed under SOPA never seemed to occur to him.

In fact, supporters of the bill regularly used arguments that actually could have been turned around on them. They refused an amendment from Rep. Darrell Issa to limit the powers of the bill to those who actually were in the US, saying that it would set a bad precedent for countries like China... and this came just after they were totally outraged that anyone might think that the entire bill itself sets a bad precedent for countries like China. The disingenuous bullshit was really ridiculous.

Rep. Watt was particularly keen to display his own ignorance. He regularly admitted that he wasn't very knowledgeable on technology -- which should have been a reason to recuse himself or to at least ask for more info from experts. Instead, he just insisted that all of the technical experts were simply wrong. Based on what? Nothing. How does someone like Watt get elected when he appears to want to regulate the internet based on pure faith and against what every single expert has said? It's downright scary.

Later, Watt angrily rejected an amendment to clarify some language to make sure it was limited -- by saying that he believed the language already said what the amendment added. If that's true, why reject the amendment? All it would do is make the intent clear. Instead, he said no. That makes no sense at all.

What was clear, from the beginning, was that the SOPA supporters were not there in good faith. They had no intention of listening to reasonable suggestions to fix the bill, and stuck together as a bloc to reject pretty much all of them -- even while admitting their own ignorance. The really sad part was when Goodlatte tried to equate the views of a couple of policy analysts who get money from the entertainment industry, with the views of nearly 100 independent internet engineers who have pointed out how problematic SOPA really would be. Watt and others tried to pretend that because each side could turn up someone who would say something that those views were equal. It's the insane Congressional equivalent of "he-said/she-said" journalism, where you "hear" both sides, but never seek out the truth. That's nuts.

The simple fact is that nearly every single actual credible internet engineer has come out against these bills. There isn't an equivalence where each side can turn up a few people. The scales are completely weighted down against the bills... and many of those people have no associations whatsoever -- even as SOPA defenders insisted that only "Google" experts were against the bill. Stewart Baker isn't speaking for Google. Sandia National Labs isn't speaking for Google.

The real insanity is that supporters of the bill are rushing forward just because they want to pass "something," and they don't seem to care about the consequences.

As for the two amendments that did pass, one was to say that if you "knowingly misrepresented" a claim on a site, you had to pay attorneys' fees. Of course, "knowingly misrepresent" is a very, very high bar that will almost never be met. A similar amendment by Rep. Chaffetz that would also require fees if you failed to get an injunction in court was rejected, because SOPA supporters were worried this would scare people off. As Chaffetz pointed out: that's the whole point. It would scare off those who don't have strong, legitimate claims.

The other amendment that passed right at the end, was from Rep. Jared Polis, requiring the State Department to do a study on the eventual impacts of SOPA. That doesn't change the law really. It just will at least let people check back in on the damage it does a couple years from now.

A few other key points:

• Huge kudos to Reps. Issa, Lofgren, Chaffetz and Polis, who combined to repeatedly point out the problems of the bill and to argue forcefully and compellingly about why we needed to fix these problems. That much of the rest of the Committee ignored these concerns, played them down, or rejected them for silly or nonsense reasons, is really just a statement on the sad state of Congress today.
• I heard from sources that a big time content industry lobbyist was seen hanging out in the "members only" area during the session. If that doesn't tell you everything you need to know about what's going on, then you're not paying attention.
• There was a bizarre elementary school-like fight that went on at one point. Rep. Steve King tweeted early on:

  We are debating the Stop Online Piracy Act and Shiela Jackson has so bored me that I'm killing time by surfing the Internet.

  Rep. Jackson-Lee found out about this and announced that she was "offended," at which point it seemed like a bunch of these old clueless men started arguing about how inappropriate it was for her to say she was offended. The whole session had to pause while they talked to a "parliamentarian" about whether it was okay to use the term "offended," eventually leading Jackson-Lee to change her statement. Yeah. These are the people in charge of making our laws. Scary.
• With the session going on for 11.5 hours, there was a short break for lunch, but for dinner Rep. Lamar Smith offered "four kinds of pizza," but apparently only for other members. Staffers had to sit and starve. Nice of them, huh?

All in all, the process should leave you frightened for our country. This was not an attempt to fix a broken law. It was an attempt to please some Hollywood funders at the expense of innovation and jobs. It's insanity.

That said... if you want to watch more of it today, tune in either at the Judiciary website or the KeepTheWebOpen site and make sure you have a pillow nearby for when you want to bang your head on the desk or wall. Once again, I'll be live-tweeting some of the hearing (don't think I can make all of it) from my personal Twitter account.

Filed Under: bob goodlatte, copyright, darrell issa, dns, dnssec, jared polis, jason chaffetz, lamar smith, markup, mel watt, sopa, zoe lofgren