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<DIV dir=ltr lang=en-us class=OutlookMessageHeader align=left><FONT size=2
face=Tahoma></FONT></DIV>---------- Forwarded message ----------<BR>From: Peter
Eckersley<BR>Date: Tuesday, December 13, 2011<BR>Subject: EFF call for
signatures from Internet Engineers against censorship<BR>To: David Farber <<A
href="mailto:dave@farber.net">dave@farber.net</A>><BR><BR><BR>(For the IP
list)<BR><BR>Last year, EFF organized an open letter against Internet
censorship<BR>legislation being considered by the US Senate<BR>(<A
href="https://eff.org/deeplinks/2010/09/open-letter">https://eff.org/deeplinks/2010/09/open-letter</A>).
Along with other activists<BR>efforts, we successfully delayed that
proposal, but need to update the letter<BR>for two bills, SOPA and PIPA, that
are close to passing through US Congress<BR>now.<BR><BR>If you would like to
sign, please email me at <A href="mailto:pde@eff.org">pde@eff.org</A>, with a
one-line<BR>summary of what part of the Internet you helped to helped to
design,<BR>implement, debug or run.<BR><BR>We need signatures by 8am GMT on
Thursday (midnight Wednesday US Pacific, 3am<BR>US Eastern). Also feel
free to forward this to colleagues who played a role<BR>in designing and
building the network.<BR><BR>The updated letter's text is
below:<BR><BR> We, the undersigned, have played various parts in building a
network called<BR> the Internet. We wrote and debugged the software; we
defined the standards<BR> and protocols that talk over that network. Many
of us invented parts of it.<BR> We're just a little proud of the social and
economic benefits that our<BR> project, the Internet, has brought with
it.<BR><BR> Last year, many of us wrote to you and your colleagues to warn
about the<BR> proposed "COICA" copyright and censorship legislation.
Today, we are<BR> writing again to reiterate our concerns about the
SOPA and PIPA derivatives<BR> of last year's bill, that are under
consideration in the House and Senate.<BR> In many respects, these
proposals are worse than the one we were alarmed to<BR> read last
year.<BR><BR> If enacted, either of these bills will create an environment
of tremendous<BR> fear and uncertainty for technological innovation, and
seriously harm the<BR> credibility of the United States in its role as a
steward of key Internet<BR> infrastructure. Regardless of recent amendments
to SOPA, both bills will<BR> risk fragmenting the Internet's global domain
name system (DNS) and have<BR> other capricious technical consequences.
In exchange for this, such<BR> legislation would engender censorship
that will simultaneously be<BR> circumvented by deliberate infringers while
hampering innocent parties'<BR> right and ability to communicate and
express themselves online.<BR><BR> All censorship schemes impact speech
beyond the category they were intended<BR> to restrict, but these bills are
particularly egregious in that regard<BR> because they cause entire domains
to vanish from the Web, not just<BR> infringing pages or files.
Worse, an incredible range of useful,<BR> law-abiding sites can be
blacklisted under these proposals. In fact, it<BR> seems that this
has already begun to happen under the nascent DHS/ICE<BR> seizures
program.<BR><BR> Censorship of Internet infrastructure will inevitably
cause network errors<BR> and security problems. This is true in
China, Iran and other countries that<BR> censor the network today; it will
be just as true of American censorship.<BR> It is also true regardless of
whether censorship is implemented via the DNS,<BR> proxies, firewalls, or
any other method. Types of network errors and<BR> insecurity that we
wrestle with today will become more widespread, and will<BR> affect sites
other than those blacklisted by the American government.<BR><BR> The
current bills -- SOPA explicitly and PIPA implicitly -- also
threaten<BR> engineers who build Internet systems or offer services that
are not readily<BR> and automatically compliant with censorship actions by
the U.S. government.<BR> When we designed the Internet the first time, our
priorities were<BR> reliability, robustness and minimizing central points
of failure or control.<BR> We are alarmed that Congress is so close to
mandating censorship-compliance<BR> as a design requirement for new
Internet innovations. This can only damage<BR> the security of the
network, and give authoritarian governments more power<BR> over what their
citizens can read and publish.<BR><BR> The US government has regularly
claimed that it supports a free and open<BR> Internet, both domestically
and abroad. We cannot have a free and open<BR> Internet unless its
naming and routing systems sit above the political<BR> concerns and
objectives of any one government or industry. To date, the<BR> leading role
the US has played in this infrastructure has been
fairly<BR> uncontroversial because America is seen as a trustworthy arbiter
and a<BR> neutral bastion of free expression. If the US begins to use
its<BR> central in the network for censorship that advances its political
and<BR> economic agenda, the consequences will be far-reaching and
destructive.<BR><BR> Senators, Congressmen, we believe the Internet is too
important and too<BR> valuable to be endangered in this way, and implore
you to put these bills<BR> aside.<BR><BR>--<BR>Peter Eckersley
<A href="mailto:pde@eff.org">pde@eff.org</A><BR>Technology Projects
Director Tel +1 415 436 9333 x131<BR>Electronic
Frontier Foundation Fax +1 415 436 9993<BR><BR></DIV>
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