After her efforts to substantively alter the bill (to defang it or at least add oversight) were rejected, Rep. Zoe Lofgren proposed to rename the act to, "Keep Every American's Digital Data for Submission to the Federal Government Without a Warrant Act of 2011."
The main daily newspaper in San Francisco had a front page article trumpeting a "takedown" of a child porn ring. I commented online that this was an advertisement by the government to encourage surrendering our rights to "protect the children".
The reaction was pure hate for my posting because it was defending pedophiles (it wasn't). It felt like an angry mob that had nothing but revenge on its mind.
This is why the efforts to destroy all privacy will succeed. For the kids. Yeah, that's it.
The thing is, that takedown, an Ars Technica article about which was on the HN front page briefly last night, was accomplished without this heinous legislation. To my mind, that rather puts the lie to the need for such laws.
The reaction was pure hate for my posting because it was
defending pedophiles (it wasn't).
What do you except? It's sad to see that even usually decent and intelligent people devolve into frothing mobsters when you oppose something that's 'for the children', however ridiculous it may be. It becomes especially despicable when you see the content industry essentially stating that child pornography is a fabulous excuse to justify domain seizures, censorship and other completely outrageous measures to protect their failing business model[1].
It's pretty difficult (if not to say dangerous) to hold a position that's in opposition to such measures. Especially, as in my case, when one is of the opinion that it's not child pornography we should be fighting, but child abuse. The former is, for the most parts, a victimless crime (just look at what's consider child pornography today, it's absolutely ridiculous). I would even say that the holy crusade against child pornography obfuscates and hinders the fight against child abuse severely.
This practice is actually very common. If you can't tack your legislative piece on to some 'sure bet' bill you just name it something that no person would ever vote against.
Got a piece of legislation on drilling for oil in Alaska? Call it the 'Freedom from Terrorism act' and just like that. It's approved. No one reads the entire Bill, so the name is a HUGE part of the process.
I know it's a fairly common practice, but this is like an overly hyperbolic and exaggerated example you would give when describing the practice. A bit like saying "PATRIOT Act? What's next, the 'Protect our Children from Pornography' Act?" Apparently!
The fact that they actually went this far... I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
That's actually helpful levity when considering service offerings like this[1]:
DRDL interconnects control and data sessions of protocols like FTP. During the identification process DRDL aggregates detailed traffic properties like MIME-type, filename, chat channel and SIP caller ID. This granularity enables you not only to see the Xbox Live traffic, but rather the Xbox Live users who are playing Halo 3.
It's not clear whether use of a VPN/SSH would prevent this kind of traffic analysis, but an obfuscation daemon of some kind could surely be written.
While it's kind of interesting, I've never researched how networks like Freenet, or WASTE, etc deal with those issues (or, if they even address them at all).
I'm speechless.