According to a group of experts, the Protect IP Act will literally “break the Internet.” Both Ars Technica and Mike Masnick @ Techdirt have posted excellent articles that outline the problems with this legislation, especially with regard to it requiring DNS filtering to defend copyright. Both articles reference a recently released report by DNS experts titled “Security and Other Technical Concerns Raised by the DNS Filtering Requirements in the PROTECT IP Bill.”
If you don’t know much about DNS, I strongly recommend you read this technical whitepaper. As a minimum, at least take a look at the Ars Technica article that provides an overview & excerpts from the white paper.
If my previous post didn’t pique your interest about this asinine piece of legislation (a.k.a. crap), then the above articles & white paper may do the trick. As a minimum, if you read the white paper then you’ll at least gain some useful knowledge about how DNS works; DNS filtering; and even how easy it is to evade DNS filtering should the PROTECT IP Act be enacted.
Since it appears as though the United States is about to join the ranks of other great “censorship” countries such as China, Iran, Burma & Republic of Azerbaijan (just to name a few), I find it fitting that the U.S. State Department funded a recent report which reviews censorship circumvention tools. The report is titled “Leaping Over the Firewall: A Review of Censorship Circumvention Tools“ and was directed at internet users in the above four countries, whose implementation of internet censorship poses a large & growing challenge to online freedom of expression. Uh… gee, uh… it’s kinda looking like maybe “us” citizens of the US of A may need our own suite of censorship circumvention tools in the not so distant future, eh?
Don’t forget… the above articles only discuss the DNS Filtering portion of the PROTECT IP Act. This legislation also envisions implementing link criminalization and government mandated censorship of search engine results (e.g. targeting Google and others). Lauren Weinstein posted an excellent article yesterday titled “Why Search Matters – and Fighting Internet Censorship with Technology.” It’s not only an excellent read, but scary!
All for now…