How Proposed Legislation – SOPA – PIPA – OPEN – PCOPA Will Affect Us Daily

Everyone knows by now how the proposed internet related legislation could potentially damage the way that the internet works using the DNS system. I have already told you too, about how the proposed legislative measures could lead to censorship. I've even gone as far as providing instructions on how to circumvent censoring. (And, if the new laws pass, I'll have to remove them or face the “Wrath of the DOJ.”) But, consider the way in which the Usenet search index provider, Newzbin2, provided their members a way to get around the blacklist...well before the order was even due to take effect.

Well, members of the delegations that wrote all these laws, SOPA, PIPA, OPEN, and the Protect Children from Online Pornographers Act, placed safeguards in every one of these laws that essentially make it so that privacy and anonymity will never be assured again. Even the kind of security that is routine for online banking, and many other financial transactions. Corporate financial and personal databases that are kept on the cloud would suffer miserably, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Proxy and VPN providers would have to provide for the filtering inside their clients (for U.S. customers,) if these parts pass. And that's just the ones that pass their stringent guidelines that the laws will place on the providers. If the provider can't pass these guidelines, then use in the U.S. would be outlawed.

There are indications in the present legislation that there are already plans to blacklist some software developers. The measure doesn't mention it, but they specifically targeted Mozilla because of their refusal to assist the Dept. of Homeland Security in their filtering attempts. The language specifically says that anyone specifically creating tools, software, or other device designed to keep the user off of the blacklist. In other words, a blacklist filter on/off button. Also targeted in this language is anyone developing other software that is file-sharing related, A couple of the specific targets of this would be cloud based services, like Drop Box, and the recently seized Megaupload.

There was a bill introduced last year that I touched on in another article, the Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers act. This bill seems to be more about the spying and less about the children they are claiming to protect. The bill does provide for much harsher punishments for child sex offenders, and increased protection of witnesses, but there's a section that some legislators refuse to do away with. It says that your ISP will have to keep a complete history of all you do on the internet. Everything...from your browsing history, to your keyword searches, and even log in information. Wow, that's pretty far reaching considering the billions of terabytes of data exchanged daily in just the U.S. And guess who would pay for the storage of your data...you, the taxpayers.

I'm not sure if there's some kind of control freak issues here, but the more I look at it the more apparent this becomes. Control over not only what we see, but the things we use to see them. Maybe the legislators are beginning to realize how far reaching the internet is, and how potentially educational, (and damaging to their careers,) it actually can be. The internet has changed our lives in ways we couldn't ever have imagined, and at this point in the game, has the potential to be the new “Whistleblower.” It's funny how when any kind of informational exchange starts threatening the political elite , or the rich, it immediately becomes the target of restrictive measures that choke off the voice of the rest of the world.