Yesterday ISOC-DC hosted a breakfast round table discussion on SOPA/PIPA and reasonable alternatives to deal with Internet piracy.

The discussion was led by noted Internet scholar and author, Rebecca MacKinnon; The MPAA’s Chief Technology Policy Officer, Paul Brigner; as well as ISOC-DC’s own Michael Nelson of Georgetown University and CSC’s Leading Edge Forum.

@rmack spoke brilliantly about the problems with the copyright approach that led to SOPA as well as the intrinsic challenges to find solutions to Internet problems like piracy and the tradeoffs necessary in a multi-stakeholder environment.

Paul Brigner, who was not in fact burned at the stake by waves of Net Freedom activists, discussed not only  the legitimate need to protect intellectual property and copyrighted content (read movies), but also of the film industry’s need to incorporate technology into it’s policy considerations. A very lively, informed, and productive discussion ensued.

SOPA sponsor has another Internet bill that records you 24/7 – SlashGear.

Senator Lamar Smith, lead sponsor of the currently dead SOPA bill you’ve heard so much about, has another bill in the works that uses Child Pornography as a screen to push through an amendment that’ll have your internet service provider tracking all of your financial dealings online. Each time you use a credit card, each time you read your bank statement, all of your IP information and your search history will be required by your ISP to be stored for 18 months at all times. This bill is H.R. 1981 and will have more dire consequences than SOPA or PIPA ever had the potential to have.

What it does is to amend several rules that have to do with Child Pornography and preventing it, the bill itself called the “Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011.” What it also does is to change the U.S. code Chapter 18 section 2703 Required Disclosure of Customer Communications or Records to include a requirement that your internet service provider do the following:

A commercial provider of an electronic communication service shall retain for a period of at least one year a log of the temporarily assigned network addresses the provider assigns to a subscriber to or customer of such service that enables the identification of the corresponding customer or subscriber information under subsection (c)(2) of this section.

While it was legal for the government to issue a subpoena for the viewing of the information they speak about here before, it was not part of the law that internet service providers capture or retain that information at any point. In effect, while before the authorities would need to first find a reason for you to need to be watched to get the ISP to start collecting information from you, that information will already exist on file, effectively meaning you’re being watched and recorded even if you’ve done nothing wrong.

Don’t worry though, there’s an additional set of lines that should placate you because it’s so very kind of them to think of:

(1) to encourage electronic communication service providers to give prompt notice to their customers in the event of a breach of the data retained pursuant to section 2703(h) of title 18 of the United States Code, in order that those effected can take the necessary steps to protect themselves from potential misuse of private information; and

(2) that records retained pursuant to section 2703(h) of title 18, United States Code, should be stored securely to protect customer privacy and prevent against breaches of the records.

So don’t worry, your information will be “stored securely” so noone else can access it! But if they do access it, your ISP will give you “prompt notice” so you can change all your credit card numbers, hide your kids, hide your wife, and hide your husband. This bill has currently cleared its committee, this meaning that the next step is a full vote. This bill needs to be stopped, and if I might go one better, Lamar Smith needs to be stopped, for the good of the internet and YOUR privacy.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/English_Wikipedia_anti-SOPA_blackout

To: English Wikipedia Readers and Community 
From: Sue Gardner, Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director 
Date: January 16, 2012 

Today, the Wikipedia community announced its decision to black out the English-language Wikipedia for 24 hours, worldwide, beginning at 05:00 UTC on Wednesday, January 18 (you can read the statement from the Wikimedia Foundation here). The blackout is a protest against proposed legislation in the United States—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate—that, if passed, would seriously damage the free and open Internet, including Wikipedia.

This will be the first time the English Wikipedia has ever staged a public protest of this nature, and it’s a decision that wasn’t lightly made. Here’s how it’s been described by the three Wikipedia administrators who formally facilitated the community’s discussion. From the public statement, signed by User:NuclearWarfare, User:Risker and User:Billinghurst:

It is the opinion of the English Wikipedia community that both of these bills, if passed, would be devastating to the free and open web.

Over the course of the past 72 hours, over 1800 Wikipedians have joined together to discuss proposed actions that the community might wish to take against SOPA and PIPA. This is by far the largest level of participation in a community discussion ever seen on Wikipedia, which illustrates the level of concern that Wikipedians feel about this proposed legislation. The overwhelming majority of participants support community action to encourage greater public action in response to these two bills. Of the proposals considered by Wikipedians, those that would result in a “blackout” of the English Wikipedia, in concert with similar blackouts on other websites opposed to SOPA and PIPA, received the strongest support.

On careful review of this discussion, the closing administrators note the broad-based support for action from Wikipedians around the world, not just from within the United States. The primary objection to a global blackout came from those who preferred that the blackout be limited to readers from the United States, with the rest of the world seeing a simple banner notice instead. We also noted that roughly 55% of those supporting a blackout preferred that it be a global one, with many pointing to concerns about similar legislation in other nations.

In making this decision, Wikipedians will be criticized for seeming to abandon neutrality to take a political position. That’s a real, legitimate issue. We want people to trust Wikipedia, not worry that it is trying to propagandize them.

But although Wikipedia’s articles are neutral, its existence is not. As Wikimedia Foundation board member Kat Walsh wrote on one of our mailing lists recently,

We depend on a legal infrastructure that makes it possible for us to operate. And we depend on a legal infrastructure that also allows other sites to host user-contributed material, both information and expression. For the most part, Wikimedia projects are organizing and summarizing and collecting the world’s knowledge. We’re putting it in context, and showing people how to make to sense of it.

But that knowledge has to be published somewhere for anyone to find and use it. Where it can be censored without due process, it hurts the speaker, the public, and Wikimedia. Where you can only speak if you have sufficient resources to fight legal challenges, or, if your views are pre-approved by someone who does, the same narrow set of ideas already popular will continue to be all anyone has meaningful access to.

The decision to shut down the English Wikipedia wasn’t made by me; it was made by editors, through a consensus decision-making process. But I support it.

Like Kat and the rest of the Wikimedia Foundation Board, I have increasingly begun to think of Wikipedia’s public voice, and the goodwill people have for Wikipedia, as a resource that wants to be used for the benefit of the public. Readers trust Wikipedia because they know that despite its faults, Wikipedia’s heart is in the right place. It’s not aiming to monetize their eyeballs or make them believe some particular thing, or sell them a product. Wikipedia has no hidden agenda: it just wants to be helpful.

That’s less true of other sites. Most are commercially motivated: their purpose is to make money. That doesn’t mean they don’t have a desire to make the world a better place—many do!—but it does mean that their positions and actions need to be understood in the context of conflicting interests.

My hope is that when Wikipedia shuts down on January 18, people will understand that we’re doing it for our readers. We support everyone’s right to freedom of thought and freedom of expression. We think everyone should have access to educational material on a wide range of subjects, even if they can’t pay for it. We believe in a free and open Internet where information can be shared without impediment. We believe that new proposed laws like SOPA—and PIPA, and other similar laws under discussion inside and outside the United States—don’t advance the interests of the general public. You can read a very good list of reasons to oppose SOPA and PIPA here, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Why is this a global action, rather than US-only? And why now, if some American legislators appear to be in tactical retreat on SOPA?

The reality is that we don’t think SOPA is going away, and PIPA is still quite active. Moreover, SOPA and PIPA are just indicators of a much broader problem. All around the world, we’re seeing the development of legislation intended to fight online piracy, and regulate the Internet in other ways, that hurt online freedoms. Our concern extends beyond SOPA and PIPA: they are just part of the problem. We want the Internet to remain free and open, everywhere, for everyone.

On January 18, we hope you’ll agree with us, and will do what you can to make your own voice heard.

Sue Gardner,
Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation 

As the preparations for the ITU WTSA and WCIT pick up pace over the coming months, we plan to set up a dedicated mailing list for ISOC Chapter members to exchange information on areas of common interest/concern leading up to these ITU conferences in 2012 (for more information about the WCIT, please go to:  http://www.isoc.org/pubpolpillar/docs/itr-background_201108.pdf).

ISOC will be attending the global preparatory meetings as well as many of the Regional meetings – we will circulate notes and reflections on that process to such a list and, if desired, set up conference calls as appropriate to discuss issues in further detail.  We’ll also share our inputs to the meetings and other documents that may be of interest.  We hope that many of you will find this to be useful and informative.

If you are interested in joining the list please go to https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/itu2012chapters.  We would also appreciate it if you could make your Chapter Members aware of this opportunity and encourage them to participate.

via The Broadband Bridge: Bridging the Digital Divide in DC | Relay Station Social Media.

The Broadband Bridge is a community based wireless mesh network program to provide underserved people with free broadband wireless, computers, and digital literacy training in Washington DC’s Bloomingdale & Eckington Neighborhoods. The project has received an IS
OC Grant

I talked to Preston Rhea and Josh King of The New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative, as well as Clarence Labor of One Computer One Child about the project and found out some very interesting things about the Broadband Bridge, mesh networks, and bridging the digital divide. Here’s my video about the project.

via Action Blogging Campaign—Universal Internet Access – Peace and Collaborative Development Network.

Isabelle Eshraghi | Agence Vu | Aurora Photos

What does Universal Internet Access and Digital Freedom mean to YOU?

“[This issue] is about whether we live on a planet with one Internet, one global community, and a common body of knowledge that benefits and unites us all, or a fragmented planet in which access to information and opportunity is dependent on where you live and the whims of censors.”—Hillary Clinton, U.S. Secretary of State

Today, freedom of expression and equal access to knowledge and ideas has become synonymous with access to the Internet. As we witness on PulseWire every day, the Web has opened a new frontier for the free exchange of ideas, exposure to new markets, and global forums for building movements. Yet hundreds of thousands of people are excluded from participating—due to cost and infrastructure, threats to safety, government censorship, etc.

World Pulse invites women worldwide to share their personal testimonies on obstacles faced and risks taken in accessing the Internet to seek information, speak freely, and connect globally.

Share your personal testimony on the everyday obstacles you face and risks you take in accessing the Internet. Does expressing yourself freely put you at great risk for your personal safety? What’s it like battling constant power outages or a slow connection speed? Do you pay exorbitant prices and endure harassment at local Internet cafes? Or does your country filter and block access to important information?

We also want to hear about innovative ways you’re utilizing the Internet to accelerate change in your life, your community, or globally. How has the Internet made a difference in your life? What will it take to improve access in your community, and what does Universal Internet Access and Digital Freedom mean to you?

Raise your voice and speak your truth to bring awareness to this rising, global human rights issue. Together, let’s lead the conversation and ensure a gender lens on global advocacy efforts to bridge the digital divide and demand our right to access!

Your testimonies will be leveraged to advocate for Universal Internet Access and Digital Freedom at the highest levels of policy-makers and International Human Rights bodies.

By Preston Rhea and Joshua Breitbart

The Broadband Bridge is a community-based partnership seeking to bridge the digital divide in Washington DC’s Bloomingdale and Eckington neighborhoods. The Bridge is finding its way through the wilderness of reconciling the need for a community-based process with the corporate interests of some project partners.

The project’s participants are working on expanding the nascent mesh wireless network, currently servicing a small corridor on 1st St. NW in Bloomingdale, to cover the whole neighborhood in wireless broadband. A recent grant from the Internet Society, secured with the Open Technology Initiative’s help, will subsidize participation in the network by some local residents who would not otherwise be able to afford a computer and wireless router. The process of planning and executing this large expansion of the project’s service area and social justice mission brings no shortage of growing pains.

Some participants in the Bridge project have expressed the desire for several months to seek legal protection from any future possible action against them, stemming from their participation in the Bridge. Leading into the new year, the group discussed several possible solutions, ranging from individuals incorporating under an LLC to establishing a non-profit that would also govern the direction and action of the project itself.

The project volunteers faced a challenge in reconciling the desire to be protected through legal incorporation with maintaining an open community-based method for organizing the project. As one participant at a February 17 meeting described it, it is difficult to organize the project without creating a “table” to invite people to that doesn’t also cut some people out. The Bridge’s volunteers have recently invested more time discussing organizational structure than acting on project tasks, such as installing equipment.

By the end of that meeting many of those organizational hurdles had been cleared and the participants reached a compromise that sustained the open nature of the Bridge project. The team created three working groups – planning, technical, and social – and people allocated themselves to roles. The planning group will develop a more comprehensive proposal for organizational structure while the social group continues neighborhood outreach and the technical team proceeds with installations. The gathering ended with a positive sense of forward motion, buoyed by the release that same morning of a Washington City Paper post profiling the Bridge and its aspiration of bridging the digital divide in conjunction with the DC government’s fiber network, DC-Net.

Since the meeting on Thursday morning, the Bridge volunteer list has buzzed with plans for working group meetings to take place this week in Bloomingdale and project anchor members are on the verge of securing the first round of hardware to be purchased with the ISOC grant.

Libyan Disconnect

By James Cowie on February 18, 2011 8:56 PM | 3 Comments | 3 TrackBacks

Renesys confirms that the 13 globally routed Libyan network prefixes were withdrawn at 23:18 GMT (Friday night, 1:18am Saturday local time), and Libya is off the Internet. One Libyan route originated by Telecom Italia directly is still BGP-reachable, but inbound traceroutes appear to die in Palermo. A minority of our peers report some surviving paths through the peering connection between Level3 and Telecom Italia, but traceroutes into those prefixes fail, suggesting that the Libyan cutoff is complete.

We wondered whether anyone would repeat Egypt’s strategy. Tonight, it appears that we have our answer.

Updates to follow.

Update 06:39 UTC

Corrected above report to reflect GMT+2 time zone.

Two-thirds of Libyan routes came back to life at 6:01 UTC (8:01 local time), and the remainder were restored nine minutes later. At the moment, spot checks of Libyan domains and traceroutes into affected networks indicate that connectivity has been restored, and Libya is back on the Internet.

via Libyan Disconnect – Renesys Blog.

ISOC-DC’s Michael Nelson and James Glanz of the New York Times on the PBS Newshour discuss how Egypt’s government shutdown the Internet and the possibilities of other governments doing the same.

(Note, it was announced today that Dr. Tarek Kamel will maintain his post as Egypt’s Communications Minister)

The following is from an email to the ISOC Chapter Delegates list by Veni Markovski:

I’d like to add a few personal* words here about the former minister of ITC of Egypt, Dr. Tarek Kamel, former secretary of ISOC-Egypt.

I know Tarek for many years, and I find his position in this whole crisis as one that requires support from his other former ISOC Trustees and ISOC chapter presidents.

Tarek is widely recognized as the person who brought the Internet widely in Egypt – first as adviser to the minister of ITC, then as a minister himself. He has publicly and privately expressed support for the open development of the Internet. He is co-founder of ISOC-Egypt. As his bio on the ISOC web site says for these early years of the development of the Internet in Egypt, “Kamel’s work extended into liberalization issues such as a tax reduction for ISPs as well as a government/private sector partnership to serve the Egyptian Internet community. He has actively participated in the establishment of community centers in remote areas to bring the Internet to the have-nots.”

As a minister, he managed to change the policies in Egypt to encourage not only wide Internet access in the country, but also to engage within the tough Internet governance debates in a very positive way for the global Internet community. I’d argue that thanks to his team, Egypt was one of the respected countries in the Internet governance debates at the IGF, but also at the ITU, including the recent ITU Plenipotentiary meeting in Mexico.

While we don’t know the facts as who requested the shutdown, I feel confident in believing that this was not his decision. In a serious situation, in a country which is under severe internal and external pressure, rulers often do things, which are difficult to explain even days later, and certainly much easier to explan after a few years. I have lived through similar circumstances in Bulgaria, in 1989 and in 1997, and I could tell you (as probably Khaled can share more recent memories) that situation changes dramatically within days, even hours.
I wish Tarek and his team, who have done so much good things for the Internet, to survive the crisis (revolt, revolution, changes – you name it), and continue to contribute for the development of the Internet in Egypt, the region, and the whole world. Certainly lessons will be learned from the action of the Egyptian government, and certainly we’ll spend a lot of time reflecting on not only what happened, but what can be done to avoid such shutdown in the future.

One thing, which might serve immediately as a lesson, is that a myth being spread around in the last 10 years, that the Internet of a whole country can be stopped by actions of ICANN should come to an end**. It is clear now that the actions of one government are much more effective and can shutdown not only the Internet, but also mobile communications immediately. That should keep everyone alert on the perspective of having the Internet being governed by governments. Because, no matter what we think, so far the Internet has never been shutdown, even for countries that have been under UN sanctions, or even for countries, that have been at war with UN- or NATO-lead coalitions. And that’s something we should see how to further study, research, and use in our chapters’ work.

I hope that other chapter delegates, who have worked with Tarek, as well as Lynn and other key staffers, would support Tarek – I believe that now more than ever before he needs such a support.

_____
* – Personal means that this is not opinion of any of the organizations I am associated or affiliated with.
** – I have had presentations in the past in Russia / Eastern Europe, where I’ve been explaining how the Internet works, and what is the role of the DNS; for the purpose of this email I won’t write more, but the ccTLD is not the vital link in providing Internet access to the users – the waves and cables are.