Published:
21 December, 2011, 23:17
Anti-SOPA activists find ways to keep the Internet free
As Americans ready for a legislation that will impose a
government-sanctioned firewall over the Internet, the elite
computer-literate hacktivists attacking the law are finding ways to
circumvent the passing of SOPA.
If the House and Senate have their way, the Stop Online Privacy Act,
or SOPA, will leave Capitol Hill soon and seemingly cloak the Internet
with Congress-created blockades that will shun every user of the World
Wide Web from a whole slew of content, including music, videos and, in a
nutshell, knowledge. Under the legislation, violation will yield
massive fines and imprisonment — all for such action as uploading videos
to YouTube. While the legislation is being delivered as a way to deal
with copyright infringement and piracy on the Web, the law itself will
severely cut down the free-flow of information online and would make
something as simple as singing karaoke a crime if the footage ever finds
an audience on the Web.
“SOPA is a joke,” an activist affiliated with the online collective Anonymous says to RT under condition of anonymity.
“It’s Internet censorship under the guise of anti piracy. Everyone knows this.”
That
guise is being guided by the government, however, which could make it
come to life in the very near future. Only one week ago Congress
approved the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, a
legislation that allows for the indefinite detention and torture of
American citizens. With being shackled at Gitmo a real-life threat now,
activists against SOPA realize that the censorship shouldn’t be
something that they’d put pass Capitol Hill. In preparation, adds the
source aligned to the online collective Anonymous,
“We are preparing for censorship much like China.”
As
the realities of SOPA passing becomes an Orwellian-threat almost coming
to life, computer users are quickly taking to the Web to spread
information to other surfers on how to sneak pass the firewall that
could cause the censoring of the Internet.
“Most of us have been stockpiling IP addresses,”
adds the source. Under SOPA, the government is believed to go after the
Web by means of attacking the Internet’s domain naming system, or DNS.
That’s the process that translates the actual, alphabetical domain name
from a series of numerical characters, the Internet protocol (IP)
address.
In order to get around such filtering, activists have
already begun circulating lists online that chronicle the IP-addresses
of popular websites that could be censored on SOPA so that users will be
able to keep a roster handy of the digits that can be typed to dig up
sites even as at risk as Google.com (which you could alternatively
navigate to with the numbers 74.125.225.86 pasted into your browser).
“SOPA emergency lists” have been spread around the Web in recent days
via Twitter and viral messaging, allowing users to save a list of sites
as innocent as Digg.com or The Onion, which are just as prone to having
the plugged pulled on them than anyone else.
Erik Martin, the general manager of the popular website Reddit, wrote last week that,
“If SOPA passes in anything like its current form, it would almost certainly mean the end of Reddit.”
“SOPA would make running Reddit near impossible,” added Martin. “
And
we have access to great lawyers through our parent company. I can't
imagine how smaller sites without those kind of resources could even
attempt a go at it if SOPA passes.”
For the less
computer-savvy, developer T Rizk has created an add-on for the popular
Web browser FireFox which instantly translates domain names to their IP
equivalent. His program, DeSopa, is available for free and is just one
of the latest alternatives birthed through the chilling legislation.
“I
feel that the general public is not aware of the gravity of SOPA and
Congress seems like they are about to cater to the special interests
involved, to the detriment of Internet, for which I and many others live
and breathe,” T Rizk explains to TorrentFreak.
“It could
be that a few members of Congress are just not tech savvy and don’t
understand that it is technically not going to work, at all. So here’s
some proof that I hope will help them err on the side of reason and vote
SOPA down.”
Other material circulating online includes a
tutorial sent through Twitter that serves as a beginner’s guide to both
the Stop Online Privacy Act and PIPA, the Protect IP Act that stands to
yield similar consequences. One text file, “Why SOPA and PIPA Suck,”
explains in layman’s terms,
“How this legislation may very well fuck up the Internet.”
“It
is often difficult for us average folk to sympathize with the
billionaire performers in Hollywood and RIAA/MPAA who claim that we're
stealing from them and compromising profits,” writes the author of the document.
“They
are correct – it is stealing, plain and simple. However, you don't see
blanket legislation that infringes our basic privacy for any other
crime, like shoplifting.”
“To the best of my knowledge,
Congress has never enacted this type of blanket legislation that invades
our privacy – except in the name of combating terrorism, of course.”
Even easier to understand is a video uploaded to
YouTube this
week by Leah Kauffman, the mastermind behind the Obama Girl-videos that
led up to the 2008 Election. Over computer-programmed drums and a soft
piano melody, Kauffman sings,
“Don't put up a firewall when we could have it all / Say no to protect IP / You won't stop piracy / What is this China?”
The American Civil Liberties Union has added,
“By
instituting this practice in the United States, SOPA sends an
unequivocal message to other nations that it is acceptable to censor
speech on the global Internet.” Even the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, said in a recent speech that SOPA would essentially
“criminalize linking and the fundamental structure of the Internet itself,” calling it
“reasonable,” but that its
“mechanism is terrible.”
Despite
their attempts at appearing as advocates against SOPA, Google has also
gone on the record to encourage Congress to find other ways to strike
down websites that the government doesn’t want to grow. Before Congress
last month, Google copyright policy counsel Katherine Oyama told a House
Judiciary Committee that while the bill would
“jeopardize our nation’s cybersecurity,” she asked lawmakers to consider other ways of censorship.
“If
you cut off someone’s financial incentives, they’re not going to want
to pay for the servers, the bandwidth and the infrastructure,” she
said. In order to do that, she suggested the government look towards the
precedent set by stopping funds from going to Julian Assange and his
whistleblowing site, WikiLeaks.
“You look at WikiLeaks. I
think this is a good example of the fact that this a strong remedy:
choking these sites off at their revenue source,” said Oyama. “
I
think [copyright infringing sites] are in business because they can
sell advertising or because they can process from subscribers. If you
could get the entire industry together and choke off advertising and
choke off payments to those sites, you could be incredibly effective
without introducing the collateral damage we discussed to free speech or
Internet architecture.”
Google and other big web companies
shouldn’t expect the battle to end with a little snafu in the financing
of the sites in question, however. Given the support that anti-SOPA and
PIPA activists have received in this month alone, Big Internet is a
force to be reckoned with. When the National Defense Authorization Act
was approved last week, hacktivists were quick to wage an all-out
campaign on the lawmakers who helped make the law possible. In the days
since, personal information and private details relating to the
politicians that voted in favor of NDAA have made its way around the
Web, with hackers vowing to continue to wage a cyberwar against Congress
and those that let the US government turn America into a battlefield.
“We've
been watching you systematically destroy the rights of your own people,
one law at a time. No longer shall we stand by and watch you enslave
our fellow citizens,” an Anonymous operative wrote on the Web recently.
“You
have continued down this path of treason by creating acts such as the
National Defense Authorization Act, Stop Online Piracy Act, Protect IP
Act, and more. You've tried to conceal the true purpose of these bills,
and pass them without the consent of the American people.”
“We
are now here to undo your sordid life's work in its entirety. No longer
will your transgressions go unnoticed. No longer will you enslave the
people. The world will know of your violations against the rights of the
citizens you were elected to represent,” adds the Anonymous operative.
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