| Well, we can at least arm you with all the helpful information we can dig up. Personally, I would hammer on a few main points: SOPA is ineffective, expensive and dangerous. Build from there. Lead with your best arguments, cull the weak ones, hammer on them with the points they're least able to refute. * Ineffective Australia had a bill like this (which is dead... for now), but also did some trials. Read the reports to see how big a failure that was (scroll down to "Live filtering trials"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Austral... Even if you have full control of a network, it's not so easy to keep pirates off of it. Why else would there be pirates on the RIAA's own network? https://torrentfreak.com/riaa-someone-else-is-pirating-throu... And there are already countermeasures, so the law has been rendered obsolete even before being passed: http://www.itnews.com.au/News/285170,firefox-add-on-circumve... * Expensive As you of all people know, these new requirements would be incredibly taxing for startups, preventing new jobs from being created. This would require every site to implement filters, slowing everything, raising costs and blocking innocent things by mistake. The CATO institute has shown, using the MPAA's own research, that it won't even save one job all told: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120104/04545217274/cato-i... Their numbers are overblown: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100801/17431810439.shtml http://www.publicknowledge.org/blog/playing-numbers-why-sopa... How much will this cost? I could make up a number. Indeed, a lot of numbers have been made up in support of SOPA already. We've already established that it will be ineffective, so the benefits are approximately zero, making it difficult to justify any cost. So rather than inventing numbers, I will point instead to what I do know, that these are the people who will be paying the price: https://www.cdt.org/report/growing-chorus-opposition-stop-on... * Dangerous Whether they're trying to hijack DNS requests or web pages, censoring firewalls are bad for security, because if you control the device doing the hijacking, you can use it for whatever. Incidentally, existing products like SmartFilter already perform MITM attacks every time you try to visit an https page. In theory, the organization is supposed to add their key to everyone's computer and then they sign a bunch of fake sites with the firewall. When they don't bother doing that, you see it attempting to hack your connection all the time. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111214/18075617093/former... Or you can refer to these: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120109/10413817347/co-cha... http://www.publicknowledge.org/blog/managers-amendment-sopa-... Also, it undermines our own State Department's efforts to promote freedom & democracy abroad. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120105/13282317290/us-sta... Anyhow, I hope this is enough. Please make any use of this you can. Good luck! |