[DanielBMarkham]

I would urge extreme caution about reading too much into this article.

I (I'm a political junkie) saw Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D) on TV yesterday. The message I got from his body language, nuance, and phrasing was something like "Obviously people who are elected from heavy technology areas are feeling a lot of heat. There's still a lot of support, though. Let's see if we can tweak this in such a way as to pass some kind of compromise."

Maybe that's just Reid trying to keep the RIAA cash cow alive, not sure. But I was fairly certain that what I was hearing was a tactical retreat, not a strategic surrender. Not by any means. My money says next time they'll have some language in there that could be interpreted a bunch of different ways (to prevent informed debate), and they'll wait until the last minute and sneak it into some other bill that is a "must-pass."

[brandall10]

Someone on HN posted a link to "Century of the Self" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self

Basic takeaway for me was dictatorships control by abject force, democracies keep things in check by pandering to irrationalism (ie. consumerism and mass media).

My take on this whole matter is perhaps framing this as a desire to protect Hollywood is a bit of a ruse. Wikileaks, the Middle East uprisings, Occupy Wallstreet, etc, are beginning to send a message.

Let's face it, the issues raised by SOPA and Protect IP have been a 'problem' for quite a while now. So why now exactly? And why has the public been almost completely unaware of this legislation? Technology is too enabling and things are happening too quickly. The US government is fearing a threat that things are about to run off the tracks. I consider this bill just one of many that will be coming down the pike in various forms - the meta message simply being a war against technology, or trying to contain it to keep the concept of American life in check. Now that the word is getting out about this a retreat and rethink is in order to figure out how to broach legislation that moves toward this goal. All the other side has to do is frame this as "we're moving toward being like China" and the propaganda machine is thrown for a loop, because clearly, that is the idea to be avoided. Our US concept of prosperity is defined by that contrast. It's the new Cold War. But China isn't the adversary. We are.

Apologies for the conspiracy theorist tone. But yeah, we're just getting started.

[Kroem3r]

I don't know why you'd apologize for putting this in a larger context; not doing that risks making the win Pyrrhic.

SOPA and PIPA aren't end-game plays, they're simply tactics in the ongoing culture war. Recent events, from Wikileaks to Anonymous and Occupy Wall Street, have put the spot-light on the internet crowd. Now, SOPA has flushed them out into the open.

If you win the battle, look to lose the backlash. Imagine how successful they'll be portraying the 'net crowd as disrespectful of property, lawless, elitist, anti-American and all that. This will become yet another one of these issues that shave off and mobilize some fraction of the electorate and get them to vote against their own best interests. Not only that, it will marginalize movements coming out of the internet; even if they just start that trend, this will all have been a huge success.

[Generic_Name]

Well if you're right, that just means EVERYONE needs to speak out against legislation like this, otherwise who knows where the government is going to lead this nation.

[mattwdelong]

What scares me most is the fact that everyone knows this tactic. Write an absurd policy, debate it, offer an alternative and jam it down citizens throats.

We know this, yet there is not much that can be done about it. Aside from the obvious, running for Senate and using your vote, what can be done to stop it? Someone with the right amount of money and enough motivation can pass just about anything, given enough time.

I think, instead of protesting SOPA (or the next bill), people need to devise a method or position themselves so that they're in the right places to protect the average Citizen from such policies. These bills will just keep coming. Screaming from the side line is no longer effective.

[DanielBMarkham]

If the president were to have the line-item veto, where he could approve of certain parts of a bill and veto others, we could hold him personally responsible whenever bills get loaded up like this. As it is, they can pass what they want and nobody is responsible. That's clearly not the way the system was designed to work. The entire purpose of representative democracies is that while representatives can freely vote against their constituents, the constituents also can throw them out of office based on the representative's decisions.

I've seen this same problem play out in a variety of contexts, and it looks to me like the line-item veto is the only thing that will prevent this corruption of the system we're seeing. While this idea has been a pet cause of conservatives for some time, it looks like supporters of liberty have just as much or more skin in the game as fiscal hawks.

Play out the following scenario in your head: it's late in the year, no budget has been passed by Congress (again), and suddenly some third-rail social program is running out of money. Congress passes a law to help the orphans and grandmothers, everybody climbs on-board with huge majority votes, and way in the back section is another version of SOPA.

If you're the president, what do you do? Note this is a much different political scenario than just threatening a veto -- this is asking if you're willing to risk pissing off huge special interests groups just to make a much smaller number of nerds happy. It's political math, and it works quite simply. You sign the bill, make a public speech about how bad the new SOPA is, and life goes on. If you're smart you send out mailers asking people to donate so you can get rid of the thing you just signed! One party will pick the "side" of SOPA, the other party will pick the other "side". In fact it doesn't matter whether you really support or oppose the bill, whoever paid for it got it passed, huge numbers of politicians got to oppose it, and the public can't point the finger at anybody. There's nobody to throw out of office. There's no feedback loop. The system is broken.

In my mind the only thing that is going to fix that is the line-item veto. A lot of state governors have it. I think it's about time POTUS got it also.

[mattwdelong]

That's actually laid out quite nicely. And in theory, I really like it.

However, it's kind of like a last line of defense, where the rest of the defense is entirely broken. It's putting all your faith in that last line of defense, and hoping that the right scenario will play out. Eventually, it too, will fail. Still, the first line of defense has to be fixed. With that being said, it's a step in the right direction.

[philwelch]

Wasn't the line item veto passed into law but ruled unconstitutional during the Clinton administration? In any case, this argument is predicated on the idea that we can trust the president, which is an idea the most recent couple of presidencies should have disabused us of.

[rgrieselhuber]

In effect, doesn't the President already have line item veto? If there are items he doesn't agree with, he should signal that he will veto until they are removed.

[jbooth]

That requires a lot from the President and oftentimes they'll be on the losing end of that political battle. On the recently-passed NDAA for example (which explicitly made it legal to detain people without trial, and hopefully will be struck down by the courts), it was passed as part of funding the military, sending out soldier paychecks, etc. Fox News is already (wrongly) accusing Obama of wanting to undermine our troops all the time, and people are already sick of pointless squabbling over routine funding matters in DC. Obama would have been the political loser from vetoing the bill, the Republicans would have known it, and they probably would have just kept passing the bill and forcing him to veto it until he caved.

[dantheman]

Obama originally objected to the NDAA because it limited his powers too much, not because of the indefinite detention clause.

The Administration strongly objects to the military custody provision of section 1032, which would appear to mandate military custody for a certain class of terrorism suspects. This unnecessary, untested, and legally controversial restriction of the President's authority to defend the Nation from terrorist threats would tie the hands of our intelligence and law enforcement professionals. Moreover, applying this military custody requirement to individuals inside the United States, as some Members of Congress have suggested is their intention, would raise serious and unsettled legal questions and would be inconsistent with the fundamental American principle that our military does not patrol our streets. We have spent ten years since September 11, 2001, breaking down the walls between intelligence, military, and law enforcement professionals; Congress should not now rebuild those walls and unnecessarily make the job of preventing terrorist attacks more difficult. Specifically, the provision would limit the flexibility of our national security professionals to choose, based on the evidence and the facts and circumstances of each case, which tool for incapacitating dangerous terrorists best serves our national security interests. The waiver provision fails to address these concerns, particularly in time-sensitive operations in which law enforcement personnel have traditionally played the leading role. These problems are all the more acute because the section defines the category of individuals who would be subject to mandatory military custody by substituting new and untested legislative criteria for the criteria the Executive and Judicial branches are currently using for detention under the AUMF in both habeas litigation and military operations. Such confusion threatens our ability to act swiftly and decisively to capture, detain, and interrogate terrorism suspects, and could disrupt the collection of vital intelligence about threats to the American people.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/legislativ...

[jbooth]

What? Break it down for me here, in what way is he arguing for more quote "powers"? The power to not indefinitely detain people? That's a really brutal one, favorite of dictators everywhere. I shudder at the thought of someday being not-detained.

I mean, I really don't want to carry Obama's water on this one given that he did sign the bill, but you're just engaged in some sort of silly deliberate misinterpretation of the paragraph you quoted.

[danssig]

You're making the assumption that the president is against this legislation aren't you?

[dhimes]

Write an absurd policy, debate it, offer an alternative and jam it down citizens throats

I don't think that was their tactic. I believe they intended to get the bills passed pretty much the way they wrote them (with, of course, the canonical juggling that goes on in these things). "Screaming from the sideline" was, in fact, effective. I'm just not comfortable using it as a long-term strategy.

We do need strong organizations in support of net freedom and neutrality. I would very much favor an organization whose only focus was on the 'net, and didn't also try to be anti-software-copyright/anti-software-patent or take on some other personality as well. It's easy to dilute your support when you try to take on too many causes that most folks don't really understand. Thost that may be inclined to give to one cause may shy away from a group that supports several.

[nitrogen]

I don't think that was their tactic.

Sure, they (Hollywood) would be happy if SOPA passed unaltered, but that's always the tactic: propose a door-in-the-face bill, shift the Overton window a bit, pass a foot-in-the-door law. It happens over and over.

Example: Do you think they could have passed a 40 year copyright extension in the 1970s? Instead, they passed two ~20 year extensions, one in 1976, one in 1998.

Example 2: SOPA and PIPA would have been unimaginable in 1998. Instead, they got the DMCA, which was merely unacceptable. Now, they push SOPA and PIPA hard, expecting to pass some watered-down version, and driving web site owners to extol the DMCA they vociferously opposed in 1998.

[dhimes]

I suspect in many cases it's a "Plan B" rather than a first-shot strategy. It is, of course, hard to know for sure, but as a counter-example, look how they de-fanged the FDA for regulating nutritional supplements (this goes back to the '90s). The first thing the industry did was to get every sympathetic (or buyable) politician and talking head to start talking about how Americans were hurt by the stupid FDA, using the usual hyperbole and emotion-stirring anecdotes, so that people had the FDA, out of the blue, on the tip of their tongues and "knowing" it was bad. Newt Gingrich was a point-man for this effort. (Once it was passed people started dying from ephedra-based nutritional supplements.)

Then when the legislation was produced a support-base had already been formed. They expected a very public fight and prepared for it.

In this case they were very quiet. The first thing I heard at all in the normal media was on the radio driving to work this morning. The news guy on the Boston station mentioned Wikipedia's blackout tomorrow and mentioned SOPA as the reason. The who bit was about 3 sentences. As I said, I'm not privy to insider strategy, but it was definitely a different tack.

[Retric]

The way to stop it is to create and fund long term organizations devoted to stopping it. We have Greenpeace and PITA we need Net Freedom.

[sespindola]

We already have the EFF[1]. Maybe we should consider donating to it.

[1]: https://www.eff.org/helpout

[Retric]

Thanks for that, I just gave them 100$ because you mentioned it.

PS: They require an email address on their donation page, but you can get away with junk data.

[linuxlizard]

I donate $20/month. And they're a US 501(c)(3) organization so my donation comes off my taxes. Win win.

[stiletto]

I've been meaning to ask someone this: do you mean that your return (if you receive a return) would be an additional $20, or that you are taxed as though you made $20 less? Sorry if this is elementary or too off-topic.

[neilparikh]

I'm pretty sure that $20 is not taxed. So, you're taxed as through you made $20 less.

[mattwdelong]

Well, I kind of think this is playing right into the problem at hand. I mean, I believe what got us into this problem in the first place is an organization with motivations. Playing the same game is not what needs to be done, something else needs to be done. What that is? I don't know. But THIS game is not working, there are too many citizens getting hurt/left behind as a result. Think different. Hackers may not be the brightest in the world, but they sure are some of the most creative.

[bulletsvshumans]

EFF?

[stevecooperorg]

First hit on google.

[gersh]

Do we need a constitutional amendment guaranteeing uncensored internet access?

[philwelch]

We already had one, I thought.

[dantheman]

This has been the standard practice for quite awhile. Special interests always have the incentive to get legislation that favors them, this was pointed out in Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson (1946):

Special interests, as the history of tariffs reminds us, can think of the most ingenious reasons why they should be the objects of special solicitude. Their spokesmen present a plan in their favor; and it seems at first so absurd that disinterested writers do not trouble to expose it. But the special interests keep on insisting on the scheme. Its enactment would make so much difference to their own immediate welfare that they can afford to hire trained economists and "public relations experts" to propagate it in their behalf. The public hears the argument so often repeated, and accompanied by such a wealth of imposing statistics, charts, curves and pie-slices, that it is soon taken in. When at last disinterested writers recognize that the danger of the scheme's enactment is real, they are usually too late. They cannot in a few weeks acquaint themselves with the subject as thoroughly as the hired brains who have been devoting their full time to it for years; they are accused of being uniformed ,and they have the air of men who presume to dispute axioms.

http://www.fee.org/library/books/economics-in-one-lesson/#0....

The whole book is available at the URL, it's quite a good read.

[dhimes]

I think you hit the nail squarely on the head, Mr. Markham. I too sense this is not going away soon. I don't even trust my own reps in the long term, and they are supposedly opposing.

I think this issue will be to the RIAA what abortion is to fundamentalist Christians: they intend to fight this fight until they win it.

[pasbesoin]

I didn't see Reid, but I agree. Amongst other things, the last 15+ years have shown us there will be no strategic surrender.

I need to dig into more detail, but everything leading up to this leads me to believe it's just a new round of hand waving, or "duck and cover", until they can find e.g. the eve of another holiday recess to try to ram it through.

And notice, please, that in the midst of this "retreat", they never did present and listen to the technical experts. Do you thing that this is entirely by accident?

[espeed]

This "sneak it into some other bill that is a 'must-pass'" is BS too. What efforts have been made to reform the bill system?