We are all outlaws
Internet security dean, professional cryptographer, and Princeton professor Edward Felten has been tracking and cataloguing the ominous, creeping progress of “Super-DMCA” legislation across the U.S. in his blog ‘Freedom To Tinker’ (start at the bottom of the page), and at a summary page, here.
Cloned individual bills, each supported by the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), have already been quietly enacted in several U.S. states (including Delaware, Maryland, Illinois, Michigan, and Virginia) with more pending in other states.
This is genuinely worrying stuff. To illustrate, Felten quotes from the law already enacted in Colorado:
A person commits a violation … if he or she possesses, uses, manufactures, develops, assembles, distributes, transfers, imports into this state, licenses, leases, sells, offers to sell, promotes or advertises for sale, use or distribution any communication device … to conceal or to assist another to conceal from any communication service provider … the existence or place of origin or destination of any communication that utilizes a communication device...
In other words – it’s a good job I’m not in Colorado. Sitting here, blogging on a Windows machine, sending encrypted WiFi traffic through our little home firewall out via the DSL modem – I’m evidently in flagrant breach of this law.
I’m routinely concealing the “origin and destination” of the traffic through my “communications devices”, simply by using the default setup options provided by the companies who manufactured this combination of hardware and software I’m using.
Clearly these suppliers are dangerous, subversive nests of hackerdom. Notoriously shady companies such as IBM, Microsoft, D-Link, and Nortel.
This lawmaking is cluelessness raised to the level of art. Professor Felten points to this gob-smackingly boneheaded one-pager (PDF) being circulated by MPAA lobbyists. It starts:
While the Internet and Broadband services have great potential, they can also cause enormous losses to consumers, telecommunications services, and the companies that produce and distribute content for those businesses.
You can tell without clicking that link, it doesn’t get much better after an opening sentence like that.
But rather than endure another of my rants – go read Felten for a properly informed and researched analysis of this disturbing threat.
