Showing posts with label the internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the internet. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 20, 2018

From Wired: PRO-GUN RUSSIAN BOTS FLOOD TWITTER AFTER PARKLAND SHOOTING

For our upcoming look at the media in GOVT 2305:

- Click here for the article.

EACH NEW BREAKING news situation is an opportunity for trolls to grab attention, provoke emotions, and spread propaganda. The Russian government knows this. Fake-news manufacturing teenagers in Macedonia know this. Twitter bot creators know this. And thanks to data-gathering operations from groups like the Alliance for Securing Democracy and RoBhat Labs, the world knows this.
In the wake of Wednesday’s Parkland, Florida, school shooting, which resulted in 17 deaths, troll and bot-tracking sites reported an immediate uptick in related tweets from political propaganda bots and Russia-linked Twitter accounts. Hamilton 68, a website created by Alliance for Securing Democracy, tracks Twitter activity from accounts it has identified as linked to Russian influence campaigns. As of morning, shooting-related terms dominated the site’s trending hashtags and topics, including Parkland, guncontrolnow, Florida, guncontrol, and Nikolas Cruz, the name of the alleged shooter. Popular trending topics among the bot network include shooter, NRA, shooting, Nikolas, Florida, and teacher.
On RoBhat Labs' Botcheck.me, a website created by two Berkeley students to track 1500 political propaganda bots, all of the top two-word phrases used in the last 24 hours—excluding President Trump's name—are related to the tragedy: School shooting, gun control, high school, Florida school. The top hashtags from the last 24 hours include Parkland, guncontrol, and guncontrolnow.
Ash Bhat, one of the project’s creators, says the bots are able to respond quickly to breaking news because they’re ultimately controlled by humans. In contrast to the Russia-affiliated Hamilton 68 bots, Bhat would not speculate on who is behind the bots that RoBhat Labs tracks. In some cases, the bot creators come up with hashtags, and use their bots to amplify them until they’re adopted by human users. “Over time the hashtag moves out of the bot network to the general public,” he says. Once a hashtag is widely adopted by real users, it’s difficult for Twitter to police, Bhat says. RoBhat Labs’ data shows this happened with the hashtag MemoDay, which bubbled up when House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes’ controversial memo was released.

What's the purpose? According to this opinion piece, to undermine trust in American governing institutions.

- Click here for: "After the Parkland shooting, pro-Russian bots are pushing false-flag allegations again."

For most Americans, the Parkland shooting was a terrible tragedy. But for social media accounts that promote the interests of Russia in the United States, it was a fantastic opportunity.
On the morning after the tragedy, the Russia-linked accounts were commenting fiercely, pushing the “crazy lone killer” explanation for the shooting and mocking advocates of gun control. According to Hamilton 68, a tracker website created by the German Marshall Fund, a lot of them linked to photos of guns and ammunition on the Instagram account of the suspected killer, plus a screenshot of a Google search for “Allahu akbar.” Others linked to a fact-checking website that debunked some statistics about gun crime.
By Friday morning, some of the same accounts were also pushing something slightly different: the hashtag #falseflag. That’s a reference to the conspiracy theory, already widespread 48 hours later, that the shooting never happened, that the attack is a “false flag” operation staged by the U.S. government as a prelude to the seizure of guns.
And this is just the beginning. Over the next few days, many of these same kinds of accounts will invent a whole range of conspiracy theories about the shooting. If the past repeats itself, pro-Russian, alt-right, white-supremacist and pro-gun social media accounts will promote the same hashtags and indulge in the same conspiracy theories.
Each group has its own interests in pushing #falseflag, but the Russian interest is clear. They do it because it helps undermine trust in institutions — the police, the FBI, the media — as well as in the government itself. They also do it because it helps to amplify extremist views that will deepen polarization in U.S. political life and create ever angrier, ever more partisan divides.

Tuesday, January 24, 2017

From Vox: Donald Trump just named a net neutrality foe to head the FCC

Another indication of a major policy shift from the Obama years

- Click here for the article.

Under President Barack Obama, the Federal Communication Commission passed regulations that provided strong legal protections for network neutrality. These rules, which were strongly opposed by telecommunications giants such as Comcast and Verizon, were designed to create a level playing field for online companies.
Now Donald Trump has taken the first step toward gutting those regulations: He has named Ajit Pai to be the next chair of the FCC.
Pai has served as a Republican member of the five-member FCC since 2012. He’s known for his deregulatory views generally and his opposition to network neutrality in particular. In a December speech, he complained that there was too much “regulatory underbrush” at the FCC, and vowed to “fire up the weed whacker and remove those rules that are holding back investment, innovation, and job creation.”
Network neutrality is likely to be at the top of Pai’s hit list. But supporters of network neutrality rules say that repealing them would be a disaster for the open internet and online innovation.

“Consumers need to be worried about what this means for their access to the internet,” argues Chris Lewis of the pro-net neutrality group Public Knowledge. He warns that in a world without network neutrality rules, big ISPs like Comcast or Verizon could block access to certain websites or force customers to pay extra to reach sites they don’t own.
The president can appoint an existing FCC member chair without Senate approval, according to Ryan Radia, a legal expert at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. So Pai won’t have to go through the confirmation process in order to assume his new role.
Republicans will have a majority on the FCC and in Congress, so there’s likely nothing Democrats or liberal groups can do to stop Republicans from rolling back network neutrality rules. But it’s going to be a long, ugly fight that could tie up the FCC in the courts for years to come.

Wednesday, September 28, 2016

From Politico: Appeals court - Ballot selfie ban unconstitutional

It turns out that you can post selfies from the voting booth.

Let's see if the Supreme Court decides to review it.

- Click here for the article.

A federal appeals court has ruled that New Hampshire's ban on voters taking and publishing photos of their voted ballots is unconstitutional. 
The Boston-based 1st Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday upheld a lower court ruling that the law, revised in 2014, ran afoul of the First Amendment because lawmakers could not show that it was tailored to the purported threat of vote-buying and voter intimidation. The unanimous, three-judge appeals court panel also questioned how serious and present a threat that was.
“Digital photography, the internet, and social media are not unknown quantities – they have been ubiquitous for several election cycles, without being shown to have the effect of furthering vote buying or voter intimidation. As the plaintiffs note, ‘small cameras’ and digital photography ‘have been in use for at least 15 years,’ and New Hampshire cannot identify a single complaint of vote buying or intimidation related to a voter's publishing a photograph of a marked ballot during that period,” Judge Sandra Lynch wrote, in an opinion joined by Judges Ojetta Thompson and Kermit Lipez.
“The prohibition on ballot selfies reaches and curtails the speech rights of all voters, not just those motivated to cast a particular vote for illegal reasons,” Lynch added. “New Hampshire does so in the name of trying to prevent a much smaller hypothetical pool of voters who, New Hampshire fears, may try to sell their votes. New Hampshire admits that no such vote-selling market has in fact emerged. And to the extent that the State hypothesizes this will make intimidation of some voters more likely, that is no reason to infringe on the rights of all voters.”
“The ballot-selfie prohibition is like ‘burn[ing down] the house to roast the pig,’” the court's opinion added, borrowing language from a 1957 Supreme Court ruling.

Thursday, September 15, 2016

From the Texas Tribune: Ted Cruz Takes Dead Aim at Obama Administration in Internet Dispute

More checks and balances - staring our junior senator. Free speech concerns play a role here, as well as questions over the legitimate functions of government. In this case it appears the senator is in favor of U.S. governmental control over a key aspect of the internet - one mentioned below.

He has introduced a bill blocking an Obama proposal to let go of ICANN.

- Click here for the story.

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz might be laying low politically, but this fall he's taking the lead on an obscure issue that could affect ongoing federal budget negotiations: Who should control how the Internet is organized?

Cruz is fighting an impending move by the federal government to relinquish oversight of a nonprofit organization that determines the way domain names are organized on the Internet.

It’s an issue on the minds of many conservatives, who charge that giving up that power would allow authoritarian regimes like China and Russia to further censor free speech on the Web.
"Once the government's out of the picture, First Amendment protections go away," Cruz said Wednesday morning at a Senate hearing he chaired.
"Why risk it? The Internet works. It's not broken," he later added. "What is the problem that is trying to be solved here?"

But those advocating for the move toward privatization, a group that includes the Obama administration and a number of technology companies, say that the U.S. ceded de facto control of the Internet decades ago and that such concern is overstated.

Thursday, February 26, 2015

From the Washington Post: The FCC approves strong net neutrality rules

- Click here for the article.

The Federal Communications Commission approved strict new rules for Internet providers Thursday in a historic vote that represents the government's most aggressive attempt to make sure the Web remains a level playing field.
The rules would dramatically expand the agency's oversight of the country's high-speed broadband providers, regulating them like a public utility. They were adopted by a 3-to-2 margin with the commission's Republican members voting against them.
Under the rules, it will be illegal for companies such as Verizon or Cox Communications to slow down streaming videos, games and other online content traveling over their networks. They also will be prohibited from establishing "fast lanes" that speed up access to Web sites that pay an extra fee. And in an unprecedented move, the FCC could apply the rules to wireless carriers, such as T-Mobile and Sprint, in a nod to the rapid rise of smartphones and the mobile Internet.

What is net neutrality?

- What Is Net Neutrality And Why Should I Care? The Non-Geek’s Guide.

And what is the FCC?

- Wikipedia: FCC.
- Website: FCC.gov.
- FCC Rulemaking.

Federalism at its most confusing

All three levels of government are involved in this:

- Feds Nullify State Laws on City Internet: Net neutrality may get more attention, but the FCC is also making a major push for community Internet service—a priority for Obama.

The Federal Communications Commission voted Thursday to overturn laws in Tennessee and North Carolina that restrict the ability of local government to provide Internet service to their own residents.
Chattanooga, Tenn., and Wilson, N.C., first filed petitions last year asking the FCC to overturn their states' laws on local broadband. Both cities are currently providing Internet service, but their state governments had prevented them from expanding the projects to more residents. Last month, President Obama urged the FCC to grant the petitions as part of his push to expand access to high-speed Internet.
Telecom and cable companies have been lobbying for the state laws around the country, arguing that it's not fair for them to have to compete with government-owned Internet providers. The companies contend that the city projects discourage private investment and are often expensive failures.
But FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler argued that if cities want to invest their own money to ensure that homes and businesses have access to high-speed Internet, then state laws shouldn't stand in their way.

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

From the Monkey Cage: The decline of local news is threatening citizen engagement

The authors find that the loss of local newspapers - and presumably less information about local matters - leads to less interest and engagement. The problems this posses for "keeping the republic" seem obvious.

Just as interesting, the authors argue that the decline in competitive races for the US House of Representatives has led to less coverage of these races, which in turn has led to less knowledge about them and then less engagement.

And there's more: The increasing number of options available for information has meant that those who follow politics know more and more because they have access to more information and those who want to avoid it have other places to go. They know less and less.

File this under: "important thing to read"

- Click here for the article.

The author does link to this cool cat video.

Friday, July 4, 2014

From The Dish: An Online Right To Be Forgotten?

It's the 4th of July - which is really all about barbecue and fireworks - but also supposedly about the signing the Declaration of Independence. I try to spend a good bit of time in early slides analyzing the argument it contains and the history leading up to it.

I try to draw attention to this open ended part of it: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. 

In lecture classes I like to generate a discussion about the word "among" which seems to suggest that other rights exist beyond those three listed. Is this in fact that case and if so what might those rights be? How would we figure this out?

The recent decision by the European Union Court of Justice that there is a right to be forgotten would be a perfect subject. This Dish links to a variety of stories discussing the right and the difficulty we might have in enforcing it.

- Click here for the post.

The digital revolution - which makes information retrieval easy - might make this impossible. And ironically, the more we actively try to conceal parts of out past, the more we highlight it. It's one thing to claim a right, a trickier thing to enforce it.

It just occurred to me that early Texas was populated by people who were trying to make themselves forgotten - by creditors, law enforcement and others. Life was different then.

Friday, January 10, 2014

From Slate: The Amazon of Higher Education

OK, I waved the suspension for this article on higher ed. I might post a few more on this topic.

A school in New Hampshire rides the wave of online learning. We're noticing the change here as well. While enrollment in some sections continues to be strong - others, notably evening classes, are taking huge hits. The most likely explanation is that these students are taking online courses.

It's no longer the future - its reality - and it is affecting the economics of higher ed.

The near demise and subsequent rebirth of SNHU offers a glimpse into the crisis facing American higher education. More than a third of American colleges and universities have deteriorating finances, according to a 2012 report. While more Americans find that a college degree is their only ticket to the middle class, fewer institutions are able to provide it at a reasonable cost.


When LeBlanc took over in 2003, SNHU was struggling. It had poor name recognition and fewer students could afford its rising tuition. When the recession hit, enrollment dipped and it looked as though the school would have to make cuts to stay afloat. LeBlanc, who previously had run an even smaller institution, 300-student Marlboro College in Vermont, thought SNHU’s one hope might be its fledgling online division.


He had long been friends with Clay Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor and author of the groundbreaking book The Innovator’s Dilemma, which examines the impacts of disruptive technologies on traditional industries. LeBlanc made Christensen an SNHU trustee and consulted extensively with him about embracing online education as a way to escape what seemed like certain decline.


In 2009, instead of cutting, LeBlanc asked the board to double down on the online division. He argued that rapid growth in online could quickly produce new revenues that could save the main campus in Manchester, N.H. “It was a big-gulp moment,” he says.


But he was convinced by Christensen that there were no other options. “The business models implicit in higher-ed are broken,” he says. “Public institutions will not see increasing state funding and private colleges will not see ever-rising tuition.”


His solution was to tackle what colleges were doing poorly: graduating students. Half the students who enroll in post-secondary education never get a degree but still accumulate debt. The low completion rate can be blamed partly on the fact that college is still designed for 18-year-olds who are signing up for an immersive, four-year experience replete with football games and beer-drinking. But those traditional students make up only 20 percent of the post-secondary population. The vast majority are working adults, many with families, whose lives rarely align with an academic timetable.


“College is designed in every way for that 20 percent—cost, time, scheduling, everything,” says LeBlanc. He set out to create an institution for the other 80 percent, one that was flexible and offered a seamless online experience. But in the process, he turned what had been a small New England college with red-brick buildings and a quad into something barely recognizable. There are still nearly 3,000 students enrolled at its campus in Manchester (the men’s soccer team won the NCAA Division II championship last season), but the action has shifted to its fast-growing online division.

Saturday, June 8, 2013

PRISM and Boundless Informant

The Washington Post and the Guardian seem primarily responsible for revealing that the National Security Agency, and its British counterpart, has been collecting data from the servers of nine Internet companies that allow it to track phone records and computer activity.

Here's the description in the WaPo:
The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post.

The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley.

Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to the document: “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.”

Here are the previously top secret files which describe PRISM.

And a description of Boundless Informant.

The NYT provides background on the program - which can be traced back to 9/11 and has its defenders in Congress.









http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/us/nsa-verizon-calls.html?smid=pl-share

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

This makes total sense

The first commercial transaction over the internet involved the sale of a bag of marijuana.

In 1971 or 1972, Stanford students using Arpanet accounts at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory engaged in a commercial transaction with their counterparts at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before Amazon, before eBay, the seminal act of e-commerce was a drug deal. The students used the network to quietly arrange the sale of an undetermined amount of marijuana.

Thursday, February 7, 2013

Post Office to cut Saturday mail delivery



Detail from the Washington Post. The transition to digital communications seems to have caught up with the agency - which remember has a function that is directly tied into a delegated power in the Constitution. The decision was made by the current Postmaster General and is on shaky legal ground - some argue Congress should make the decision, but the Post Office does not think Congress has the ability to make the right decision on this so is moving on its own. The decision does not save near as much money as the Post Office is losing and is upsetting postal workers - naturally.

- The postal union (the National Rural Letter Carriers Association) wants the postmaster general fired.

- Is this the beginning of the Post Office's death spiral?

- The Post Office apparently has plans for becoming more fiscally disciplined, but claims that Congress is preventing them from doing so. They are going around Congress and hoping members of Congress will eventually see things their way and get behind this changes later.

- Esquire Magazine features a long article on the post office in its current issue.

- The US Post Office is the best in the world at delivering mail - which is what it's supposed to do right?

- Here's the Wikipedia entry on Postmaster General - and here's a link to info on the most famous Postmaster General the US ever had - even if he held the position primarily during colonial days: Benjamin Franklin.

Saturday, January 12, 2013

"the single most important comment in the history of Internet comments. Probably.”

That's what The Atlantic calls the comment from a Georgia lawyer that led to the idea that Secretary of the Treasury can sidestep the debt ceiling by minting a coin and giving it a value of $1 trillion and depositing it in the treasury. He has no economics training, which he considers helpful.

The idea came to him initially after reading a 2009 Wall Street Journal article about frequent-flier point collectors taking advantage of an offer from the U.S. Mint. When the Mint offered free shipping for purchases of $1 legal-tender Native American coins, entrepreneurial citizens bought them with their credit cards, collected the points, and then deposited the coins into their bank accounts. It amounted to free frequent flier miles.

This story was so intriguing to Beowulf that he began looking into monetary law and found this: “The Secretary may mint and issue platinum bullion coins and proof platinum coins in accordance with such specifications, designs, varieties, quantities, denominations, and inscriptions as the Secretary, in the Secretary’s discretion, may prescribe from time to time.”
He took the idea to a website's comment section and waited.

In the midst of the debt-ceiling negotiations in the summer of 2011, a commenter on the blog Pragmatic Capitalism offered a simple suggestion to end the debate over the debt ceiling once and for all: “Geithner could sidestep the debt ceiling this afternoon by ordering the West Point Mint to coin a 1 oz. $ 1 trillion coin.” For months, it suffered the fate of the vast majority of Internet comments lingering in the ash heap of history. And yet, somehow, this one comment was plucked from obscurity and has become the talk of the nation.

Lately it’s seemed like everyone wants to talk about this platinum coin idea. It resurfaced largely thanks to Joe Weisenthal of Business Insider and Josh Barro of Bloomberg View, and it has now become a favorite topic for journalists around the country (including Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman) and was even brought up in a White House press briefing this week. But it all started with someone going by the name of “Beowulf.”
But the Treasury Department has apparently ruled out minting it. Its legal status is still unclear.

- A wikipedia page has been set up for the coin.

When we cover the media, we discuss how the internet has decentralized the flow of information and agenda setting. I'm not aware of a comment having an impact on political debate though. This is new stuff.

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

A Great Question: Watergate 4.0: How Would the Story Unfold in the Digital Age?

Several newspapers have written up a recent talk made by the reporters who broke the Watergate story - Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward - that included a discussion about whether reporters in the age of the internet would have been able to break the Watergate scandal as they did years back.

They note that students today seem to over-estimate what is on the internet:

The truth of what goes on is not on the Internet. [The Internet] can supplement. It can help advance. But the truth resides with people. Human sources.”

And that the resources they had available that allowed for the investigation do not exist any more:

Woodward and Bernstein’s main point was evocative of a previous, plentiful era: Editors gave them the time and encouragement to pursue an intricate, elusive story, they said, and then the rest of the American system (Congress, the judiciary) took over and worked. It was a shining act of democratic teamwork that neither man believes is wholly replicable today — either because news outlets are strapped or gutted, or because the American people have a reduced appetite for ponderous coverage of a not-yet-scandal, or because the current Congress would never act as decisively to investigate a president.

And they mention the negative impact of the 24 hour news cycle and the use of news sources to confirm deeply held opinions rather than obtain objective analysis:

“We had a readership that was much more open to real fact than today,” Bernstein said. “Today there’s a huge audience, partly whipped into shape by the 24-hour cycle, that is looking for information to confirm their already-held political-cultural-religious beliefs/ideologies, and that is the cauldron into which all information is put. . . . I have no doubt there are dozens of great reporters out there today — and news organizations — that could do this story. What I don’t think is that it would withstand this cultural reception. It might get ground up in the process.”

Of course they might just be a couple of grumpy old guys.

Saturday, March 17, 2012

Three Hill stories about the FCC

2302's should read these since they touch on a critical independent executive agency - one that is commonly argued to be captured by the industry it is meant to regulate. 2301s should read these for what they tell us about federalism - what policies the national government claims it has authority to regulate. Few claims are made that it is unconstitutional for them to regulate communications since it seems by its nature to be an interstate activity. 2301s might also be attentive to the agency capture angle, since these relationships are driven by industries and the lobbyists who represent them. Are FCC commissioners truly independent and attentive to the needs of the general public, or are they placed on the commission to represent the needs of the industry?

1 - LightSquared: FCC's planned block will violate our 'constitutional rights': The FCC's efforts to resolve a conflict between LightSquared and companies that use GPS is getting nasty. More from PCWorld.

2 - FCC commissioner blasts his agency for over-regulation: This is self explanatory, but fits within the subject matter of previous posts on the overall impact of regulations and whether independent regulatory agencies are too zealous in their approach to what they do. It is worth pointing out that the commissioner in question was appointed by George W Bush and shares the general disposition to regulations that Republicans tend to have.

3 - Republican pushes FCC for details on Google 'Wi-Spy': The FCC has been investigating the fallout from the personal data Google collected and published while creating its Street View feature. A member of Congress wants to see the report.

For further info:
- The FCC Website
- The FCC Wikipedia site

Monday, February 20, 2012

Regarding the "political intelligence industry "

I want to highlight a separate quote from the story on the political intelligence industry linked to below since it makes a separate point about the changing role of the media given the online environment and changes in the way people use the news and in how it is gathered:

As journalism and the habit of reading decline, it seems entirely possible that political intelligence will develop into a billion-dollar industry. People will still need information about government affairs, after all. But this information may become a luxury commodity for the very rich rather than something ordinary citizens consume by reading newspapers and magazines or listening to the radio or watching the evening news. Demand for all these mediums has dwindled, and the rise of the Internet doesn’t appear to have taken up the slack. Politicians, meanwhile, who after all have limited time on their hands, may increasingly wonder why they should spend any of it talking to a mere reporter when they can talk instead to a political intelligence consultant who just might reward the favor with a fat campaign contribution.

Saturday, December 24, 2011

Will SOPA break the internet?

This builds off posts far below, but might an exhuberant proposal to protect copyright holders online ruin the internet? People on the left and the right seem to be rallying against the proposal.

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

The dreaded You Tube moment

Here's an interesting read - it touches on points made in 2301 when we discussed the consequences of new media technology, in this case You Tube. The author argues that Republican candidates are mindful that their performances in the debates can lead to unwitting viral recordings that can undermine a candidate's appeal. Rick Perry's "oops" moment took off and had a life of its own since it was easily captured and distributed.

This has had an impact on how candidates perform: "No one has been more cautious in debates than Romney, the field's nominal front-runner. The former Massachusetts governor has worked to draw little attention to himself, choosing his words carefully when answering questions and often refusing to take the bait if a rival tries to goad him or get under his skin."

The story points out an important contemporary reality: ""The potential army of detractors or amplifiers has expanded exponentially, which makes the candidates more sensitive . . . Now, everyone's a publisher and everyone's a distributor. It makes the candidates realize there is no safe harbor anymore."

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Is this Internet Censorship?

From the NYT:

China operates the world’s most elaborate and opaque system of Internet censorship. But Congress, under pressure to take action against the theft of intellectual property, is considering misguided legislation that would strengthen China’s Great Firewall and even bring major features of it to America.

The legislation — the Protect IP Act, which has been introduced in the Senate, and a House version known as the Stop Online Piracy Act — have an impressive array of well-financed backers



. . . The bills would empower the attorney general to create a blacklist of sites to be blocked by Internet service providers, search engines, payment providers and advertising networks, all without a court hearing or a trial. The House version goes further, allowing private companies to sue service providers for even briefly and unknowingly hosting content that infringes on copyright — a sharp change from current law, which protects the service providers from civil liability if they remove the problematic content immediately upon notification. The intention is not the same as China’s Great Firewall, a nationwide system of Web censorship, but the practical effect could be similar.

The web may not remain be the forum for ideas that we think it is now.

James Fallows: Censoring the Internet: It's Not Just for China Any More!