Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Ron Paul — Stop Internet Censorship


Read it at Congressman Ron Paul
Stop Internet Censorship
by Rep. Ron Paul
(h/t Edward Harrison | Credit Writedowns)

Ron Paul gets it. Democrats by and large are on the wrong side of this issue, other than wrt to the donors.

Congress is using a sledge hammer to kill flies and threatening to break the Internet and stifle innovation.

A lot of people across the political spectrum, especially younger people, are flocking to Ron Paul for this and similar reasons, even though they may disagree with some of his other views.

Rachel Maddow: "It's no longer OK not to know how the Internet works." — 'The Rachel Maddow Show' for Wednesday, January 18, 2012

3 comments:

Matt Franko said...

Tom,

I was thinking what the industry could do is modify the storage protocols so that every one of their customers would have a physical disk partition assigned to them.

Even under a RAID scenario, the storage companies should still be able to maintain configuration management of their storage systems so that they could determine where each of their customers data is stored at the physical level.

Think of it like the mini-storage facilities.

If someone renting a bay at one of these storage unit facilities was suspected of storing drugs there, and the cops got a tip off, it would not be like the cops would confiscate the whole building, rather they would confiscate just the unit that the suspect(s) were renting.

This type of approach can also apply to online storage.

feds would get a complaint about a specific user/customer. Contact the online data co. and if the feds wanted the physical hard drive of the suspect, the Co. could just pull the disk(s)or the parttion of the specific customer that was accused of IP infringement. Case closed.

This would require the cooperation of both the ISP and law enforcement to rearrange the industry and the enforcement approach.

Both of these entities can typically be buttheads though. Internet types dont like to be told what to do (arrogant technocrats) and law enforcement often likes to be heavy handed.

Resp,

Tom Hickey said...

Right, deter the criminal not the crime. There is no way to prevent online piracy by "preventing online piracy," other than restricting the Internet. However, it is possible to reduce online piracy by targeting pirates.

If someone renting a bay at one of these storage unit facilities was suspected of storing drugs there, and the cops got a tip off, it would not be like the cops would confiscate the whole building, rather they would confiscate just the unit that the suspect(s) were renting.

Good analogy. It illustrates the insanity of preventing crime by closing down an entire industry and violating property rights to do so. And the fact is in the war on drugs, just this sort of thing happens. Similarly, the war on terror. It's impossible to mount a war on crime. but it is possible to police criminal activity.

Only imbeciles would do this, or people on the take.

I suspect that the donors are thinking that actually policing criminal activity is too slow and inefficient. They would rather just get rid of the entire venue, and Congress is clueless and venal enough to go along with it.

Pretty much the same as the US destroying entire countries to end terrorism.

It's absurd unless economic cost and human rights are no object so that a few people can get their way.

Unknown said...

We should all be responsible in using the internet so the government will have no reason to censor it. As a responsible subscriber of an Australian internet service provider, I encourage everyone to do the same.