[Noisebridge-discuss] internet censorship: congress is giving you it for xmas

[Joshua Juran]

On Nov 14, 2011, at 10:41 PM, Matt Thrailkill wrote:

> The first thing that springs to mind when I read about this and
> PROTECT-IP; can I just spam out bogus complaints about sites I don't
> like so they can be forced offline until someone has a chance to
> hand-process it?  Will I be able to take CNN offline because someone
> in a comment thread quotes me without my permission?  Or does a person
> have to be a huge corporation to do all the fun stuff?

Isn't it awesome how the question just answers itself?

> These laws are just begging to be abused..

No, X is just begging for Y when Y is an undesirable but likely  
outcome of X that was *not* intended by X's creators.  Sending  
session tokens unencrypted, for example, was just begging for an  
exploit like FireSheep -- the guilty parties just assumed that this  
would never happen, or figured they'd wait to deal with it when it  
did, or they were just oblivious.  They certainly didn't mean to  
enable session hijacking.  On the other hand, I assert that SOPA was  
created for the sole purpose of being abused.  Hello Kafka, hello  
Orwell.

Josh