Dear network operators, I apologise for a posting that contains some politics; I hope you'll agree that it also has fairly substantial short-to-medium term operational implications. As you may or may not have heard, there is a censor-DNS-to-enforce-copyright bill that is going to be passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee this Wednesday. It will require service providers to censor the DNS entries of blacklisted domains where piracy is deemed too "central" to the site's purpose. Senators are claiming that they haven't heard any opposition to this bill, and it is being sponsored by 14 of the 19 committee members. We believe it needs to be stopped, and we need your help. What EFF needs right now is sign-ons to an open letter, from the engineers who helped build the Internet in the first place. The text of our letter is below. If you agree with it and would like to sign, please send me an email at pde@eff.org, with your name and a one-line summary of what part of the Internet you have helped to design, implement, debug or run. This is URGENT. I need your sign-ons by 4:00pm, US Eastern time (1pm Pacific), tomorrow. Unfortunately, the civil liberties community has been ambushed by this bill. You can find out more details on the bill here: https://eff.org/coica --------------------------- Open letter from Internet engineers to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee: We, the undersigned, have played various parts in building a network called the Internet. We wrote and debugged the software; we defined the standards and protocols that talk over that network. Many of us invented parts of it. We're just a little proud of the social and economic benefits that our project, the Internet, has brought with it. We are writing to oppose the Committee's proposed new Internet censorship and copyright bill. If enacted, this legislation will risk fragmenting the Internet's global domain name system (DNS), create an environment of tremendous fear and uncertainty for technological innovation, and seriously harm the credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key Internet infrastructure. In exchange for this, the bill will introduce censorship that will simultaneously be circumvented by deliberate infringers while hampering innocent parties' ability to communicate. All censorship schemes impact speech beyond the category they were intended to restrict, but this bill will be particularly egregious in that regard because it causes entire domains to vanish from the Web, not just infringing pages or files. Worse, an incredible range of useful, law-abiding sites can be blacklisted under this bill. These problems will be enough to ensure that alternative name-lookup infrastructures will come into widespread use, outside the control of US service providers but easily used by American citizens. Errors and divergences will appear between these new services and the current global DNS, and contradictory addresses will confuse browsers and frustrate the people using them. These problems will be widespread and will affect sites other than those blacklisted by the American government. The US government has regularly claimed that it supports a free and open Internet, both domestically and abroad. We can't have a free and open Internet without a global domain name system that sits above the political concerns and objectives of any one government or industry. To date, the leading role the US has played in this infrastructure has been fairly uncontroversial because America is seen as a trustworthy arbiter and a neutral bastion of free expression. If the US suddenly begins to use its central position in the DNS for censorship that advances its political and economic agenda, the consequences will be far-reaching and destructive. Senators, we believe the Internet is too important and too valuable to be endangered in this way, and implore you to put this bill aside. -- Peter Eckersley pde@eff.org Senior Staff Technologist Tel +1 415 436 9333 x131 Electronic Frontier Foundation Fax +1 415 436 9993