Who Really Engaged in Misinformation?
Who Really Engaged in Misinformation?
Who Really Engaged in Misinformation?

    Get Involved Today

    In a blatant act of hypocrisy, Cary Sherman the chief
    executive of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), as well as
    his allies, are claiming that the public was misinformed about the Stop Online
    Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP (PIPA) when they opposed those
    bills.  As Sherman said, “misinformation may be a dirty trick, but it
    works.”  His organization would know given that for more than a year the
    RIAA, Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and other pro-SOPA and
    pro-PIPA allies actively engaged in misinforming Congress on the implications
    of the SOPA and PIPA.  

    Take
    for example the misinformation campaign by the RIAA and MPAA on the Domain Name
    Server (DNS) filter provisions in SOPA and PIPA.  Both bills contained
    provisions that would require broadband companies to filter DNS traffic to
    websites that a court would order “blocked.” 
    I say “blocked” because filtering DNS traffic does not take content off
    the Internet, nor does it stop an individual from spending the 5 seconds it
    would take to bypass the filter by migrating to a foreign DNS server.  It does however make networks significantly
    less secure and more vulnerable to hackers and cyber criminals (hence the
    “break the Internet” meme).  This finding
    is shared by more than 140 Internet engineers (including the Internet’s
    original architects and leading cyber security experts), several think tanks,
    private companies, and public sector entities operating DNS servers.  

    Public
    Knowledge
    and the Center for Democracy & Technology worked hard to untangle the misinformation campaign they waged in favor of DNS filtering on Capitol Hill.  We had to because frequently
    throughout 2011 these trade groups representing some of the most
    powerful companies in the world, actively tried to exploit the lack of technological
    expertise inherent in Congress.  Behind closed doors in private meetings
    and in open session with your Members of Congress, the groups’ representatives claimed
    that opposition by experts was just the “Google crowd” and were completely unfounded.  This “Google
    crowd” would consist of people like former Department of Homeland Security
    Assistant Secretary Stewart
    Baker
    , the National Sandia Labs, and a lot of the human rights community just to name a few (for the full
    list, click here).

    During
    the legislative hearing on SOPA, House Homeland Security Subcommittee Chairman on
    Cybersecurity Rep. Dan Lungren (R-CA) questioned MPAA Exec. Vice President
    Michael O’Leary about the cybersecurity problem.  In response he received the standard
    misinformation campaign line of there was no cybersecurity problem and that
    this type of activity “occurred all the time.”  To bolster their
    misinformation campaign, the content lobby worked hard to manufacture
    the “truth”
    by highlighting the work of the very small number
    of individuals (a grand total of three) who wrote “technical rebuttals.”  These were not so much rebuttals as they were
    well
    orchestrated advocacy pieces
    that ignored the engineering and distorted
    the studies
    they utilized in order to dupe Members of Congress to
    believe the legitimate concerns were in fact unsupported.

    Part
    of the RIAA and MPAA misinformation campaign centered on the argument that DNS
    filtering and secure networks (DNSSEC) could both exist in the same
    network.  This was despite the fact that top experts in the field provided an extensive
    explanation why that would not be technologically possible (a couple of these
    individuals actually saved the Internet in the past). 
    In the end, when Comcast (a SOPA supporter) announced they had to shut
    down anything that filters DNS traffic when they activated DNSSEC and the White House Cybersecurity Coordinator stated that the bills “pose a
    real risk to cybersecurity,” the jig was up.

    Lastly,
    claiming that censorship concerns in regards to DNS filtering were misplaced
    completely ignores the fact that SOPA and PIPA moved America closer to censorship
    oriented regimes.  If these bills were enacted into law, American
    broadband providers would have been required to install the same filtering
    technology used in China, Iran, United Arab Emirates, Armenia, Ethiopia, Saudi
    Arabia, Yemen, Bahrain, Burma (Myanmar), Syria, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and
    Vietnam.  This reality triggered the outpouring of opposition from the international human rights community who fight censorship overseas
    every day and point to the United States as the model.  Summing up the
    well informed reasoning behind their opposition, Julian
    Sanchez with the Cato Institute
    points out that enacting SOPA
    and PIPA would mean the “only difference between? the Unites States and China is what’s on the blacklist.” 

    The more than 14 million Americans who contacted their Congress knew
    what was in these bills.  If the MPAA and RIAA want to engage in a debate
    of who engaged in misinformation, I suggest they look internally before arguing
    that the public was too ignorant to understand SOPA and PIPA.  The truth
    of the matter is the public saved a misinformed Congress from itself.