Patrick Ruffini, political strategist, author, and President of Engage, a digital agency in Washington, DC, discusses his latest book with coauthors David Segal and David Moon: Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet. Ruffini covers the history behind SOPA, its implications for Internet freedom, the “Internet blackout” in January of 2012, and how the threat of SOPA united activists, technology companies, and the broader Internet community.

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Related Links

• Patrick Ruffini, Engage
• Patrick Ruffini, Huffington Post
• Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet, Goodreads

The “Cyber Privacy Act”? No it ain’t!

Michigan Representative Thaddeus McCotter (R) has introduced a bill to create a take-down regime for personal information akin to the widely abused DMCA process. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act established a system where copyright holders could as a practical matter force content off the Internet simply by requesting it.

McCotter’s proposal would similarly regulate every Internet site that has a comment section. He thinks it’s going to protect privacy, but he’s sorely mistaken. Its passage would undermine privacy and limit free speech.

I’ll take you through how McCotter’s gotten it wrong.

The operative language of H.R. 5108 is:

Any Internet website that makes available to the public personal information of individuals shall– (1) provide, in a clear and conspicuous location on the Internet website, a means for individuals whose personal information it contains to request the removal of such information; and (2) promptly remove the personal information of any individual who requests its removal.

The Federal Trade Commission would enforce the failure to abide by requests as it does unfair and deceptive trade practices. (Meaning: penalties.)

So if someone posts his or her name in a comment section and later regrets it, the operator of that web site would have to take it down. Sounds nice—and that is the right thing for webmasters to do when the circumstances warrant. But what about when they don’t?

Let’s say you run a site that receives hundreds or thousands of comments per day, many of them from anonymous visitors. Let’s say the site deals with controversial issues, and some visitors are angry at each other—they’re even angry at the site for hosting the discussion. Those visitors start working to undermine the conversation. They personally attack others, adopt false names, tell lies, and use vulgarities. This kind of person is well known on the web. They’re called “trolls.”

What would trolls do if federal law required webmasters to take down personal information by request? Simple: They would post the personal information of others. They would pose as others and falsely ask to have information taken down.

It’s a great way to attack a site: require it to consider hundreds or thousands of personal information take-down requests, each one backed by the threat of federal penalties.

What do you do as a webmaster to counter that? You require all comments to be tied to a fixed identity. Require a log-in before site visitors can comment. Then you can figure out later if the person requesting a take-down of personal information is the person who it pertains to.

What’s the result of that? Web sites collect and store more information about visitors. Then they turn around and use it for tracking and marketing. The information is available to litigators and government investigators, of course, through subpoenas and warrants.

Are you doing the math? McCotter’s “Cyber Privacy” bill is a proposal to increase Internet surveillance. Maybe he intends to improve Internet courtesy and decency. But decency is not a federal government project. It’s bottom-up, not top-down.

I write, of course, as a spare-time webmaster myself. The bills on WashingtonWatch.com get hundreds of comments per day. Many bills get lots of comments, but one in particular—subject of dispute, controversy, and trolling, along with productive political organizing—has over 130,000 comments.

I do a lot to foster a good visitor experience, consistent with maintaining the space available for free speech. I advise people about how to deal with trolls, I allow people to register so their stable identities can build trustworthy reputations, I proctor commenters about controlling vulgarities—sometimes strongly editing comments when they don’t, and I allow users to block commenters and words they don’t want to see.

When the context warrants it, I do remove personal information at the request of people that I believe are making honest, good faith requests. I think it’s part of what builds allegiance to the site.

But if I were required by law to do this, it would be an entirely different calculation. Each request would present me with a veiled legal threat, not a small customer service opportunity.

As trolls figured out how to exploit the law—the way some copyright holders exploit the DMCA—they could inundate small sites with requests. Webmasters would be right to treat all requests with suspicion. Confirming requests would require them to convert to greater surveillance. A percentage of the small sites and blogs that are hobbies or money-losers would just shut down comments rather than deal with the nonsense.

Representative McCotter’s plan to regulate Internet communications this way is no “Cyber Privacy” act. It’s anti-privacy, and it’s anti-free-speech.

Readers of Tech Liberation Front may be interested in a new breakfast series that BroadbandCensus.com has recently begun.

The next event in this series, “Should Government Funding Be Part of a National Broadband Plan?” will be held on Tuesday, November 18, from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m., and will include Stan Fendley, the director of legislative and regulatory policy for Corning, Inc., Kyle McSlarrow, CEO of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA), and John Windhausen, Jr., president of Telepoly Consulting. I will moderate the discussion.

Two weeks after Election Day, this Broadband Breakfast Club meeting will consider one of the hottest topics in telecom: can and should funding for broadband work its way into a pending fiscal stimulus package?

Future meetings of the breakfast club (December 2008 through March 2009) will consider the role of broadband applications in harnessing demand, how the universal service fund will be changed by high-speed internet, the role of wireless in universal broadband, and the extent of competition in the marketplace.

The Broadband Breakfast Club meets monthly at the Old Ebbitt Grill, at 675 15th Street, NW, in Washington. (It’s right across the street from the Department of the Treasury.)

Beginning at 8 a.m., an American plus Continental breakfast is available downstairs in the Cabinet Room. This is followed by a discussion about the question at hand, which ends at 10 a.m. Except for holidays (like Veteran’s Day), we’ll meet on the second Tuesday of each month, until March 2009. The registration page for the event is http://broadbandbreakfast.eventbrite.com.

Because of the limited size of the venue, seated attendance will be reserved the first 45 individuals to register. There are no restrictions on who may register to attend. With the exception of speakers, there is a $45.00 charge (plus a modest Eventbrite fee) to attend. The events are on the record.

We kicked off this series earlier this month with a well-attended breakfast on “10 Years Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act: Success or Failure?”

I started the Broadband Breakfast Club for the same reason that I started BroadbandCensus.com earlier this year: I believe that American consumers, policy-makers and broadband providers need better information about the issues surrounding high-speed internet access.

Today, broadband is (or could) the driver of citizen engagement, commerce, democratic participation, education, entertainment, health care and potential environmental gains through wider telecommuting. And yet basic information about where particular broadband company offers service – and at what price and at what speed – is not conveniently available in a single, public source. The free web service BroadbandCensus.com aims to change that by going directly to individual internet users for their feedback.

Our Broadband Breakfast Club series is directed more at Washington policy-makers and influencers. But again, we are seeking to broaden the discussion by allowing all to participate. The goal of this breakfast series is to bring an informed consensus – or, failing that, an informed disagreement – around key broadband policy questions.

With the dawn of a new administration – and the prospect of a systematic approach to high-speed internet issues for the first time in nearly a decade – now is the time to undertake these discussions.

Further, the breakfast events that we’re hosting now will lead up to our Spring 2009 conference, “Broadband Census for America: The New Administration.” The Spring 2009 conference – bringing together federal, state and local officials, academic researchers and other interested parties around the issue of broadband data – is tentatively scheduled for Friday, March 27, 2009, here in Washington.

If you have questions or thoughts about upcoming events in the Broadband Breakfast Club series, or about the Spring 2009 conference, “Broadband Census for America: The New Administration,” or about BroadbandCensus.com in general, feel free to contact me: drew at broadbandcensus.com, or at 202-580-8196.

As with everything on BroadbandCensus.com, this blog post is under our Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License. That means you can copy, send, repost and redistribute it. Please do so! The URL for this post is http://broadbandcensus.com/blog/?p=923, and the URL for the registration page is http://broadbandbreakfast.eventbrite.com.