{"id":12631,"date":"2011-12-17T10:52:21","date_gmt":"2011-12-17T15:52:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=12631"},"modified":"2011-12-17T10:52:21","modified_gmt":"2011-12-17T15:52:21","slug":"we-are-at-the-mercy-of-underachieving-congressional-know-nothings-that-have-more-in-common-with-the-slacker-students-sitting-in-the-back-of-math-class-than-elected-representatives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/12\/17\/we-are-at-the-mercy-of-underachieving-congressional-know-nothings-that-have-more-in-common-with-the-slacker-students-sitting-in-the-back-of-math-class-than-elected-representatives\/","title":{"rendered":"We are “at the mercy of underachieving Congressional know-nothings that have more in common with the slacker students sitting in the back of math class than elected representatives”"},"content":{"rendered":"

A great post on the folks who are currently debating — if so many declarations of ignorance can be called “debating” — hacking away at the very basis of the internet<\/a> we’ve come to love:<\/p>\n

\n

Some background: Since its introduction, SOPA and its Senate twin PROTECT-IP have been staunchly condemned by countless engineers, technologists and lawyers intimately familiar with the inner functioning of the internet. Completely beside the fact that these bills as they currently stand would stifle free speech and potentially cripple legitimate businesses by giving corporations extrajudicial censorial powers, they have found an even more insidious threat: The method of DNS filtering proposed to block supposed infringing sites opens up enormous security holes that threaten the stability of the internet itself.<\/p>\n

The only problem: Key members of the House Judiciary Committee still don\u2019t understand how the internet works, and worse yet, it\u2019s not clear whether they even want<\/em> to.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s of course perfectly standard for members of Congress to not be exceptionally proficient in technological matters. But for some committee members, the issue did not stop at mere ignorance. Rather, it seemed there was in many cases an outright refusal<\/em> to understand what is undoubtedly a complex issue dealing with highly-sensitive technologies.<\/p>\n

When the security issue was brought up, Rep. Mel Watt of North Carolina seemed particularly comfortable about his own lack of understanding. Grinningly admitting \u201cI\u2019m not a nerd\u201d before the committee, he nevertheless went on to dismiss without facts or justification the very evidence he didn\u2019t understand and then downplay the need for a panel of experts. Rep. Maxine Waters of California followed up by saying that any discussion of security concerns is \u201cwasting time\u201d and that the bill should move forward without question, busted internets be damned.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A great post on the folks who are currently debating — if so many declarations of ignorance can be called “debating” — hacking away at the very basis of the internet we’ve come to love: Some background: Since its introduction, SOPA and its Senate twin PROTECT-IP have been staunchly condemned by countless engineers, technologists and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,9,10,28,15],"tags":[459,698,186,58,661],"class_list":["post-12631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-law","category-liberty","category-media","category-technology","tag-censorship","tag-congress","tag-freedomofspeech","tag-internet","tag-regulation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3hJ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12631"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12631\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12632,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12631\/revisions\/12632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}