http://www.crikey.com.au/2010/10/01/the-internet-filter-coming-to-the-us-wit...
The US Congress spent yesterday packing up and heading home for mid-term re-election campaigns, having failed its most important job — passing the annual budget. But even this deadlocked Congress is capable of doing what the Australian Labor Party cannot — pass a mandatory ISP-based Internet filter — and do so before the end of the year.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi will recall the current congress for a special lame-duck session later this year before newly elected representatives are sworn in, to pass last-minute reforms in case the Democrats lose power, as widely predicted in the polls. Among those reforms include a low-profile copyright proposal with bipartisan, almost unanimous support that just so happens to include censoring whole websites included on a government-run blacklist.
The *Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act*(COICA) will blacklist sites that are “dedicated to infringing activities” regardless of where the site is hosted, with exceptions for commercially-oriented sites but not political speech. Originally planned as two blacklists, one controlled by the courts and one by the US Attorney General, the latter was dropped from the bill yesterday after ISPs raised early complaints.
Aaron Swartz from Progressive Change and Australian Peter Eckersley from Electronic Frontier Foundation began a petition campaignhttp://demandprogress.org/blacklist/ this week to fight the bill at demandprogress.orghttp://www.demandprogress.org/, garnering 100,000 signatures in two days.
http://www.crikey.com.au/2010/10/01/the-internet-filter-coming-to-the-us-wit...