Reddit Founder, DNS Hacker And Other SOPA Critics Will Address Congress In Hearing

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian (left) and security researcher Dan Kaminsky, two of the seven witnesses invited to testify at a congressional hearing January 18th.

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Opponents of the Stop Online Piracy Act, the bill that threatens to block large swathes of foreign websites for alleged copyright infringement, have complained that Congress has yet to hear their voice. In the initial hearing and markup of the bill in Congress, the only outside critic of the bill invited as a witness was Google, whose opposition to the act was largely dismissed as an isolated exception.

 

 

Now, it seems, the tech industry’s SOPA haters will have their day. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform announced Monday that it will hold a hearing on SOPA on January 18th. Among the invited guests are Alexis Ohanian, a founder of Reddit.com, Dan Kaminsky, a well-known security researcher who has worked on security issues in the Domain Name System, and Lanham Napier, the chief executive of Rackspace Hosting. All, with various arguments, have spoken out strongly against the bill.

The online community at Reddit that Ohanian has helped to assemble includes some of the most active opponents to the controversial piece of legislation. Reddit’s users successfully called for the boycott of GoDaddy when it supported the bill and even began working on plans for an alternate, mesh network-based Internet that would better resist censorship than the current Internet were SOPA to pass. Ohanian has argued that if SOPA would have been in place in 2005, he and his co-founders would have never created Reddit, now a two-billion pageview-per-month site, and that the legislation would “obliterate an entire tech industry.”

Kaminsky, a security researcher who exposed and helped fix a critical bug in the Internet backbone protocol DNS in 2008, has been equally outspoken against SOPA, albeit for more technical reasons. When I spoke with him last month, he argued that SOPA’s use of DNS filtering to block copyright infringing websites would cripple the development of DNSSEC, a more secure protocol designed to stop attacks that imperceptibly spoof websites. An open letter from 83 early Internet engineers echoed those concerns.

 “We’re going to DC and explaining, ‘Look, we’re here to tell you there are security implications to the work you’re doing that we know you didn’t expect, but are counter to the national security interests of the USA.’” Kaminsky says. “No one intended to break anything [with this bill.] They intended to address a legitimate economic concern. But thanks to the law of unintended consequences, their efforts in DNS filtering run counter to our efforts in DNS authentication.”

Those worries of technical collateral damage are one reason that the second half of Congress’s markup hearing on  SOPA was delayed until later this month. California representative Darrell Issa, who has drafted a SOPA alternative known as OPEN and organized the House Oversight Committee hearing, argued in last month’s markup session that ”This bill is not ready for prime time,” that “We haven’t heard from the scientists,” and “We haven’t done our due diligence.” Utah representative Jason Chaffetz added, “Bring in the nerds!”
On January 18th, it seems the nerds will arrive.
The full bill of witnesses for the hearing, which also includes a Sandia National Labs scientist, the American Civil Liberties Union chief of staff, a partner from New York early-stage venture capital firm Union Square Ventures, and a former director of the Department of Homeland Security, is available here.