Last week’s blackout of thousands of websites across the world in protest of SOPA and PIPA is widely rumored across the internet to have been effective in killing the legislation. However, considering how much money is behind them, don’t be surprised if they resurface after the election. At that point those who lost have nothing to lose and those who won will at least have nearly two years for their constituents to forget.

Unfortunately, that’s not the only thing that puts internet freedom at risk. Wesley sent me a link to an article about ACTA, a secretive international trade agreement designed to prevent the “counterfeiting” of such things as intellectual property, GMO seeds, and medicines.

Any system that allows corporations the power to silence citizens by shutting down their online presence is a system that would allow anybody with enough money to silence anyone they don’t like. That is censorship and it is wrong.

However, the part that really creeps me out is the requirement of ISPs to check every packet of data. That’s a lot of data going through each router and to have to inspect each packet would require some tremendous processing power. Besides that, what about encrypted data?

I personally use encrypted connections all the time, whether it’s for e-commerce, online banking, Gmail, remote access to my server when I’m away from home, or for Linux and BSD ISOs I’m downloading on bittorrent. For my ISP to be able to inspect every packet and determine whether or not I’m distributing intellectual property, they would need to decrypt all of these connections. Unless the entire framework of the internet was changed to require that encryption keys be shared with ISPs, the amount of power required to break even 128 bit encryption would be prohibitively expensive. Otherwise they couldn’t tell if I’m downloading a torrent of a pirated movie or a Linux ISO. Even if they do decrypt packages they wouldn’t be able to distinguish file sharing of mp3s from someone backing up their files to the cloud or if they’re just copying their own file to their own portable system for their own legal use.

Oh, the real fun thing about the decryption required to check packets is that there would exist a router or two for every transaction that hackers could break into where they could access lots of passwords, credit card numbers, and any other data that is and should be private.

I really hope that many of the details of the video are inaccurate, but it’s hard to fact check when all that’s available is a few websites containing leaked fragments. Considering that it has been in the works for five years and was signed by the US just last year and the text of the agreement hasn’t even been released yet…well that just goes to show what the Obama administration thinks about transparency.

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has issued a press release regarding ACTA stating:

As the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) prepares to ratify an international agreement related to the enforcement of intellectual property rights, U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) – chairman of the Senate Finance Committee’s Subcommittee on Trade – sent a letter to President Obama today asking why the administration believes the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement (ACTA) does not require Congress’s formal approval. According to legal experts, cited by Wyden, if the USTR ratifies ACTA without Congress’ consent it may be circumventing Congress’s Constitutional authority to regulate international commerce and protect intellectual property and would therefore represent a significant expansion of the executive branch’s authority over international agreements.

“It may be possible for the U.S. to implement ACTA or any other trade agreement, once validly entered, without legislation if the agreement requires no change in U.S. law,” Wyden writes. “But regardless of whether the agreement requires changes in U.S. law…the executive branch lacks constitutional authority to enter a binding international agreement covering issues delegated by the Constitution to Congress’ authority, absent congressional approval.”

So not only is this technologically inconceivable and would require serious privacy breaches (based on the leaks) but it’s also sure sounds like it would be illegal to have any effect without direct congressional approval. SOPA may come back, even if it’s just to enact ACTA.