Sandia Labs Joins SOPA Opponents
Napolitano warned that SOPA is unlikely to be effective
The Sandia National Laboratories, which is a part of the U.S. Department of
Energy, joined the group of the SOPA opponents. Their comment was that SOPA, which aim is to make allegedly copyright-infringing Web sites disappear from the Internet,
will negatively impact the US cybersecurity and is unlikely to be effective.
Napolitano,Sandia's director of computer sciences and information systems, sent a letter in response to a request for a critique of the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, from Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat who represents the heart of Silicon Valley. Lofgren is leading opposition in the House of Representatives to SOPA.
SOPA, which was introduced last month in the House to the applause of lobbyists for Hollywood and other large content holders, is designed to make allegedly copyright-infringing Web sites, sometimes called "rogue" Web sites, virtually disappear from the Internet.
It would allow the Justice Department to seek a court order against an allegedly piratical Web site and serve that on Internet-related companies including search engines and Domain Name System (DNS) providers. SOPA's opponents include civil libertarians, free-market and libertarian groups, and Google, Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, and other Web companies.
In the last few days, discussions in Washington centering on SOPA and its cousin in the Senate, called the Protect IP Act, have begun to focus more on how the measures would affect U.S. cybersecurity and a set of security improvements to the Internet's domain name system, called DNSSEC.
The letter from Napolitano says that one Sandia staff member said that
DNS filtering requirements in SOPA was a whack-a-mole approach that
would only encourage users and offending Web sites to resort to low cost
workarounds.
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