[Wikimedia-l] CFAAA+CALEA vs. SOPA+PIPA: the amortization

[James Salsman]

Marc Pelletier wrote:
>
> On 04/13/2013 07:25 PM, James Salsman wrote:
>> In short, the CFAA amendments alone would likely cost readers, editors,
>> and the Foundation more than 500 times as much as SOPA or PIPA could
>> have cost, under what I believe is a very reasonable set of assumptions.
>
> {{cn}}
>
> -- Marc

I will gladly show my work if the Foundation agrees to explain their theory
about why May 2013 fundraising results were disappointing, indicative
of contraction, or any other reason to expect a decline in their growth rate.
I have repeatedly been told that such reasons exist, but nobody has been
able to find them. I think a decimal was misplaced by one.

Since the CFAA problem is less important than it was this morning per

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/04/huffington-post-credits-internet-activists-major-victory-stopping-bad-cfaa-bill

\o/

... I will instead give you my cost estimate of the proposed CALEA changes:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/03/26/andrew_weissmann_fbi_wants_real_time_gmail_dropbox_spying_power.html

How much is a person's privacy worth?
How will this affect article quality?
Will there be chilling effects on editing?
Will there be chilling effects on reading?

The first scenario which springs to mind is about the different decisions
editors make when they think they are being watched by law enforcement.
How many more editors are likely to be potentially subject to criminal
prosecution if they actually are being watched by law enforcement.
That is not a negative number.

The second scenario is, what does this allow in the way of joe-jobs if
someone finds out that they can make law enforcement watch other
people more closely by emailing them keywords? That one probably
spirals into corruption, so we  can assume an asymptotic value of
"unaffordable."

Therefore the cost is greater than SOPA+PIPA, which would have
added the necessary staff to process URL take-down notices, in
proportional to the likelyhood that people in different countries would
start doing that to each other to try to prevail in content disputes.

Best regards,
James