No, The White House Did Not Say 'They Will Not Support SOPA & PIPA'

Chris | InformationLiberation
Jan. 14, 2012

The Huffington Post is wrongly reporting the White House will not support SOPA or PIPA. If you read the White House's actual statement, it's full of strongly worded language, but absolutely nowhere does it say they will not support the bills. On the other hand, it does state, "we will continue to work with Congress on a bipartisan basis on legislation that provides new tools needed in the global fight against piracy and counterfeiting."

How anyone could believe the same White House which passed the NDAA into law after claiming they would veto it should be taken by their rhetoric and not even by their word is beyond belief. With the NDAA, Obama was on record saying he would veto the legislation, this statement from the White House says they're in full support of passing copyright crackdown bills, but they must "defend an open Internet based on the values of free expression, privacy, security and innovation."

That's pure rhetoric (and it's contradictory on its face).

The author of the White House's statement, Obama's 'IP czar' Victoria Espinel, has already overseen the seizures of hundreds of websites without any due process, including websites which were deemed legal by their own respective countries. This White House is actively engaged in violating our internet freedoms, to completely ignore this attack on internet freedom and turn around and take a vaguely worded statement promising nothing as an explicit denouncement of these censorship bills is foolish and naive to the extreme.

The only concrete information to come out from the White House's statement is they will move forward "on legislation that provides new tools needed in the global fight against piracy and counterfeiting."

That means the current censorship supporting DMCA laws are not enough, the current unconstitutional seizures of hundreds of websites without due process is not enough, they want even more power and they're expecting congress and the internet community to get in line and give it to them.

Update: There is one policy statement in her writing where she says the White House will not support DNS blocking, that provision was already removed from the SOPA bill yesterday, so it changes nothing.