March 31, 2003

Tennessee Lawmakers Threaten Internet

For years, Tennessee has taken pride in being proactive in wiring the state and its schools and libraries for Internet access, and millions of dollars of state funds have been expended for that purpose. Now, Tennessee lawmakers are putting much of that at risk with silly legislation that could render the Internet useless in Tennessee by outlawing "firewalls" and other software and hardware that are crucial to the operation of the Net. Several other states are also considering similar legislation, including South Carolina, Colorado, Massachusetts and Texas - and the bills - textually similar - are apparently are intended to extend the national Digital Millennium Copyright Act, explains Edward Felten.

Here is one example of the far-reaching harmful effects of these bills. Both bills would flatly ban the possession, sale, or use of technologies that "conceal from a communication service provider ... the existence or place of origin or destination of any communication." Your ISP is a communication service provider, so anything that concealed the origin or destination of any communication from your ISP would be illegal - with no exceptions. If you send or receive your email via an encrypted connection, you're in violation, because the "To" and "From" lines of the emails are concealed from your ISP by encryption. (The encryption conceals the destinations of outgoing messages, and the sources of incoming messages.)

Worse yet, Network Address Translation (NAT), a technology widely used for enterprise security, operates by translating the "from" and "to" fields of Internet packets, thereby concealing the source or destination of each packet, and hence violating these bills. Most security "firewalls" use NAT, so if you use a firewall, you're in violation. If you have a home DSL router, or if you use the "Internet Connection Sharing" feature of your favorite operating system product, you're in violation because these connection sharing technologies use NAT. Most operating system products (including every version of Windows introduced in the last five years, and virtually all versions of Linux) would also apparently be banned, because they support connection sharing via NAT. And this is just one example of the problems with these bills. Yikes.

The legislation being pushed by Sen. Person and Rep. Briley is bad legislation pushed by politicians who don't know enough about the Internet and how it works - otherwise, they would realize that the impact of this law would be to render the Internet either illegal or inoperable in Tennessee. Go here for more information on it.

UPDATE: I found the Tennessee version of the legislation. Senate Bill 213, sponsored by Sen. Curtis Person, and House Bill 457, sponsored by Rep. Rob Briley. Both bills have been moved to their respective judiciary committees. Let's hope they die there.

Meanwhile, if you have any information on the Tennessee legislation, who is lobbying for it, and relevant campaign contribution information involving the key House and Senate sponsors, please forward it to me at bill-at-billhobbs.com.