Congress Condemns Belarus For Doing A Bunch Of Things It Wants To Do

from the seriously? dept
by Mike Masnick
Techdirt
Jul. 13, 2011

Recently, the House of Representatives passed a resolution condemning Belarus for various human rights violations. It lists out all the various rights violations, and some of them are certainly pretty bad, and I have no doubt that the government of Belarus is doing some highly questionable things. Yet, there's one section of the resolution that seems especially interesting, given certain actions in Congress lately:

The Government of Belarus has restricted freedom of expression on the Internet by requiring Internet Service Providers to maintain data on Internet users and the sites they view and to provide such data to officials upon request, and by creating a government body with the authority to require Internet Service Providers to block Web sites.

Fascinating. Because, Congress here in the US is currently debating two bills that seem to do exactly that as well. There's the data retention bill (disguised as an anti-child porn bill) and there's the PROTECT IP Act, which would give the government power to require ISPs to effectively block web sites. It's as if Congress doesn't even realize what it's doing and what it's saying.