What You Can Do About DOPA

I’m going to take a few minutes to switch from the Blackboard patent issue to another legal crisis. Many of you have been hearing about DOPA (The Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006). Its purported intention is to stop online child predators, but what it effectively does is shut down access to any sort of social networking site (which seems to be defined as any site that has some kind of login requirement and allows you to post content) from schools and libraries. It’s so broad that it would filter out even official school web sites with logins. In other words, it’s Bad. You can read the ongoing drumbeat of blog posts on the topic here.

So what can you do about it? A while back, I promised that I would post some ways in which you can take action to help change our world (or, at least, our laws) for the better. Consider this post to be my first installment on fulfilling that promise.If you are a United States citizen who is living (or at least voting) in the U.S., then the best thing you can do is to write your Representative and Senators. Don’t write other people’s Representatives and Senators; they won’t care what you have to say. But your own will. I’ve talked to a whole bunch of people who are close to the Beltway scene and they all say that, contrary to popular belief, our elected officials tend to take calls, letters, and emails from their constituents very seriously.

So here’s what we can do about DOPA. I’m asking those of you who have rehearsed the arguments against DOPA many times (I haven’t) to write drafts of letters that people can copy and send to their Congressmen (and Congresswomen). Add your drafts as comments on this post. Then, whether you write your own letter or copy one of the ones that will (hopefully) be appearing here shortly, go to Congress.org, enter your zip code into the box in the upper right-hand corner, and click on the little arrow to the right of it. That will take you to a page with all of your (Federal) elected officials. You can write a letter to them from here. Click on “Compose your own message” in the box near the top of the page and paste the text into the main text box in the page that comes up. Fill out the rest of the form, and the email will go to all of your elected officials. Easy! For a fee of $8.95, they will even hand-deliver a hard copy of your message to your Congressperson’s office.)

If you are not a U.S. voter, then the big thing you can do is help U.S. voters become aware of the issue and what they can do about it. Talk about it. Blog about it. Email about it. Get the word out.

Contacting our elected officials about issues we care about is a potent yet heavily under-utilized civil liberty in the United States. And in the Internet Age, it’s easier than ever.