***EDIT – I apologize for the really long post, I didn’t plan on writing this much. But please read it when you get a chance, it’s a very important issue to be conscious of.***
It seems like the responsibility and integrity of our federal legislators is rapidly diminishing.
We should be happy, right? The widely-supported blackout across the Internet on Wednesday was extremely successful in raising both awareness and protest against SOPA and PIPA. It was so successful, in fact, that Congressional support of the bills has become the minority, with the majority of legislators now in opposition to the acts. That’s great news, and everyone who took part in protesting should be both satisfied and proud. Unless something unheard of happens, SOPA and PIPA seem to be pretty much dead.
But what do you know, just when it seems like all threats have been terminated, a new piece of legislation is revealed by Congress: The “Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011.” This bill sounds good, right? No rational person in their right mind would support child pornography, and it is definitely something that should be stopped. But once again, the drafters of the bill have made it so over-generalized and power-wielding that it is even more of a threat to our rights than SOPA/PIPA were. Listen to the clauses of the Bill: ”Under language approved 19 to 10 by a House committee, the firm that sells you Internet access would be required to track all of your Internet activity and save it for 18 months, along with your name, the address where you live, your bank account numbers, your credit card numbers, and IP addresses you’ve been assigned” (quoted from the link below). WHAT!?!? This is ridiculous! All the government needs to do to have access to this information is simply ask your Internet provider to hand it over, and they have no choice but to give it to them. And somehow, the legislators in favor of this act don’t believe it to be the slightest violation of our privacy and rights.
Would this be helpful in catching child pornographers? Maybe. Safe to say it would probably catch a few. But think about how few child pornographers there are in the first place. 0.00000001% of people? Probably less. Granted that still makes a few thousand, but of the 307 million people in the United States, that’s still a completely obscure number. If they’re paranoid about monitoring our every move, it’s much more difficult for them to find such an obscure group of people.
No, what this comes down to is the government’s attempt to monitor our every move. They couldn’t stop piracy through SOPA/PIPA, so they’re using this act as a secondary try. Who says they’re just going to be looking for pedophiles out there? They have access to tens of millions of people’s every move on the Internet, and what legislator wouldn’t want to use that as an opportunity to catch wrongdoers? They’ll never admit this, and it can’t be preemptively proven, but we all know it’s 99.9% likely to happen. For those of you who have read the classic 1984 by George Orwell, the US government seems to be taking the role of the book’s all-seeing, dictatorial “Big Borther.”
Oh, and just to further prove that point, guess who is one of the driving supporters of the bill? Lamar Smith, the founder of SOPA/PIPA. If that’s not proof that this bill has different intentions than its title states, then I don’t know what is. It sickens me.
The primary threat of the success of this bill is that the average person won’t know its true intentions. From the act’s title, if you oppose it than you can be automatically labeled as a supporter of child pornography. I’m sure that they’ll have plenty of commercials and posters advocating the need to “Stop online child pornography now!” and most of the unenlightened citizens will wholeheartedly support it solely because of its title. When it comes to a simple vote in Congress, most legislators won’t want to be written down in the country’s history as opponents of the act to prevent child pornography. While SOPA and PIPA were clearly wrong to the average citizen, this new bill will most likely be widely supported and seemingly innocent. I’ve heard that this is actually a popular government tactic: To present a less-appealing bill that will most likely cause widespread indignation, and then sneak in an innocent-seeming but equally restrictive bill in the aftermath.
Sorry for the extremely long post, I’d be impressed if anyone is still reading at this point. I’m rarely political, but ignorant and abusive legislators such as these always make me outraged and disappointed. These people should not be in office. We’re having one of the worst economic recessions in the nation’s history, the environment is slowly going to hell, and third-world countries are full of violence and poverty, yet our government decides to focus on corruptly taking away our rights?! You’ve gotta be kidding me! Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of responsible, well-intentioned legislators out there; the problem is that they’re only a minority.
Luckily, this act hasn’t gone before the whole House of Representatives yet, and there’s still plenty of time for it to be denied. But at the rate its going, it’s a very present threat. In the meantime, we need to take as much action (if not more) as we did with SOPA and PIPA. Post about it on WordPress, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, anywhere to get the word out. If I find any safe and reputable petitions against it, I’ll be sure to post a link to let everyone get involved. This bill and the people behind it are outright disgusting, and we can’t just sit here and let them win.
Sorry again for the ridiculously long post, and thanks to anyone who actually read it to the end. If you want a great article about even more information on the bill, go to the link below (it’s very informative). In the meantime, enjoy the Internet while it still is free. …On that note, have a great day!
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/08/the-legislation-that-could-kill-internet-privacy-for-good/242853/
