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Rebels of the Week: Wikipedia, Mozilla, Reddit, WordPress, The Daily Paul and every other website participating in the SOPA protest blackout Wednesday... including us!

SOPA and the spectre of censorship:

How would you like to open your browser one day to find your favorite websites blocked or censored by an act of the relentlessly growing regulatory regime in Washington? How would you like to find an image like the one above in place of your favorite content or even political commentary? If you haven’t heard about it by now already, SOPA (the “Stop Online Piracy Act”) is a concerted effort by various special interests in Old Media to cope with the rapidly changing world of information and its effects on the distribution and monetization of media, but like many major regulatory reforms pushed by special interest lobbyists, while the key players are fighting over something petty, they are unwittingly working to build the infrastructure for future oppression and tyranny, or as Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute puts it: the legal and technological architecture for censorship.

Julian Sanchez writes at the link above:
“SOPA is a 70 page statute establishing a detailed legal process by which the Justice Department can initiate blocking of supposed pirate domains by ISPs and search engines, and by which private parties can seek orders requiring payment processors and ad networks to sever ties.”
Should you be scared? Yes. Yes you should be…

Read the rest of my article at The Silver Underground. And yes.. HumbleLibertarian will be "going dark" tomorrow in protest of SOPA as well. No new posts and maybe a parodied "notice" that we've been taken down to violating SOPA.


Wes Messamore,
Editor in Chief, THL
Articles | Author's Page
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