Or Forever Hold Your Peace

Will America Emulate China?

I thought it might be prudent to get this piece out before Attorney General Eric Holder has the power to flip the switch on Sanity Sentinel and ban all of my content. Once AG Holder has that power, he may determine that the links, videos and photographs contained on this site constitute "copyright infringement", and I will be silenced.

Welcome to 21st century America and the era of Obama's Hope and Change. It is rapidly becoming a barren, lugubrious wasteland reminiscent of our worst nuclear-winter nightmares, a once gloriously free and industrious land choked into moribundity by the Progressive Socialist stranglehold. I'm reminded of an old Polaroid that was never properly protected by the felt roller, discovered decades later in the bottom of a drawer, once a colorful, cherished memory now reduced to an ashen image of the past.

So many societies have historically experimented with the philosophy of totalitarianism masquerading as compassion - and failed miserably - that we should know better than to keep trying, but the powerful are a stubborn lot. Then again, the powerful never understood the pain of what they had wrought until they lost. Expend no sympathy on their behalf, however, because whatever they experienced at the end was nothing compared to the devastation left in their wakes.

A few days ago a bill flew through the Senate Judiciary Committee with no resistance, passing unanimously. That bill was the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA), and what it will do is to give the United States Attorney General the ability to shut down any website he deems to be in violation of this bill. He will have the authority to simply turn off any website on a whim.

COICA is ostensibly designed to protect Hollywood, music and media from piracy, but it's language is much broader than simply trying to prevent theft of copyrighted material. Yes, the AG will need to obtain a court order before acting, but the parameters for enforcement are so expansive that virtually any site he visits may suffer censorship and banishment. If copyright infringement is deemed to be "central to the site's activity", it will meet the criterion for action.

The chilling aspect of this is, even hyper links to another website may be considered grounds for termination, even if there has been no "crime" committed. For a good example, take a look at The Drudge Report. (Oops, I just did it!)

Matt Drudge's site is hugely popular, generating over nine billion hits in the past year. But his site is nothing more than a news aggregate source, consisting of nothing but links. While he has broken no laws, and while he has not been to sued to the best of my knowledge, it stands to reason that his site would be the first casualty of Lord Holder's reign.

 The good news is that the bill will not go before both full houses for a vote until next year, supposedly. One would think that in the new session of Congress, passage of such a thing would have little chance of success. But just the very idea that our government is even considering placing that sort of power in one man's hands is startling, at best.

Combined with elected officials openly calling for the shutting down of information television and radio stations, this is precisely the sort of thing that we the people must be ever vigilant against. We now live in a country built on freedom and personal responsibility that has been reduced to a government prison. They are taking our property, seizing our finances, and controlling our diets and habits. Now they are attempting to remove our ability to know about it.

The Tea Party movement probably never would have happened without the free flow of information. I maintain that that is exactly the reasoning behind these tactics by the government. If they can isolate us and silence us, we are lost forever. We simply cannot allow that to happen.

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