Over two weeks ago, both SOPA and PIPA were shelved. However, "shelved" does not imply "dead." Shelved simply implies that the Internet was so loud in their dissent of these atrocious bills, it would be political suicide to continue them any further .. for now.

What is truly sad is that it took this level of an Internet blackout to even reach Congress. SOPA's sponsor, Lamar Smith (R-TX) went so far as to call SOPA opponents "a vocal minority", and later casting them as piracy harbingers for merely protesting against this bill, nevermind poor legal language (which, in the same sentence, he claimed such language did not exist, demanding opponents "[s]how [him] the language. There’s nothing they can point to that does what they say it does do").

Even worse is that this was simply one of many unending steps by the media industry. If they can't have SOPA/PIPA, then they'll force treaties to bind Congress's hands, constituency be damned. With wave two of this bullshit, we now have the Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement (ACTA) and SOPA's bastard brother after its mother smoked a few dozen Jeffrey's dosed it with pure cocaine, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). ACTA has already been signed by President Obama under the guise of it being an "executive agreement," thereby bypassing the constitutional requirement of Senate ratification. This is highly illegal and unconstitutional (surprising, when the president himself was a constitutional law professor), and we recommend everyone sign the We The People petition to force this administration to acknowledge the legalities that must be honored.

But why stop there? With the recent signing of the National Defense Authorization Act, simply desiring online privacy is considered a potential act of terrorism and enough to throw you in Guantanamo Bay. Hey, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear, right?

Not only are we all pirates requiring DRM and draconian laws to imprison us and further crowd the United States prison system (already the largest crowding in the world, even larger than the USSR Gulags, at one prisoner for every 136 US citizens), but now we need our privacy and fourth amendment rights stripped away just in case one of us might want to do something nefarious in secret. This is TSA logic at its finest: One person tried to set his shoes on fire, so now everyone is trying to set their shoes on fire.

God Bless America.