[Infowarrior] - SOPA Signals End of a Free-Information Age We Won't Know We Had Until It's Gone

[Richard Forno]

Thursday, December 15, 2011 5:44 PM EST

SOPA Signals End of a Free-Information Age We Won't Know We Had Until It's Gone

By Connor Adams Sheets

http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/268080/20111215/sopa-signals-end-free-information-age-won.htm

As they unceasingly have for the past several years, I watched today as Twitter, Tumblr and Reddit, blew up with an endless stream of news about topics as divergent as NDAA, SOPA, Bahrain, Iran and the economy.

The mainstream media seems to over paper much of the important news in order to promote stories of kidnapped girls and tawdry murders, but the people who have a hunger to know can still create access for themselves to the kinds of information they deem to be important.

Want to know about Egypt's ongoing turmoil? Find some reporters on the ground there and follow their lists, find some human rights groups on one side and the government mouthpieces on the other side and follow all of them. And peruse the various media outlets for whatever reporting may be going on there (actual reporting continues in disparate pockets, despite all the hype to the contrary.)

It may be difficult to find real information, but it does exist, and it is our prerogative to care enough to find and consume it.

But what concerns me is not the existence of information, as the continuing existence of humanity guarantees we will continue to do and say things of interest. At issue is the limiting of our access to said facts and opinions, and it is a concern that is coming to a head in Washington right now.

But first some background, as I see it:

First the corporatization and over-monetization of mainstream media outlets turned them into efficient distributors of what the lowest common denominator wants to consume, or what news providers believe they want to or should be consuming.

News was once dominated by the figureheads on the nightly news, household names who decided what we should know. Then we were left to our own devices to parse through the broadcasts and periodicals that defined the news-scape. As the companies that produced those dispatches were bought up by national, then international conglomerates, they became more and more homogeneous.

As an intern covering the U.S. Congress five years ago, while still in college, I witnessed firsthand the pack mentality that defines the vast majority of modern journalism. Over-worked, underpaid and severely under-supported reporters scramble to report and aggregate all the same stories for their own publications, while real, hard-hitting investigative journalism takes a backseat.

The number of journalists with ever-decreasing amounts of time to spend on enterprise has fallen precipitously in the past couple of decades, but the blow was softened as readership migrated to the Web. In the new media sphere there was less curated, well-funded and professionally vetted journalism, but it was very hard to keep a secret for long.

WikiLeaks blew the lid on thousands of pages of "top secret" files, Reddit, Digg and other websites provided forums for like-minded, engaged individuals to promote the most important, least-appreciated content, and blogs provided sources for alternate viewpoints that would never have otherwise seen the light of publication. The hits went to whoever had something interesting to say the most often, and a quasi-democratization of opinion reigned.

For most of the past decade, this new arena of freedom of speech and less-fettered access to information operated just below the radar of most high-powered politicians, law enforcement authorities, CEOs and other people with the power to effect change.

But as Twitter and other new media outlets fueled the Arab Spring, the elites became concerned, and the crackdown loomed large on the horizon. There was too much freedom to assemble, too much free speech, too much ability to exercise the right to overthrow a tyrannical government.

In America this all came to a head as we witnessed the crackdown on the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations that swept the nation. The government used brute force in a an attempt to scare the citizenry into abandoning its protestations. Didn't work.

So that brings us to today. The U.S. Congress and its corporate friends and backers are unnerved by the rumblings of the gentry, so they clear the way for the National Defense Authorization Act despite the protestations of the Pentagon, FBI, ACLU, and everyone who would rather not be locked up forever for checking Al Jazeera one too many times. It basically suspends habeas corpus permanently, and President Barack Obama has signaled he won't be vetoing it.

Unfortunately, that was just the smokescreen for the law that will hit closer to most of our computers, that they will use to end our little segment of open exchange. SOPA, as the Stop Online Piracy (aka Privacy) Act is known, was literally drafted behind closed doors, ostensibly in order to protect intellectual property.

But its real impacts are much more ominous, as anyone who has ever posted on YouTube, done a search on Google, or updated his or her status on Twitter or Facebook (all companies who, along with many others, have declared their opposition to SOPA) should take the time to educate themselves about.

The result will be the creation of a legal framework under which the government can stop information exchange essentially at will. Sure, the feds likely won't use it much at first--it's couched as a way for them to target and punish torrent sites like The Pirate Bay and other domains (like YouTube and Google, to name a couple of "offenders") which provide a means for Web users to attain or view copyrighted material without paying for it.

But the justified fear of everyone who enjoys not becoming a felon--because they accidentally clicked on a Lady Gaga video not posted on her official Vimeo account--is that it will go much further.

The widely-held and perfectly fair interpretation of this law, which is generating some of the most intense criticism of any piece of legislation in recent memory, is one under which the feds would be able to shut down Twitter or other websites at any times it deems such a move necessary. For instance: when people are attempting to organize a protest.

If SOPA passes, it will signal the end of this era of open online dialogue that our younger generations managed to create for themselves. We should all rue the day.


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Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it.