Don't Let Us Be Silenced

Don't Let Us Be Silenced

Do you remember those days when spying on people use to be frowned upon? Well according to the government those days have gotten up and left. With everybody connected to the internet now days, the government and the corporations of America spy on regular citizens, which have done nothing wrong.

The government has always been censoring what we can and cannot send even before the internet. During wars such as the American Civil, both World Wars, and almost every other war America has been involved in letters to the soldiers have been looked through, then if seemed unfit or unjust. One of our researchers recently found over 500 confiscated and condemned letters at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland (Myron Fox). They have also censored stuff such as music and movies. Now they are continuing the cycle and are trying to censor the internet as well.

In some other countries they do not have internet freedom. In democracies and authoritarian countries alike, efforts have been made by governments around the world to shut down Web sites, silence bloggers, filter out certain words or censor negative information (Flock). In countries such as China, most websites are blocked such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

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In Some countries such as Turkey, their government has banned the use of 138 words on the internet, such as gay and escort. These are examples of countries that we will end up with the same internet rules, once we get censored.

In the past couple years the government has been spamming us with laws and acts concerning internet censorship. The ones that have reached the media and the people, such as SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA, have been protested highly against. The fact about it is that these acts will keep being proposed in till one eventually gets passed. If these laws/bills would to be passed we would be getting closer and closer to a society like the one in the book 1984 by George Orwell, in which Big Brother controls everything, and watches everybody. The government will be able to watch where we go, what we do, and who were talking to on the internet.

SOPA or the Stop Online Privacy Act was the first one to hit the main media. SOPA was in the Senate, while PIPA or Protect IP Act in the House was its counterpart. Both are meant to attack the problem of foreign Web sites that sell pirated or counterfeit goods. They would impose restrictions forcing U.S. companies to stop selling online ads to suspected pirates, processing payments for illegal online sales and refusing to list Web sites suspected of piracy in search-engine results (Fahrenhold 1). The problem with this is that most online businesses would go out of business with this new law, because they would have to stop selling ad spots on their website to most of their buyers. Companies like Facebook, Google, and Wikipedia would