Today many websites including Firefox, Copyblogger, WordPress, Wikipedia and a tonne of others are completely blacked out to raise awareness of the two anti internet freedom bills SOPA and PIPA.

Ive talked about the downward slide of Freedom of Expression in Ecuador before but what makes any attack on the Internet dangerous is that it restricts the freedoms of EVERYONE.

These Bills claim that they are to stop Piracy and the theft of Intellectual Property. The problem is that like the Prohibition of Alcohol in America in the 1920s it will only push Piracy further underground while punishing normal users like us. Anyone with the smallest amount of tech knowledge can use a VPN (Virtual Private Network) and a number of other ways to get around SOPA and there will always be ways to ensure the existence of big torrent sites like the Pirate Bay.

The scariest thing about SOPA however is it can crush dissenting voices on the web

For Martin Luther King day last monday if someone were to post a copyrighted speech of the great man in the comments section of this website then the SOPA could technically block the DNS of this website and PayPal freeze our account.

While I doubt anyone would ever want to target a tiny site in Ecuador like this one the SOPA and PIPA bills are more sinister when you take into account what very powerful forces have already done to dissenting voices like Wikileaks.

Wikileaks was subjected to a Banking Blockade that dried up its funding for its release of thousands of leaked reports on war crimes and government and corporate corruption. You can still donate to the extreemist racist sites like Ku Klux Klan however – as long as they dont get on the bad side of the powers that be.

With SOPA if one of twitters 100 million users posted a link to anything under copyright it gives the government hte right to shut it down. Same goes for Facebook, Google plus, and any other social network or community website.

This bill is dangerous and needs to be stopped.

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