2011 Internet Bills and Laws You Should Act On – Censorship and Privacy

I just found a post and this video (Act now to stop Internet censorship legislation in the United States) about a current bill that is going through the US congress about “protecting Intellectual Property” – and how it has some steep censorship issues coming with it. We are 100% against censorship, and that is why we suggest you learn a bit about this bill and the proposed law. If you are in the USA we suggest you visit this site to contact your representatives and ask them to kill this bill.

We are for free speech and protecting it. Hopefully you have already seen a news story about this, as a few have cropped up talking about how google and AOL and many others are opposing this bill. I am sure we all know that the music and movie industry pays a lot of bribes (lobbies, lobbying, donating to campaigns, etc) to congress, so without people contacting their representatives this may become a reality – it’s just one hop skip and jump away from pushing us in the direction of Pakistan – where that government is now forcing all telecom companies to censor what they term as offensive words from text messages that people send to one another.

Imagine a time when government dictates that private companies have to censor and citizens are not allowed to post or text each other words like “fart”, “tampon” or “Jesus Christ” – well it’s true now in Pakistan, at least it was, it may be still? There was a news story about this from the AP that we had linked here previously, and now is does not show. and the United States is seriously considering taking steps in that direction. (and my Levis jeans and Hanes socks I am wearing are from there? really?)

And a separate law / issue you may have missed – I wish people would of made more noise in the news and the blogging community about the law that was recently passed in the US that requires every internet service provider to keep records of every web site that you visit. Lifehacker has an article about this mandate for your internet company to keep future spying records for the government to inspect, and what you can do about it.

I could write pages about all this – but I hope you will visit thew links to learn more, and I will keep this short for now.

Double props to lifehacker for doing more research about which VPN services actually keep you private.

old link – http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AS_PAKISTAN_OBSCENE_TEXT_MESSAGES?SITE=WABEL&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT