The nightmarish SOPA hearings
I think the heart surgery analogy is excellent.  I would never, unless it were an extremely dire situation with no doctors, attempt any kind of surgery on someone.  Nor would I ever start dictating to doctors how the perform their procedures.<p>Yet that is what government does, day in and day out.  They regulate industries which work in ways they don't understand, and they do it primarily for political motivations.<p>The MPAA may want tools to fight piracy, but to politicians, who don't really care about piracy, this is an opportunity to have something to campaign on, and it gives the government more power.<p>More power means more prestige and more money for them, if not now, in their post career lives when they lobby, etc.<p>More regulations gives them more control over industry- the power to threaten to make the regulations even worse, or the threat that their opponent will do that if they don't get re-elected (so please give generously!)<p>I don't think these people are "well intentioned".  They don't actually want to help anybody.  Theft is already against the law.  SOPA won't change that, it won't stop piracy, and its not criminalizing piracy.<p>No, they're politicians.  And they're not even <i>corrupt</i> politicians.  This is simply the nature of what they do.  They pass laws, they shake down industry, and they get paid for passing ever more laws without regard for the impact of those laws.<p>Hell, when those laws cause massive destruction to the economy, what do they do?  They turn around and say "Well, If we'd been able to pass the law <i>I</i> proposed, this wouldn't have happened!  Here, we need to rush into force even more regulations to make sure this never happens again!"<p>There's a famous(?) libertarian author by the name of L. Neil Smith who's got a saying that's very applicable here:<p>"Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure."<p>I hope we stop SOPA.  But the lesson I would hope a lot of you take away from this is that SOPA is not an isolated incident, it is one of thousands of incidents, most of which go by completely unmentioned each year, where the system works to undermine human rights and make people's lives worse.   These guys aren't corrupt, the system is corrupt.<p>The constitution, in the enumeration clause and in the Bill of Rights, attempted to prevent this.  The enumeration clause limits the powers of the federal government to <i>only</i> those enumerated in the constitution.<p>Regulation of the internet, or communications of any kind, is not an enumerated power of the Federal Government.  This means that when the federal government does this, it is doing it without authorization.  Further, the Bill of Rights forbids congress from engaging in censorship.  SOPA clearly authorizes censorship so they're also in violation of the Bill of Rights.<p>These words in the constitution, in this day and age have very little teeth.  The PATRIOT act runs afoul of them as well, but nobody has succeeded in getting it overturned.<p>The situation will continue to get worse.  Even if SOPA is defeated-- this isn't the first attempt-- it will come back in a few years.<p>I think that the only possible solution is a technological one.  I think that the only way to to fight them is with technology and disobedience to the very idea that they have the right to restrain speech or control the internet.<p>The courts will not help us, and they certainly won't, and every election is so stage managed that nobody who actually knows the difference between a domain name and an IP address will ever get elected.<p>Help us with technology, its our only hope!