That the Justice Department would try to lock Swartz up for half his life on what amounted to a nonviolent act of protest suggests it too saw his capacity to affect change. He was to be a model of deterrence. So much more in the way of information sharing is possible than what the laws of intellectual property allow. Only punitive examples can keep the enterprising and curious from unlocking content that delights and stimulates millions. In a statement posted online following his death, Swartz’s family wrote: “Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.” At Swarz’s funeral yesterday morning, his father said his son was “killed by the government.”

The precedent of filtering access to pornography would soon be applied to filtering "hate speech" - and that this would be used to censor disagreement by Christians with gay marriage, or plain political dissent.

Some governments sought to use the recent meeting of the International Telecommunication Union in Dubai to increase censorship and regulation of the Internet. At the conclusion of the meeting last Friday, 89 countries signed the treaty, while 55 countries said they would not sign or that additional review was needed. We stand with the countries that refused to sign, and we stand with you.

The Internet Blackout was just the beginning. Together, our websites and personal networks can mobilize the planet to defend the internet from bad laws & monopolies. Are you in?

Despite a 2010 Coalition pledge to “end the storage of internet and email records without good reason” the Government has recently announced plans to store more of these private records. The Government’s Draft Communications Data Bill proposes to increase the collection and storage of “communications data” – records of email, text and phone calls – for the entire population. Instead of reversing already problematic powers that allow for mass surveillance, the Coalition now proposes to go much further: creating a Snoopers’ Charter by any other name.

The problem is that all the people opposing SOPA undercut their opposition by acknowledging the importance of copyright and IP, by condemning piracy. It is admirable that they are taking the ride side of the chasm caused by their cognitive dissonance, but dissonance it is. If you support copyright, you oppose piracy, and you support the state’s existence and its attempts to enforce these “property rights.” You cannot have both copyright, and Internet freedom/freedom of speech. The threat here to property rights, to individual rights, to Internet freedom and freedom of speech and expression and the press comes from copyright itself. We must strike at the root. SOPA is just a symptom of the disease. The disease is copyright. Everyone is trying to treat the symptom–enforcement efforts like SOPA–with half-hearted treatments like labeling the response “disproportionate” or going “too far.” This is like trying to treat a brain tumor by taking Tylenol–sorry, acetaminophen–in response to the headaches caused by the tumor. All opponents of SOPA and censorship, all denizens of the web and proponents of freedom, must oppose copyright itself (and patent too).

If you support a free and open Internet, let your legislators know, no matter what country you live in. This is global issue. If you live in the USA, you can find your elected state representatives here https://www.eff.org/sopacall and send your concerns.

The planet may not be so lucky. It's increasingly apparent that the internet may bring about the death of human civilisation, beating out previous contenders such as nuclear holocaust and the election of George W. Bush.

The agents of this planetary death will be the climate-change deniers who, it's now clear, owe much of their existence to the internet. Would the climate-change deniers be this sure of themselves without the internet?

I wonder if any of them ever thought, when they were growing up, dreaming little kid dreams of being the “goodguys” and saving folks from the “badguys”, that they’d end up merely doing the bidding of corrupt and irrational federal judges, thuggishly intimidating the very folks they once dreamed of saving, helping a new and unAmerican aristocracy to establish themselves as an elite with rights — like simple privacy — that ordinary individuals are no longer allowed to enjoy.

This much seems certain about the future: The more that electoral politics in western democracies appears increasingly ineffective in fighting political and corporate corruption, economic inequality, restraints on the Internet, environmental problems, suffering in developing countries, and unnecessary wars, the more we can expect to witness hacktivism. The most interesting question is whether the American and global plutocracy that has so successfully advanced the greedy interests of the rich and powerful will learn to live with hacktivism or whether it mounts a far more aggressive attack on it, including severe criminal penalties.

"Censorship has always been wrong and irresponsible," says Brad Spangler. "Now it's another thing: Impossible."

Spangler, director of the Center for a Stateless Society, announced on Sunday that the Center is now mirroring Wikileaks -- an international whistle-blower site which reactionary elements in the US government have worked assiduously to suppress over the last week -- and encouraging and assisting others in doing likewise.

Gestapo. KGB. Stasi. Savaak. Homeland Security.

There is no longer any moral difference—assuming there ever was.

Likewise the politicians are very uneasy, the blogosphere gets where the MSM does not, prying where they rather it would not and worse holds them and their policies to ridicule and disseminates it far more widely than the MSM. And no politician can afford to be made a fool of. And their attempts to harness it to their ends are failing: it is too international and too vibrant to be manipulated using their traditional methods.

Indeed, the model for what would happen on a much larger scale under ACTA can already be foreseen by observing recent US federal government crackdowns on innocent, legitimate blogs. On July 16, 2010, federal authorities shut down Blogetery.com, a site that hosted 73,000 blogs, under the allegation that some of these blogs reproduced copyrighted material. Any reasonable person will recognize, of course, that most of the blog owners probably committed no violation whatsoever, but millions of hours of human effort were nonetheless wiped out by this new kind of random, arbitrary censorship. Would you invest your time and energy into developing a high-quality blog if you feared that it could be destroyed at any moment, and not because of any action you took?

ACTA's provisions would amplify the already-onerous Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998. Prior to DMCA, copyright infringement was a civil offense; if the holder of "intellectual property rights" to a work found himself inconvenienced by its unauthorized distribution, he could sue the "infringer" in court. The DMCA criminalized copyright infringement and has rendered thousands of innocent creators' work subject to notorious and frivolous takedown notices, but it retained important protections for individual consumers and Internet service providers (ISPs). For instance, the DMCA's "safe harbor" provisions absolved ISPs from liability for any copyright infringement on the part of their customers. ACTA would eliminate this protection and require ISPs to become an enforcement arm of the treaty, under threat that the ISPs themselves would be fined or shut down if they did not comply.