Go get 'em tigers! Bring 'em all down to their knees! "He that killeth with the sword, shall be killed with the sword."

Keep in mind there some speculation that Anonymous a Governmnet fronmt group and this will be used to justify more policing of the internet.. I personally do not know what to believe but the FBI WILL use this to say "see we told you so..."

I don't think the Anonymous action was the deciding factor and could be secondary to protests and online petitions. Seeing how reactionary the conservatives in power are and how quickly they retaliate with "we don't negotiate with terrorrists" shit, I doubt that was the case. I think they saw the power of the people. Cyberwar may continue to escalate, but so will protests and petitions.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Mahatma Gandhi

"Protect IP Act."

The Enlightenment concepts the USA were founded on included a severe limitation on the protection of "Intellectual Property" rights, obviously thus NOT a testament to greed. But today, elite saboteurs of the same government are twisting those Enlightenment concepts into pretzels, using the law that was meant to restrict property rights for public benefit, into elevating property rights for private benefit. Merkans consider their country to be great, and it was the fortress against greed that made it great. Turning it into a fortress for greed is a colossal corruption. It may as well be pounded into rubble.

"The statement also detailed what appeared to be private details, including home address and birth dates, relating to the family of Chris Dodd, chief executive of the Hollywood studios' trade body, the Motion Picture Association of America." Could they take data to analyze and then expose corporate crimes? And, could they hack into broadcast media and substitute reports on corporate crimes (and government crimes)?

A-ha. This explains why the internet 'service' company's "data usage" box that's like a ticker-tape of IP addresses we visit, was out of commission on Thursday. A chunk of a day of not being able to trace and track any internet usage by all in the intelligence community. Too bad they didn't make it permanent, but I suppose they could if they wanted to. Well, this was a retalitory act defending some website I've never heard of, and Anonymous does seem to strike defensively, so ending data collection and knocking out spy agencies permanently would be reserved, I suppose, for a larger offense than a Megaupload.com violation.

The following will be in two parts due to the number of characters allowed: Power vs. People in the Digital Age The government seems determined to turn out the lights on the digital age. And this is with or without SOPA or the other bills that were only this week shouted down by the global digital community on Blackout Wednesday. The very next day after support for that legislation collapsed after an impressive mass protest, the FBI and the Justice Department demonstrated that they don’t have to pay any attention to all this silly clamor. Congress, legislation, polling, debates, politicians, the will of the people — it’s all a sideshow to these people. The FBI and Justice Department on their own initiative shut down megaupload.com, the biggest of thousands of file-sharing sites online, and arrested four of its top officials. The FBI is hunting down three others who seem to be on the lam. They all face extradition and twenty years in prison. As part of the sweep, the feds issued 20 search warrants and arrived at individual houses in helicopters. They cut their way into houses, threatened with guns, confiscated $50 million in assets, and outright stole 18 domain names and many servers. And what is their grave crime? They are accused of abetting copyright infringement, that is, permitting the creating of copies of ideas expressed in media. No violence, no fraud, no force, no victims (but plenty of corporate moguls who claim without proof that their profits are lower as a result of file sharing). Megaupload had millions of happy users. It was the 71st most popular website in the world. Only 2% of its traffic came from search engines, which means that its customer base was loyal and collected through the hard work and entrepreneurship of site owners. For its users, it was a wholly legitimate service. For the owners, their profits were hard earned through advertising. But the government saw it differently. And contrary to what many people believe, the already-existing law permits the government to do pretty much whatever it wants, as this case shows. The government relied on a 2008 law to make criminal instead of civil charges. A newly created IP taskforce is the one that worked with the foreign governments to seal the deal. In the end, it was a presentation of exactly the nightmare scenario that anti-SOPA protesters said would happen if SOPA had passed. It turns out, as the deeper realms of the state already knew, that all of this was possible with no Congressional action at all. Congress doesn’t need to do anything. We can watch the debates, go to the polls, elect people to represent us, and perform all the rest of the rituals of the civic religion but none of it matters. Power is here, active, oppressive, in charge, permanent, regardless of what you might believe. Might it be that some of the users’ shared content on Megaupload was copyright protected? Absolutely. It is nearly impossible not to violate the law, as shown by SOPA sponsor Lamar Smith’s own campaign website, which used an unattributed background image in technical violation of the law. The leading opponent of piracy might himself be a pirate! But the trendline with Megaupload was clearly toward using the space to launch new artists with new content: not piracy but creativity. As Wired.uk wrote, this crackdown came shortly after Megaupload announced music producer Swizz Beatz — married to Alicia Keys — as their CEO. They had rallied a whole host of musicians including Will.i.am, P Diddy, Kanye West and Jamie Foxx to endorse the cloud locker service. Megaupload was building a legitimate system for artists to make money and fans to get content. What’s this all about? It is some powerful corporate lobbyists trying to prevent the emergence of an alternative system of art and music delivery, one powered by people rather than merely the well- connected. The Internet’s great glory is its seemingly magical capacity for distributing information of all sorts universally unto infinity. The idea of the state’s regulations on information — instituted by legislators in the 19th century — is that this trait is deeply dangerous and must be stopped. So it is inevitable that the powers that be will try to shut it down; copyright enforcement is only the most convenient Taser of choice. This is the battle for whether the digital age is permitted to exist in an atmosphere of free speech, free association, free enterprise, and real property rights, or whether it will be controlled by government in conjunction with aging media moguls from monopolistic corporate oligarchies. The lines are clearly drawn, and it is taking place in real time. Example: within minutes after the officials of Megaupload were arrested, a global hacker group called Anonymous shut down the Justice Department’s website and also the sites of the Motion Picture, the Recording Industry Association of America, Universal music, and BMI — the major lobbying forces in Washington for restriction and reaction against the Internet.

In another stage of the great battle over information freedom, the Supreme Court, on the very day of the SOPA protests, handed down a decision that could have a devastating effect in the months and years ahead. It permitted the re-copyrighting of works that are already in the public domain so that the domestic law accords with the international law. If that sounds like no big deal, consider that many local orchestras have already changed their season lineup to remove some major works from their repertoire because they can no longer handle the licensing fees. It’s hard to know what to call this but cultural masochism. Regardless of how the legal struggles turn out, a culture of rational and irrational fear has gripped the web. I’ve noticed this growing over the last months, but just this week, it has become worse, to the point of paranoia and even mania. The successful protests against SOPA only ended up causing the censors to redouble their efforts, and the message is getting out: almost everything you want to do online could be illegal. A small sample of what I mean. Just this morning I received the following email: “BBC Four recently broadcast a stunningly beautiful documentary called God’s Composer (Tomas Luis da Victoria) hosted by Robert Russell Beale. A friend in Rome sent me a link to it, but I’m not sure I’m free to share it. Have you seen this documentary? It is stunning both visually and musically.” Not free to share a link? What? To be sure, I don’t know whether he intended to send me to the BBC or some other site that is hosting an additional copy of it. Regardless, this is what it has come down to: a belief that every email is traced, every site is monitored, every act of individual volition on the web could be a crime, every website is vulnerable to an overnight takedown, every domain owner could be subject to arrest and jail. The battle between power and freedom dates to the beginning of recorded history, and we are seeing it play out right before our eyes in the digital age. It’s as if at the beginning of the Bronze Age, the leading tribal chieftain made smelting ore illegal, or if at the transition from iron to steel, the ruling elite put a cap on the temperature of refining ovens, or if at the beginning of flight, some despot declared the whole enterprise to be too risky and economically damaging to the industry that depended on land travel. In the current version, the issue of “intellectual property” is at the forefront of this battle. The first most people heard of this was on Blackout Wednesday when Wikipedia went black. This is a foretaste of the future in a world in which power achieves victory after victory while the rest of the world cowers with fear in darkening times. Regards, Jeffrey Tucker for The Daily Reckoning "Freedom will prevail here, Fellow Reckoner. Don’t be scared to stand on the right side of history. On that note, please feel free to reproduce any issue of The Daily Reckoning — including this one — on any site you so wish. The messages contained herein, we hope, are bigger than any one of us. They are to be shared and spread for the learned consideration of all." -Joel Bowman/ Daily Reckoning

I believe that internet censorship of any kind is the wrong way to go in regards to protecting copy rights. Sponsorship of any internet censorship by politicians will not be tolerated by the voters. Most would agree that people who write novels, create music, movies, programs,and inventions should be able to make a profit from them. The original copy right laws were made to prevent people from making a profit on other peoples creations. The present laws have taken this to ridiculous extremes. A person can get a judgment against them for simply doing something that could possibly hinder the generation of profit. Because of the absurdity of the copy right laws, many people just ignore them. Copy rights to things that can be sent over the internet can not, and never will be able to be enforced. Even without the internet, digital content can be copied and put on dick by anyone with a computer. It cost pennies, and it can be done in a snap. Telling people that they can't do this is just like telling people that they can't drink alcohol. Prohibition of alcohol did not hinder peoples alcohol consumption in any way, just like telling people they are not allowed to do things that their computer does very easterly. As things stand, when a copy right holder puts their creation to digital format, they have voluntarily thrown their copy right to the wind. What they need to do is work on more sophisticated forms of encryption that will prevent the duplication of their copy righted material. Using politicians to sensor our internet and violate our rights to free speech and free expression will not solve their problem. If they end internet file sharing, people will just find other ways to share.