Should US Government Be Allowed to Control Us?

Ever since the Stop Online Piracy Act was brought up in congress and started getting more and more opposition, things have gotten weirder and weirder. The internet just isn’t the same as it used to be anymore. It started off with federal agents taking down MegaUpload which was only partly in the United States. For some reason they picked this peer-to-peer file sharing site over all the others and shut all of it down, not just US operations. That created a lot of controversy all over the internet from both sides, especially since this happened only a day after the January 18th protest.

Just a couple of days ago Congress announced that the bills were pretty much over and done with, for all we know. However we saw something else that indicated there might be some inside jobs going on in the Government that they aren’t telling us about. Twitter is now censoring their tweets and blocking certain tweets to specific countries. Twitter, which opposed SOPA is now giving into some of the things we were afraid would happen if SOPA was passed. Twitter has been an important medium for the Occupy protests and many uprisings in Libya and Egypt. Twitter realizes this but now they are censoring their users.

Now, the FBI has decided that they will step in. The FBI has announced that they plan to monitor social media to identify new security threats that may arise as well as the current state of our country. This might not just be the FBI either. It could pass out to other branches of the government and allow them to watch what we do online too. Along with cameras on every city block and GPS units being proposed as well, privacy is being lost all around us.

Some people who can’t get their acts together is what’s ruining it for the rest of us. Sure, there are some stupid people on the internet but hopefully they wouldn’t be stupid enough to go posting their plans to commit a felony. Also, the FBI won’t be like a follower. They will have access to your Facebook profiles no matter how locked down your privacy settings are. As if the government can’t monitor your online use now, if they get this power there is no doubt that they will know everything you say. That’s a bit creepy knowing that a government group has this kind of power. It’s an invasion of privacy but they can do it, because they’re the government.

This gives the government a level of control. By letting users know that they are always watching, users might not feel as comfortable to use something that used to be a great means of communication. Things like chats even could be monitored. Who knows, they could consider Skype a social network due to the new Facebook integration and monitor Skype calls.

Should the government be able to do this? Truth be told, they’re the government. We are the voting power that control whether or not people get elected, but they can control what goes on online which will influence who we vote for and who we don’t vote for. By monitoring social media, the government could start taking down things they don’t like so we can’t say anything bad about government officials and therefore will only know who to vote for based on what the mainstream media says. Sure, they won’t take down stuff right away but you just wait until they see something they don’t like.

I think the US government is attempting to turn the internet into a place where they can control everything that goes on. They’re already proven that they want that power, and they will do everything they can to get it. Thankfully, we the internet are doing a very good job of showing that we don’t approve of what they are doing, but big companies such as Facebook and Google are having to donating huge amounts of money to try to stop things. We have had physical protests however which shows the government that we aren’t just a bunch of blank faces behind computer screens and IP addresses, we actually exist. As long as we still have the power to voice our free speech online, we need to use this power to contact our congressmen and women and convince them that the internet needs to stay free. I don’t know what will happen, I hope our internet doesn’t become the same as other countries where it’s highly controlled. We will just have to fight and hope we win.