… but we’re still getting closer. The message contained in my previous post on the understated threat to internet freedoms is something I feel very strongly about - we must maintain net neutrality.

Take that away and we are taking away the means to communicate freely and openly (and partially anonymously, if we know how), and to verify the information we are fed by the media, and find out the stories that the government is trying to “hush up” (were it to do such a thing…). Not to mention making friends and having fun with people who don’t reside in our own country! Besides it’s not like those who want to won’t be able to bypass the filters (look at China), but in doing so, in just trying to get information that their government doesn’t want them to have (no matter how trivial or inoffensive it may be), those people would be breaking the law and thus could be locked away and hence silenced. With all the recent laws it has been passing, I’m beginning to think that our government wants us all to be criminals so that it can, if it needs to, control and/or silence people, one at a time, and make us live in constant fear of disobeying them, even if we don’t agree with their policies. Do we really want to live in a world where everyone is the same, as dictated by law? We are not just losing our freedom, we are giving it away. Chunk by chunk. We must stop it before it is too late. Here is a quote from the a free story by Cory Doctorow:

“Here’s the thing,” Randy said. “The system isn’t going to go away, no matter what we do. The Securitat’s here forever. We’ve treated everyone like a criminal for too long now—everyone’s really a criminal now. If we dismantled tomorrow, there’d be chaos, bombings, murder sprees. We’re not going anywhere.”

The Securitat are a kind of Big Brother organization like that in the book 1984. The signs are there that our own government is heading that way - for example, terror “suspects” can be held for long periods of time with no evidence. Sure, it sounds like the government is protecting us, but that law could be used against you or me if we were doing something that the government didn’t want us to (e.g. exercising free speech against the government or some of it’s activities). We must protect our freedoms, we must maintain a method of communications that cannot be controlled/watched over by the government, otherwise what means to we have to prevent something like 1984, or the world in “Little Brother” (another free Doctorow book), from coming to pass? I urge you all to read 1984 and/or Little Brother and then think about the freedoms that we are giving away year on year, and whether we will ever get them back. Both books are available free online (legally) - I recommend you download the eBook reader “Stanza” and read them through that.