The United States Department of Homeland security, the umbrella agency that has brought already such thundering farces as government sanctioned assault in one’s friendly neighbourhood airport, all sorts of theater of the absurd, wiretaps, datamining, general molly-coddling, and gross incompetence and derelictions of duty when the chance to exercise the authorities vested in them actually came around, has moved to shutter several websites, which according to their own judgment [citation needed] and estimation, facilitate traffic in pirated and counterfeit goods. Allowing the government to brandish around such power is nothing new, nothing different than any other hyper-fascist regime censoring the media, no matter what higher ground it is claiming. America’s goon squads have no proprietary rights to the world-wide web and throwing an arbitrary veil over its own doings is likely to cause headaches and quash creativity and objective reporting, and let them try to exercise their power extraterritorially since the internet is borderless.
Such powers, first sold out as a campaign promise to luddite lobbyists, the
entertainment cartel or the tele-communications companies, quickly spill over from making an example of a few unfortunates that did not play by the rules in the first place to redirection to suppression of any detail disagreeable. Rolling over on this or that slight has become too commonplace, since the insults are coming to quickly and without adequate recourse nor even rest to recuperate, but America should not ignore this creeping menace any longer.
