Sorry to go off-topic, but after this and many, many other sites went dark for a day to draw attention to the protest against the SOPA and PIPA bills I think it’s important to bring this up. (I’m posting this on both my Tumblrs. I apologize for the redundancy.)

Glenn Greenwald on salon.com has an excellent article today about how the very next day after SOPA and PIPA were withdrawn from Congress, the government shut down Megaupload.com, showing it already has the exact power we were all protesting that it shouldn’t get through those bills:

Critics insisted that these bills were dangerous because they empowered the U.S. Government, based on mere accusations of piracy and copyright infringement, to shut down websites without any real due process. But just as the celebrations began over the saving of Internet Freedom, something else happened: the U.S. Justice Department not only indicted the owners of one of the world’s largest websites, the file-sharing site Megaupload, but also seized and shut down that site, and also seized or froze millions of dollars of its assets — all based on the unproved accusations, set forth in an indictment, that the site deliberately aided copyright infringement.

In other words…the very power they feared the most in that bill — the power of the U.S. Government to seize and shut down websites based solely on accusations, with no trial — is a power the U.S. Government already possesses…  [emphasis added]

In other words, folks, exactly nothing was accomplished by convincing Congress to withdraw the SOPA and PIPA bills. As Greenwald writes:

It’s wildly under-appreciated how unrestrained is the Government’s power to do what it wants, and how little effect these debates over various proposed laws have on that power.

Please read the article, and any others you can find about the real story behind the story.