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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

I'm looking forward to this bill passing. As soon as we drive normal internet activity underground, there will no longer be any stigma to being underground. Everything will be encrypted and hidden to people that don't "know the key", and Hollywood and the government will be the last people to know the key. Reading BoingBoing and downloading the latest Hollywood crap will look exactly the same to everyone monitoring the Internet except the person actually doing the downloading, ushering in a new era of freedom.

Just like there are no laws regulating the sale of illegal drugs (and the market is flourishing), soon we will have an Internet that the government can't censor. Illegal is the new legal.

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Be careful what you wish for. This is not Tron or the Matrix where hacking against the system takes you to magical adventures. Censorship sucks no matter how you look at it.

And I don't get your drug analogy. Buying drugs legally means you know what you're buying, you can easily track the quality and strength like you would for your favorite brand of coffee. You can know where it comes from, who worked on it, if it is sustainable. You can use drugs legitimately, you don't need to hide. You can be open about it with people, and share how it has a place in your life. Illegal drugs on the other hand have none of this. The only thing you can do is build a relationship with a good dealer and cross fingers that the quality will stay the same most of the time. And there's obviously no way it hell you will trace the product back to its production. You can even go to jail for using it. And the unreliability of the product makes the experience unsafe, unpredictable, unhealthy, and dangerous. How is that "freedom"?

Edit: Seeing how popular the parent comment is, I urge readers to think twice about it. The parent comment's "looking at the bright side" stance is a coward and lazy attitude. Sorry for being harsh but it's true. It's much easier to invent yourself a wicked reason why it would work for your own individual best, put your mind at ease and just sit back instead of going through the mental effort of worrying about this and putting the energy to stand up for everybody's rights.

The more interesting point in his comment to me is that sometimes it is worse in the long term if your adversary restricts themselves.

Yes, if this passes it will wreck lives and businesses, but it might also just be bad enough to get ordinary people to start waking up to how damaging the copyright lobby is.

Now copyright and patent issues are mainly relevant to business and a small subset of people being pursued for torrenting etc. The pain point for average people have not been reached in any way - they don't notice.

But push far enough, and the backlash the copyright lobby will face may lay waste all of them.

Whether or not SOPA constitutes pushing far enough remains to be seen.

You're reading it different than me. I don't think he's literally wishing for it to pass, or is it really "the bright side" that he is describing. He's just trying to rationalize that the worst-case scenario is not the end of all freedom yet, and there will still be ways to fight/circumvent it. More like a small bright dot on a very dark background.

How are you able to see how popular the parent comment is?

It was #1 (and ~ one hour old) when I commented, and stayed #1 for a couple hours, in a highly popular thread (3 hours old and almost 400 votes at the time I believe). My comment stuck as the top child with just a couple votes, hence all children had a low voting count. So I assumed the parent was #1 amongst dozens of other comments thanks to its individual number of votes.

I kept an eye on this because its popularity is unsettling to me. I don't usually miss the vote counters but in situations like this one I really do.

You can't but you can infer it's popularity based on the time elapsed since it was posted and it's current placement on the page. In this case it is the number 2 comment at the moment and it was posted more than several hours ago.

That made me laugh:"This is not Tron or the Matrix where hacking against the system takes you to magical adventures". So true!

Yes, and just like illegal drugs, the government will have yet another unrelated crime it can arrest you for when you happen to antagonize it or do some other legal-but-looked-dimly-upon thing. What a utopia.

I have always thought that police are just keeping the status quo instead of really protecting the people.

We all break the law. Whether it is Jay Walking, smoking a joint, or being drunk in public. With the number of laws that exist today, it's hard NOT to break one every once in a while.

The only true law that is enforced is to fit in with society.

I drive like a maniac, but I am a young clean cut white male who dresses like the rest of us and drives a yaris (no tinting). I have been doing 30% over the speed limit, noticed a police cruiser directly behind me (for a few minutes), and casually moved out of his way. Didn't get much more than a glance. (No sirens, they were highway police so they were fully within their jurisdiction, should have gotten a ticket basically..)

A friend of mine who drives incredibly cautiously (because he is driving around a brand new Escalade, you know the cars all the rappers used to talk about) has been pulled over (and harassed) no less than 10 times in the past 3 years. It doesn't help that he "looks too young" for the car he drives.

Anyways... that sure is one hell of a utopia like mquander suggests.

You reminded me of one of the few Ayn Rand quotes I actually like. "The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."

I was thinking something similar. A darknet (or something like that) will become necessary, and it will become commonplace for people to use. It is currently like this in China, were many non-tech savvy individuals commonly use anonymizers or proxies.

However, what is really scary is the prospect of the government having this ability, but only exercising their power to silence dissent in secret, low-profile cases. Then, people who use TOR or similar will continue to be viewed as paranoid/criminals/conspiracy-theorists.

they still screwed people over during prohibition...

You just rocked my sleepy afternoon brain. I guess soon we'll all be outlaws. Here's to flying under the radar?

Thanks for reminding me of the bright side.

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