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Comment by Vivtek | Hacker News Reader

That's because it is a big step towards global authoritarianism. My wife is Hungarian, born in 1966 like myself, and she's deathly afraid of expressing political dissent in public venues like the Internet. That's what we're proposing to make the law now - that fear. Makes it ever so much easier to keep control, you see.

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It is very hard for Americans to comprehend the idea of blatant oppression by the government as Americas always had a gentler approach to oppressing it's citizenry. I have quite a few friends from eastern European origin and it is always peculiar when you get into a discussion about the government with them and their voice immediately drops into whisper. After all of these years thy still have it in the back of their mind that someone from the party could be listening. Pretty creepy stuff if you stop to think about it.

Well, I have a story about that, from 2005. We were in Hungary (oddly enough) and were watching a show in which you could SMS in stuff from your phone and it would scroll across the screen, and some of it was political in nature.

My then-12-year-old daughter said, "So I could say, 'Bush is an idiot' and it would show up on the screen?" (Yeah, my politics is always pretty obvious.)

I laughed and said, "Sure could!"

She thought it over and said, "But would my name be on it? Maybe that wouldn't be a good idea."

I realized at that point that it was safer to express political dissent at that time in freaking Hungary than in the United States of America, and that my daughter knew that. Talk about a blow-your-mind situation.

My wife will talk anybody's ear off about politics face-to-face, and she has entirely radical opinions for our venue of Indiana. But if it's on the record? No way. She says we just don't need that kind of trouble.

I've been going down this list, voting up things that seem interesting. And suddenly I thought "Bloody hell, I'm using my real name to criticise the government on the internet". And obviously, I've decided that I have no problem with that. But I'm a white, middle class, middle aged businessman, and a British subject rather than an American citizen. And I still thought it.

America's stupid "War on Drugs" has devastated large parts of the world. Is an equally stupid, and, more laughably, even more doomed to failure "War on Copyright" going to wreck the Internet and possibly freedom itself?

And this is Obama? Who was supposed to be the good guy?

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