White House Opposes Key SOPA Provisions 175
twdorris writes "Is this an example of our 3-part government actually working as intended? It seems the executive branch doesn't agree with the legislative on a key piece of SOPA. From the article: '"While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global internet," the White House said in a blog post.'"
Re:They can say they oppose it, (Score:4, Interesting)
This is the beginning of the new government (Score:5, Interesting)
No, this is not our 3-part government working as expected, it's the new style of government aborning. With the rise of the internet and ubiquitous communications, the public at last has a way to influence government decisions.
We see it here in its early form.
At the moment the effect is fairly weak - Obama is only taking a position because he wants public support for reelection.
But despite self-serving motives, he is taking notice and he is opposing legislation, largely because of widespread grassroots opposition.
This will be the wave of the future. If community opinion, widely distributed and echoed on the internet, can presage community action, it will become increasingly difficult for political corruption. Corporations and politicians will be unable to do "bad" things for fear of being discovered by hackers, publicized by social media, and punished by public backlash.
It's the new boss. Curiously different from the old boss.
Re:They can say they oppose it, (Score:2, Interesting)
Was there any petition there that got a reply different from "thanks for sharing your ideas, but there's no way in hell we're going to change things the way you want"?
Obama said he opposed NDAA - but he signed it (Score:2, Interesting)
Obama even agreed to the most horrifying parts of the clearly unconstitutional bill.
Our politicians are just playing games with us, and we allow it.
Re:They can say they oppose it, (Score:5, Interesting)
Cute: https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/petition/actually-take-these-petitions-seriously-instead-just-using-them-excuse-pretend-you-are-listening/grQ9mNkN [whitehouse.gov]
Re:They can say they oppose it, (Score:4, Interesting)
It is not like this issue is something covered on Fox and MSNBC and CNN.
Actually I did see CNN run a segment on SOPA. I wish I had a tape of it to give a better evaluation of the segment, but I'll give the basic impression I had from it. It seemed rather slanted to me. They spend most of the segment talking about how SOPA was a law to protect American jobs against teh evilz international criminals, mentioned that there was controversy over the bill between the Big Media companies and the Big Internet companies, and they wrapped up the segment with a rather weak comment against the bill by one of the opponents.
It seems like 90% of the people who learn about SOPA online come to the conclusion that it's a seriously bad law. My guess is that most people who saw the segment on CNN would have considered the controversy pretty boring and trivial, and probably gotten the impression that the bill was pretty much neutral or perhaps beneficial.
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Re:They can say they oppose it, (Score:4, Interesting)
It is rather pointless. The petition to have "under God" removed from the pledge is a good example of how seriously they take these things.
https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/petition/edit-pledge-allegiance-remove-phrase-under-god/v5J2fC6z?utm_source=wethepeople&utm_medium=response&utm_campaign=undergod [whitehouse.gov]
In this petition, it's asked that the phrase "under God" be removed, as it's arguably a violation of the first amendment. The first issue was the person chosen to respond to this request: Joshua DuBois, the head of the Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Slight bias here, given that DuBois heads-up a department that was itself a flagrant violation of separation of church and state. His answer was an exercise in contradictory hand waving and trying to deny that it's stupid to that a multi-cultural nation, with a pretty strong constitutional protection against religion infecting government, should keep a 1950s addition to the pledge that says that the country is subservient to the Christian god. Yeah, Hindus and stuff are welcome in America, so long as they accept that their elephant guy and the chick with the arms are not running shit here. Personally I don't see the pledge as being a pressing issue - there are far more egregious violations of the first amendment, such as the tax breaks that churches get just by virtue of being religious.