Mark Weaver
WMAL.com

WASHINGTON -- If you call a radio talk show and get on the air, you might be recorded by the FBI.

The FBI has awarded a $524,927 contract to a Virginia company to record as much radio news and talk programming as it can find on the Internet. MORE>>>

First Amendment Under Attack: 18 Examples of How They Are Coming for Our Free Speech

End of the American Dream

In the United States today, the First Amendment is under attack like never before. Technological innovations such as the Internet have made it possible for average Americans to communicate directly with one another in ways that completely bypass the mainstream media, and this is making the elite very uncomfortable. They have decided that they better come after our free speech before it is too late. Right now, free speech in America is being chipped away at it in thousands of different ways. On the one hand, you have the disciples of "political correctness" that want to make all forms of speech that are "offensive" to anyone against the law. On the other hand, you have those that are obsessed with "national security" that want to ban all speech that is critical of the U.S. government or the U.S. military. These twin forces are constantly seeking to push the First Amendment into a smaller and smaller box. If you say the wrong thing in America today, your website might be shut down, you could be suspended from school, you may find yourself out of a job and there is now even a possibility that you could be arrested and shipped off to Guantanamo Bay without a trial.

Usually those that are targeted for their speech are those that the "establishment" does not like. That would include free thinkers, political activists, libertarians, true conservatives and Christians.

Instead of seeing the value in allowing everyone to say what they think, we are being taught in America today that there is speech that is "acceptable" and speech that is "not acceptable".

If we allow this attack on the First Amendment to continue, eventually we will wake up in a country where our freedom of speech is totally gone.

The following are 18 examples of how the elite are coming for our free speech....

#1 Two bills currently going through Congress, the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, would give the U.S. government the ability to shut down literally millions of websites.

These bills are incredibly dangerous and if they are passed they could change the way that the Internet operates forever.

The following is from a piece that Google co-founder Sergey Brin recently authored about these new bills....

"Imagine my astonishment when the newest threat to free speech has come from none other but the United States. Two bills currently making their way through congress -- SOPA and PIPA -- give the U.S. government and copyright holders extraordinary powers including the ability to hijack DNS and censor search results (and this is even without so much as a proper court trial)"

Any website that posts "infringing material" could be instantly shut down under these news laws. For example, if one "infringing video" was posted on YouTube, the entire site could be taken down forever and permanently erased from Google in a matter of days. That is how serious these new bills are as Brin noted later on in his piece....

"While I support their goal of reducing copyright infringement (which I don't believe these acts would accomplish), I am shocked that our lawmakers would contemplate such measures that would put us on a par with the most oppressive nations in the world."

Can you imagine a world where there is no more YouTube, no more Facebook and no more Twitter?

That is what we could be looking at.

Sadly, many in the U.S. Congress seem absolutely obsessed with censoring the Internet.

U.S. Senator Chris Dodd once said the following....

"When the Chinese told Google that they had to block sites or they couldn’t do [business] in their country, they managed to figure out how to block sites"

U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman has gone even farther. Just check out what he once said....

"Right now, China – the government – can disconnect parts of its internet in a case of war. We need to have that here too"

Not only that, U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman also recently asked Google to install a "terrorist button" on all Blogger.com blogs so that readers can easily flag "terrorist content" for authorities.

The Internet is under attack from Washington D.C., and if you love the Internet you need to say something while you still can.

Please contact your representatives in Congress and tell them that they must vote against these bills.

MORE>>> http://lewrockwell.com/rep2/1st-amendment-under-attack.html