Software doesn't violate copyrights, people do

Rasmus Fleischer has an article on Cato's website on the increasing push to outlaw technology for the sake of protecting copyrights.

People with some programming skills, however, won’t need to do much more than combining a few readily available and otherwise perfectly legal code libraries to compile their own streamripping tool, one that would circumvent the PERFORM Act. For regulations like these to be effective, it is necessary also to censor the sharing of skills that potentially can be useful for coding illegal software. The circle of prohibition grows still larger: Acoustic fingerprinting technologies, which have nothing copyright-infringing to them, but which can be used for the same feared identification of individual tracks, must probably also be restricted.
 
This domino effect captures the essence of copyright maximalism: Every broken regulation brings a cry for at least one new regulation even more sweepingly worded than the last. Copyright law in the 21st century tends to be less concerned about concrete cases of infringement, and more about criminalizing entire technologies because of their potential uses.

The thinking behind campaigns to outlaw technologies that might infringe copyrights is basically the same as the thinking behind gun control: If something can be used for a bad purpose, it is bad and must be stopped by the force of law. The legitimate uses are dismissed as a mere excuse, and those who exercise those uses are demonized as "hackers" and "gun nuts." Guilt by technology also lies behind the movement to mandate net neutrality. Differential pricing by protocol might be used to establish a monopoly, therefore it must be banned.

But technologies aren't good or evil in themselves; only people's actions are. Attempts to outlaw them stop the good uses far more than they stop the evil ones, since professional criminals by definition don't pay much attention to the law. People will find ways to circumvent the laws; governments and law enforcement agencies will fight back with increasingly broad prohibitions, pulling more legitimate uses into the forbidden zone. Honest people find they must break the law, and the government becomes their enemy.

Bush orders use of E-Verify

With Real ID spiraling toward failure, Bush is trying another tactic to put Americans under government surveillance. He has issued an executive order requiring federal contractors to use E-Verify to force their employees to prove they are legally permitted to work for a living in the United States. Where E-Verify has been used, it has proven a nightmare for people who have lived in the United States all their lives but can't track down their birth records, or are affected by an error in the Social Security database. They are, in effect, sentenced without trial to deprivation of their living. The Cato Institute has called E-Verify "Franz Kafka's solution."

The anti-immigrant crowd wants us to believe that people coming from foreign lands are terrorists out to kill us. (By that logic, all of us, including Indians, are descended from terrorists.) Then, they hope, we'll submit to any outrage in the name of "national security."

Blogger charged with "sedition" in Singapore

Reporters Without Borders does an excellent job of showing the individual, personal impact of censorship. Many other sources discuss what laws have been passed, what firewalls have been put up against the truth, and how many people have been arrested, but RSF (their name is actually the somewhat impure French "Reporters Sans Frontières") puts a face on them.

One of these faces belongs to Golapan Nair, who has been charged with sedition "for posting blog entries criticising the supreme court’s handling of a defamation suit." In Singapore, there seems to be very little difference between criticism and "sedition," if the person you're criticizing is sufficiently powerful. If you criticize Lee Kuan Yew, who was Prime Minister for thirty years and whose son now holds the office, the difference is zero.

Access Denied reports that "Singapore's government uses restrictive laws, political ties to the judiciary, and ownership and intimidation of the media to suppress dissenting opinion and opposition to the ruling People's Action Party (PAP)." Golapan Nair's case shows what the actions of tyrants like Lee Kuan Kew mean on the personal level.