The Digital Age: You can take our rights but not our Internet!

How important is the Internet to us? Experience has taught me that being a part of the world is to partake of the Internet – perhaps more appropriately dubbed the Wild Wild Web. The Internet’s awesome power to satisfy appetites of the mind and ability to connect the world has opened that special place in our hearts reserved for things we will fight to protect. This is evidenced by the recent throngs of web users and companies retaliating against SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, which would create an internet blacklist of any site involved in or linking to sites involved in copyright infringement – coining the phrase, "the Great Firewall of America" for its striking similarities to China's questionable internet policies. In a time when Americans are subject to no-knock warrants, unprecedented government intrusion of privacy, and most recently indefinite detention by the military without trial, the internet nomads have begun rallying under the "stop SOPA now!" banner. In the tradition of our forefathers, Americans continue to fight for freedom, but it appears that as our lives have become digital so have the freedoms we will fight to protect.