Now for some pointless musing about what’s really going on. The point of SOPA/PIPA is not to combat piracy in the sense that most people understand it. I finally figured out what’s going on when I realized that for people supporting SOPA, the biggest internet pirate isn’t some torrent site like The Pirate Bay, it’s Google.

The “secret” plan isn’t to censor the internet, or take down pirate sites, or throw Google/Facebook/Wikipedia offline. The goal is to maximize revenue for existing intellectual property and the method is straightforward crony capitalism.

1. Finance political campaigns.
2. Lobby for a laws that provide leverage.
3. Negotiate lucrative blanket license agreements with major players.

Nobody in Hollywood cares about real piracy because most smart people realize that there isn’t a lot of money there. The people who use sites with pirated content aren’t easily converted into paying customers. This law will do nothing to shut down sites like The Pirate Bay or prevent people from using them. Instead, this law is aimed squarely at more lucrative targets, with the intention of facilitating a transfer of wealth from companies like Google/Facebook/Twitter to associations of content creators.

My prediction: If SOPA/PIPA pass then some form of step 3 won’t be far behind.

This seems like a new and different equilibrium, one that hasn’t ever been explored at superpower scale. For every warrantless wiretap and NSA datamining sweep, we have videos of cops beating protesters, wikileaks, and open mics. These moments allow us all to reacquire a shared truth, a common state of being. This happened. There’s no denying it. Information flows in all directions. The truth does not just want to be free, it wants to be ever present.

For every dusty DEA agent secretly slapping a transponder on a beater car (how depressing that job must be), we have a new revelation about the private lives of Texas judges, or the free hand NYC lieutenants take towards the liberal application of pepper spray. These things don’t have to be whispered about. They don’t even have to be reported. They can just be shown.

I guess sometimes I feel like both the state and the people think they’re looking through one-way mirrors.

It’s a window people. A window.

Tomahawk is the U.S. Navy’s surface- and submarine-launched, precision strike long-range stand-off weapon. Originally introduced into the Navy’s inventory in 1983, the Tomahawk has provided the commander with a powerful tool to shape the battlespace and achieve decisive victory in numerous theater operations including Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom.

I don’t know if the full scope of the strategic advantage of the device was properly understood when it was developed, but it certainly reduces the political cost (though perhaps not the monetary cost) of military intervention, and is one of the great “triumphs” of modern robotic weaponry.

Update: I’ve been thinking about this a bit more. Though the nexus of technology,culture, and politics is quite complex, the whole “casual war” phenomenon that super weapons facilitate seems like such a clean slice through the otherwise complex knot. With reality as a starting point, we can ask all kinds of hypothetical questions like “What if Libya had nuclear weapons?” or “What if cruise missiles did not exist?” that seem at least in casual consideration to really expose the way technology shapes us and we shape technology.

For one, it seems like our moral obligations seem to grow with our ability to right particular moral wrongs in the world (e.g. prevent genocide). The later ability is mediated by technology, but the former is often treated as some kind of universal truth. This all leads to a strange kind of paradox where supposedly universal moral obligations shift over time.

But it seems clear enough: exactly the same alliance that gave us Iraq is giving us Libya: the neocons who want to see the US military deployed across the globe in the defense of freedom and the liberal interventionists who believe that the US should intervene whenever atrocities are occurring. What these two groups have in common is an unrelenting focus on the reason for intervention along with indifference to the vast array of unintended consequences their moralism could lead us into. I do not doubt their good intentions and motives. No human being can easily watch a massacre and stand by. Yet we did so with Iran; and we are doing so in Yemen and Bahrain as we speak, and have done so for decades because we rightly make judgments based on more than feeling.

I think there’s probably some truth to the trope, but I would argue that it undermines itself because the typical target is a white male draft-dodger of privilege advocating for war from a protected political position of power. The reality is that war mongering draws from many different ideological camps. I think it is time that popular perceptions realign with the truth, that we stop being distracted by neo-conservative fuzziness and adopt the following central principle:

The people most in favor of war are the people most in favor of human rights.

Consider as an example the advocates for armed conflict in Libya: Samantha Power, Gayle Smith, Mike McFaul, Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Of these objectively pro-war people there is absolutely no history of military service. Samantha Power and Mike McFaul are political scientists specializing in human rights. Gayle Smith is a former journalist (who may have the most first hand experience of war at least), Joe Biden and Barack Obama are lawyers turned politicians.

I don’t have any particular problem with a lack of military service among the political elite, even when those political elite advocate for war as the solution to some foreign policy need. What I have a problem with is the hollowness of the double standard that was applied to Bush, Cheney and others with respect to the same use of force. Being ideologically left doesn’t mean one is entitled to apply labels like “chicken-hawk” based on essentially class and party sensibilities.

Moreover, I have not figured out how people who support human rights justify the civilian casualties that result from military interventionism. I thought invading Iraq would ultimately be a good move when I first heard about it. Given what we have learned since then, why hasn’t the mind set of supporters of universal human rights changed?

Inside the Tuesday evening meeting, senior officials were lined up on both sides. Pushing for military intervention was a group of NSC staffers including Samantha Power, NSC senior director for multilateral engagement; Gayle Smith, NSC senior director for global development; and Mike McFaul, NSC senior director for Russia, who has 30-plus-years of experience advocating for democracy and human rights. Vice President Joe Biden also was a supporter of imposing a no-fly zone over Libya, an administration official said.

On the other side of the ledger were some Obama administration officials who were reportedly wary of the second- and third-degree effects of committing to a lengthy military mission in Libya. These officials included National Security Advisor Tom Donilon and Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was also opposed to attacking Libya and had said as much in several public statements.

Being circumspect is easy. Showing dynamic interest is hard.

The question is whether private for-profit company involvement with law enforcement leads to inappropriate conflicts of interest. If it helps to understand my hesitation, replace Apple with Xe (formerly Blackwater), Gizmodo with Wikileaks, and the stolen iPhone with a stolen Xe laptop. Would you be so quick to support the actions of the police department if you knew that the police had a special relationship with Xe?