ACTA Is WORSE Than PIPA or SOPA

The simple danger with ACTA, PIPA, and SOPA, is it removes legal jurisprudence from a U.S. court of law to a nameless, faceless bureaucracy.

Simply put, a bureaucrat or government officer can determine your guilt through arbitrary and capricious measures and take action against you or even present his "evidence" to a "court" to seize your property.

ACTA is a greater threat because it places you under international law and an international bureaucratic committee. Think you hate dealing with Google, your cell phone company, Craigslist or PayPal? Just wait until the "rule of law" is determined in some U.N. panel in Brussels.

This is what our founding fathers gave their lives to fight against. Even the Star Chambers, an English court of law established to fight against those too powerful for ordinary courts to convict, turned into a political weapon to destroy those who dared defy the ruling elite.

These court sessions were held in secret with evidence presented in writing to appointed judges. There was no right to face one's accusers, cross examine, or be heard by a jury of one's peers. There were no witnesses, no indictments, and no right of appeal.

Do you honestly think that you can defend your interests against the power of corporate systems allied with the power of government? Even Mussolini defined the merger of state and corporate interest as fascism.

With American government turned upside down and power centralized in a behemoth, nationalized bureaucracy, which purports to govern every area of our lives, there is little justice, liberty, or free enterprise.

The continued migration of rights and liberties to an international tribunal to decide how a treaty is enforced strips the last vestiges of Constitutionally-protected freedom from the people and surrenders it to an elite council to determine who lives and who dies.

Most laws are marketed to sound helpful and beneficial. It is often in the application of that law we find it's glaring abuses. I don't want to live in a land that has to "pass a 2,000 page 'law' to find out what's in it" much less assent to laws whose rules haven't even yet been written. Such is the case with ACTA.

The principle of innocent until proven guilty is a sacred right that protects each of us. Without this, none of us are safe. We think things don't matter until they effect us personally. That is our sole determination of justice. We are deluded by a false sense of security.

They just haven't determined you're worth the trouble yet. Make waves and threaten the established order. Then we'll see their version of justice.

I doesn't matter if I think Kim Dotcom's MegaUpload was used to share all my intellectual property illegally. There are already laws in place to enforce my intellectual property rights. I can secure a lawful order in a court.

But to allow international swat team raids by police officers, FBI, or Justice Dept. officials to serve as judge, jury, and executioner and seize private property, domains, websites, bank accounts, cars, houses, cash, assets without a trial and verdict by a jury, and judgment pronounced by the court is the end of all our security. This is "justice" by the power of the gun.

Try to defend yourself in a court of law when all your money and assets are seized by these officers. Yes, I know that this is not the first time this has happened. That's just the point. Each time we enable this through our own silence, we hasten the day for our own destruction.

Yes, but I don't break the law you say. These crooks deserve this. That may be true, but guilt can only be determined in a court of law. Further, what happens when what you do becomes "illegal" or "unauthorized" or "violates" your competitor's interests because he has friends in high places.

It happens every day unless you live under a rock.

Don't give me that line that someone has investigated this and found violations. These are "alleged" violations until determined by a trial.

As a trade hearing officer, I've sat through plenty of legal standards cases where I thought the person was guilty as charged, until I heard the other side.

I've read six hundred pages of allegations that anyone would indict the accused on.

I distinctly remember a case where I was hired as an expert witness for the defense. As I read the allegations that took days to wade through, I swore my client's agent was guilty as sin. But as I began to read the pages from the defense brief, the entire case against the accused crumbled before my eyes.

Guilt or innocence cannot be tried in the court of public opinion or determined by prosecutors or police. Your rights and responsibilities rest on the bedrock of the U.S. Constitution and your right to a trial by jury.

You may choose to surrender your life, liberty, and property to an international star chamber, but I choose to defend mine until I draw my final breath. Liberty is not preserved by governments of men, but by laws written in stone and defended by those whose life depends on it.