I’m not really a tech geek, and I get bored with reading the technical details of legislation, so it’s possible I am barking up the wrong tree here, but I doubt it.
The Intended Effect of SOPA
The battle lines are pretty clearly drawn, and everybody I normally align with is on one side. Against SOPA. SOPA, an acronym for a euphemism, is the Stop Online Piracy Act. Against it are all sorts of computer people, and people who value freedom of speech.
For it, you have the music industry, probably the major movie studios, and the U.S. government. The U.S. government hates free speech. Hates, hates, hates.
They came in with cops, clubs and chemical weapons to break up the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, which were violating no laws and posed no threat to public safety. They held Bradley Manning incommunicado for over a year, kept him in jail for two years, and he’s only now getting a trial. You can’t say a fair trial, because he’s getting a military trial, and those are two different things.
The government is just chock full of people who love power. It’s the nature of the game. Hollywood is full of narcissists, Hawaii is full of surfers, and governments are filled with people who would stab their own mother in the back if it would get them a better office.
Powerful people hate free speech. So, they’re trying to end it. They are using the guise of protecting intellectual property, but I doubt if they really care about that.
I have two main reasons for objecting to SOPA. One is that the U.S. government does not own the internet and doesn’t have any right or jurisdiction to tamper with it. It is not contained entirely within the U.S. and not everybody that uses it is a U.S. citizen. Sure, it was originally a project between the U.S. Department of Defense and a couple of Universities, but that’s ancient history. Al Gore’s baby is all grown up now, and moved out of the house a long time ago.
Secondly, the internet is not pouring toxic chemicals into the water or the air. The internet is not trying to get atomic weapons. The internet is not in financial trouble, or even threatening to fire people. So, the government should spend their time worrying about problems that actually affect people’s health and welfare, and keep their big, fat, unwelcome noses out of the internet.
www.gurukalehuru.com 
I don’t discount your bigger points – that powerful people crave more power; the government doesn’t love freedom of speech, etc – but this legislature isn’t that “evil”: it is, definitely, evil, but not to the point where the government is trying to silence us. Instead, this is your run of the mill bought and paid for legislation. The industry lobbyists wrote the bill, and their whores in DC are just doing what they were paid to do. I doubt their purpose was to kill freedom of speech as much as it was to shut down piracy. Of course, every power ends up being abused so I won’t be shocked when this power is wrongly used against us, but the “piracy” thing is the main issue, so far.
However, you can’t expect clueless senators to understand how this legislation will break the Internet: they’re too busy dining with lobbyists who give them their marching orders.
Government being used by big business is nothing new: look up Smedley Butler in Wikipedia.
…and the purpose of the indefinite detention act is to protect Americans from terrorists….
Whatever the intent, these two acts erode America’s freedom to below an acceptable level.