They’re baaaack. Like an energizer bunny of mendacious stupidity, SOPA-sponsor Lamar Smith has changed tactics, and is now back to pushing provisions of his internet censorship agenda under the guise of protecting Americans from…wait for it…child pornographers. Yes, the new bogeyman with his online 24/7 surveillance act, H.R. 1981 is ostensibly child pornographers, as if *any* such activity like that is legal, and so needs all of these extra-judicial tools of control to stop it. Seems that “Stop Online Piracy” (SOPA) doesn’t resonate with enough people, so now he is resorting to giving private corporations, in conjunction with the government, wide-ranging arbitrary powers over just about any kind of content on the internet under the rubric of it being “The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011″.

Tracking the private daily behavior of everyone in order to help catch a small number of child criminals is itself the noxious practice of police states. Said an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation: “The data retention mandate in this bill would treat every Internet user like a criminal and threaten the online privacy and free speech rights of every American.” Even more troubling is what the government would need to do in order to access this trove of private information: ask for it.

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In Communist countries, where the ruling class routinely dug up embarrassing information on citizens as a bulwark against dissent, the secret police never dreamed of an information trove as perfect for targeting innocent people as a full Internet history. Phrases I’ve Googled in the course of researching this item include “moral panic about child pornography” and “blackmailing enemies with Internet history.” For most people, it’s easy enough to recall terms you’ve searched that could be taken out of context, and of course there are lots of Americans who do things online that are perfectly legal, but would be embarrassing if made public even with context: medical problems and adult pornography are only the beginning. How clueless do you have to be to mandate the creation of a huge database that includes that sort of information, especially in the age of Anonymous and Wikileaks? How naive do you have to be to give government unfettered access to it? Have the bill’s 25 cosponsors never heard of J. Edgar Hoover?

Unfortunately, this original crappy legislation has been moved through Congress, but what Smith seems to be doing now is working to amend that legislation with a new effort giving many more sweeping powers of oversight and control of content on the web. All in the name of “protecting our children,” of course. There is nothing more pathetic in politics than when people use “our children” as a human shield to ram through some of the most pitiful and self-serving policies around. As if Smith or many of his cohorts give a s**t about America’s “children,” in a country setting new records in child poverty, and where public education, public health, and child care are being drained of any support in the name of maintaining our global military presence and an ever-bloated national security state.

This act was already pushed last year, but it seems Lamar Smith is trying to re-energize this in light of the failure of SOPA, due to the overwhelming opposition against it. This new effort is looking “To amend title 18, United States Code, with respect to child pornography and child exploitation offenses,” making child pornography “double illegal,” I guess, and most everything else we say and do on the internet liable to oversight and censorship. (Lamar is definitely one Mr. Smith who needs to go AWAY from Washington, and as soon as possible.

This whole legislative effort is quite the act of political engineering, in that Smith and his cohorts are framing this in a manner which makes it politically untenable to oppose it. After all, if you are against corporate control of content on the internet, then you must be for child porn! It was bad enough having to engage in arguments with people about the negative impacts of online piracy, as if one was a cheerleader for it, just because one doesn’t abide well with the idea of sweeping arbitrary powers of control over online content by large media corporations, working in cahoots with government. I figure if this tack doesn’t work, they’ll resort to that old chestnut of blaming al Qaeda for digital “threats,”, and start claiming that you must be “for the terrorists” if you don’t support SOPA and PIPA.

What’s really scary about this bill, though, isn’t just the fact that this gives such sweeping power over internet content, but that it requires ISP’s to keep all of that personal and financial information stored for such an extended length of time. Besides the crazy amount of storage space that requires these companies to invest in, it makes every single ISP and web server a honey pot target for financial and identity theft.

So let’s make this perfectly clear everyone. These legislative efforts have NOTHING to do with internet security, property rights, protecting people from child pornography, etc… This is about control, plain and simple. Control over information, and the means and the ability for people “to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers” (Article 19, Universal Declaration of Human Rights). In other words, this is about the very core of power itself, and about who wields preeminent power over society. Information is the fundamental ingredient of power, its primary source and enabler. This is more true than ever in today’s “Information Age.”

So don’t worry, your information will be “stored securely” so noone else can access it! But if they do access it, your ISP will give you “prompt notice” so you can change all your credit card numbers, hide your kids, hide your wife, and hide your husband. This bill has currently cleared its committee, this meaning that the next step is a full vote. This bill needs to be stopped, and if I might go one better, Lamar Smith needs to be stopped, for the good of the internet and YOUR privacy.

This legislation needs to be stopped. Now.