From something I posted on ThinkProgress. Consider this my response to Lamar Smith's oped "The Truth about SOPA."

SOPA is just a step.

Once a blacklist is in place in the Internet the kinds of sites that it contains would expand - blacklisting will become an extremely simple, attractive policy option for anyone who dislikes any content on the Internet and wants to target it. Its worth repeating that just 15 years ago the United States Congress voted to remove all swear words from the open Internet. If they support that, there is no telling what other kinds of things they would seek to ban.

I have no doubt that if SOPA had been around a couple years ago they would have used it to blacklist Wikileaks when those State Department cables were dumped. I don't agree with the decision that Wikileaks made, but imagine the prospect that people in other countries would have been able to access those cables, once dumped, but Americans would not, and what the consequences of that would have been like.

Is that really the sort of future that we want?

The First Amendment would limit the scope of the blacklist, and I think it protects the content on Think Progress. It wouldn't be the end of the Internet - but it would be the end of the free Internet. What we can and cannot see is going to come down to court decisions regarding what the Constitution does and does not allow them to ban. Where judges think a "compelling state interest" exists.

Of course the proponents of SOPA are already lobbying other countries to create similar systems, so eventually you get a balkanized Internet where different things are blocked in different countries. The UK already has a SOPA style blacklist due to a decision in their courts earlier this year (Google Newzbin).

A big problem that I have with this is that we'll be making technology here in the United States to implement this blacklist, and we'll be exporting that technology to other countries where it will be used to censor content that our Constitution would protect. We would be enlisting our Internet engineering talent to build the tools that foreign governments will use to hide the truth from their people.

I wish ThinkProgress had taken a stand. The United States must send a message to the world that putting blinders up and attempting to hide the truth from people is not the right answer. Doing that is worth the cost of a few pirate sites that can't be shut down. Once you allow for blacklisting, and you accept it, the only difference between one country's blacklist and another country's blacklist is a matter of interpretation. We need to make a stronger case for individual freedom than that.