To anyone who thinks this was a “mistake” by a third party vendor, or that AT&T has ANY problem with being in the middle of a political agenda: given AT&T’s history with the Bush regime, wiretapping, NSA, etc, AND then taking the subject matter which was censored into consideration, if you can say with a straight face that this was just an overzealous “third-party” and not AT&T… You are a better liar than most.

Yes, they released the censored footage uncensored. But you know what? It was released after the fact, missing its moment of peak emotional impact (when everyone was watching it being sung online). Then AT&T can say “Look, we made good” and try to look like the good guys while dramatically reducing the impact on their good friends, Premier Bush and Co.

Quite brilliant, really.

Some people need to pull their heads out of the sand.

Just because it is not covered under the First Amendment AS WORDED, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t strike at the heart of the First. I am quite sure that something like the Internet had never even been imagined when the First was written. Nor did they envision a situation where the biggest source of censorship is NOT the government, but private corporations that own all of the dissemination channels. Remember, at the time, the government WAS the biggest source of censorship, and The Right we enjoy of Free Speech only matters one bit if we can get our message out to others. And once your blogs are censored as they go across AT&T’s internet pipes, what then?

I mean, come on, people. Wake up. The problem with this is not so much what is going on today, but how far they could reach tomorrow if we don’t say STOP, right here and now. Just imagine how much content would actually get through if anything offensive to anyone was filtered at the (internet) network level.

The roots of the problem are apparent even in this thread. Nearly any idea will have both proponents and opponents. So, it stands to reason that nearly everything can be construed as offensive to SOMEONE. If you filter the offensive content, just what does that leave, exactly?

And that’s not even taking into consideration the rest of the world. How long to you think that free-thinking countries in the rest of the world are going to put up with US censorship of things? I imagine that the solution for them would be to simply isolate the US from the rest of the internet (if we didn’t do it ourselves first).

And the scariest part is that none of this happens overnight. It is one baby step at a time, so slowly that people not paying attention will never even see it, until one day, there is no more free speech, no more content being broadcast anywhere that isn’t sanitized and pre-approved by a few big conglomerates.

If you don’t have a problem with that vision, then please have your head checked by a professional.