Letter to Duncan Hunter Essay

The Honorable Rep. Duncan Hunter
1870 Cordell Court Suite 206El Cajon, CA 92020

Dear Mr. Hunter,

My name is Andrew Szuberla and I am I high school student at Mount Carmel High School in San Diego, and a future voter in your 52 district. I would like to ask you about the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act, currently being discussed in Congress and the possible ramifications of enacting legislation that many would consider censorship and a blatant disregard for the First Amendment of the Bill of Right from which this country has laid its foundations upon.

I strongly believe that SOPA is an affront upon the very beliefs that we the people of the United States of America hold so dear to our heart, the freedom to have a government which does not monitor your everyday life and   does not try to censor our freedom of speech and expression. In the world we live in today where we are so centered around technology and more importantly, the internet, an attempt to try and limit American’s access to different forms of media is not only in my opinion heinous, but also is an attack upon one of the fastest growing job sectors in America today. Senator Ron Wyden put it best when saying “The at-all-cost approach these bills take to protecting intellectual property sacrifices cyber-security, while restricting free speech and innovation”. When we live in a country so dedicated to protecting the right of its citizens, it is a little boggling to the mind when bills like SOPA and PIPA are introduced and garner such support. It is hard to understand why those who criticized other countries like China and Syria for censoring their citizens with one hand are then in turn censoring their own constituents, the ones who voted them into office, with the other. One of the main goals that both of these bills are trying to obtain is to impede the ability for people to illegally download and share copyrighted material, but both of these bills fail to actually do so. In SOPA, it...