I was pleased to see the measured tone of the White House response to the citizen petition about SOPA and PIPA, and yet I found myself profoundly disturbed by something that seems to me to go to the root of the problem in Washington: the failure to correctly diagnose the problem we are trying to solve, but instead to accept, seemingly uncritically, the claims of various interest groups.

‘There are a lot of stories out there which are genuine examples of terrible government overreach and/or the evils of the current copyright system. Megaupload’s story is not one of them. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” is not a universal truth—and sometimes it puts you in the company of pretty crappy friends.’