After the vote, lead committee member and (and crusading ACTA opponent) David Martin explained that the document was simply too vague and the sanctions seemed disproportionate. Then he got a little grandiose, as parliamentarians have been known to do: "I'm glad that civil liberties won over," he said.

This isn't technically the end of A.C.T.A. Unlike in the U.S. Congress, where bills must make their way out of committee onto the floor for a formal vote, I.N.T.A. was merely deciding whether or not to recommend the treaty's passage. It'll still go up for a Parliament-wide vote in July. But the committee's decision carries a great deal of weight, and if rejected in that vote, it's curtains.

This prompts us to wonder what an Anon party looks like.

John Lund (Getty Images)

It's starting to feel like someone declared war on Internet piracy earlier this year while we were busy reading Reddit. But while the battle over Internet laws continues, the discussion sparked by anti-piracy legislation earlier this year seems to have disappeared.

The fight now centers on ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement that the European Union signed in January. This still-murky law, most of which was crafted quietly behind closed doors, has potential to threaten those who make the Internet their livelihood. So where are the Internet masses who came out in full force, blocking out websites and amassing in person in protest of the twin anti-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA?

As it turns out, the battle may not be ours. The latest roadblocks to ACTA in Europe likely means most of the anti-ACTA heavy lifting won't happen on this side of the Atlantic, said Andrew Rasiej, an entrepreneur and the chairman of the New York Tech Meetup who was instrumental in organizing protests in New York City against SOPA and PIPA.

A suspension of the law by the European Court of Justice has put the yet-to-be ratified and controversial multi-national agreement on hold until it can be determined whether or not it violates fundamental EU rights.

If ACTA stalls in Europe, it doesn't make sense to protest it here, Mr. Rasiej said in an email. "The battle over ACTA, as a threat to open architecture of the Internet is now being waged in other places, most notably Europe, where parliamentary approval is required for implementation," he said.

But that doesn't mean the Internet bloc can happily go back to its business. If anything, SOPA and PIPA should have been a wake-up call: nerds, the law applies to you too.

Internet activists should be concerned with more than just the challenges of combating piracy while maintaining free expression, or learning how to secure the ever changing digital infrastructure the world has come to rely upon, Mr. Rasiej said. Elected officials still don't seem to “get it” when it comes to making laws that impact technology. While Congress now knows (we hope) that the Internet is not a series of tubes, legislators still have a long way to go. "Politicians don’t know the difference between a server and a waiter," Mr. Rasiej said. "Imagine a future where our senators are explaining ACTA to us, not us explaining ACTA to them."

Even more bothersome than your complete lack of competence in maintaining your own fucking websites and serving the citizens you are supposed to be protecting, is the US federal government’s support of ACTA. You really want to empower copyright holders to demand that users who violate IP rights (with no legal process) have their Internet connections terminated? You really want to allow a country with an oppressive Internet censorship regime to demand under the treaty that an ISP in another country remove site content? Well, we have a critical warning for you, and we suggest you read the next few paragraphs very, very closely.

If ACTA is signed by all participating negotiating countries, you can rest assured that Antisec will bring a fucking mega-uber-awesome war that rain torrential hellfire down on all enemies of free speech, privacy and internet freedom. We will systematically knock all evil corporations and governments off of our internet.

That was the tame portion of the message. The author--or authors--continued, issuing threats loaded with hints of just how bad it could get for those with information stored on the servers they claim to have already compromised:

We are s(h)itting on hundreds of rooted servers getting ready to drop all your mysql dumps, child pr0n and mail spools (to be honest, fucking too much for us to read on our own, so we swap with all criminal underground allies for sex and 0days). Oh wait, what’s that? Your passwords? Addresses? Your precious bank accounts? Even your online dating details?! (yep, We know you're cheating on your…well, we won’t get into that here. Yet.)

A.C.T.A stands for Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. It is an intellectual property protection treaty being negotiated by 13 countries, including the United States. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (E.F.F.) explains A.C.T.A. is cause for concern due to "significant potential concerns for consumers' privacy" as well as "the free flow of information on the Internet." The Consumer.gov (etc.) hackers put a fine point on the problem with A.C.T.A., stating it is "more dangerous and detrimental to our rights than SOPA. ACTA will further spread the contagion of stricter copyright enforcement worldwide, at the expense of our essential liberties and basic freedoms of speech, expression and privacy."

The E.F.F. states one additional concern regarding A.C.T.A. is it will require Internet Service Providers to "identify and remove allegedly infringing material from the Internet." It may be a coincidence that innocuous form-building site Jotform was taken offline Friday, apparently after Jotform host GoDaddy complied with a puzzling Secret Service request to suspend the domain--the sort of action Anonymous and other A.C.T.A. opponents fear could become commonplace if the treaty is fully ratified.

[Consumer.gov, etc.]