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Obama’s Favorite For Supreme Court Justice Wants to Ban Guns, Free Speech
January 17, 2010, 11:59 am
Filed under: 1984, 1st amendment, 2-party system, 2nd Amendment, 9/11 Truth, Al Gore, anti gun, Barack Obama, brownshirts, bush, climategate, Dictatorship, Dissent, Empire, Fairness Doctrine, Fascism, free specch, George Bush, Global Warming, global warming hoax, government bureaucrat, Gun Control, internet, Internet 2, internet blackout, internet censorship, internet police, john yoo, left right paradigm, nanny state, Neolibs, New World Order, NWO, obama czar, political dissent, provocateur, supreme court, truth movement | Tags:

Obama’s Favorite For Supreme Court Justice Wants to Ban Guns, Free Speech

Steve Watson
Prisonplanet.com
January 15, 2010


Obama’s Advisor Cass Sunstein is one of his top picks for a seat in the Supreme Court

Cass Sunstein, president Obama’s appointee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and the man who outlined a plan for the government to infiltrate “conspiracy groups” in order to undermine them, is in direct line for a promotion to Supreme Court Justice.

Sunstein, already in an advanced position of power in the White House as Regulatory czar, has already called for strict restrictions on gun ownership, an internet “Fairness Doctrine”, and an effective ban on free speech where dissenting opinions to those of the government are expressed.

Suntein’s name was on various shortlists to replace Justice David Souter last year following his retirement, and prior to the appointment of Sonia Sotomayor. Sunstein’s name was also touted for the Supreme Court before Obama even took office in November 2008.

His close personal relationship with Obama should set alarm bells ringing for anyone who values the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, particularly as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, now aged 75, is likely to take retirement soon following illness, and with Justice John Paul Stevens now aged 90.

Sunstein and Obama go way back from their faculty days at the University of Chicago law school and are firm friends. Sunstein worked as an advisor to Obama during his presidential campaign and was drafted into the White House soon after Obama won the election.

As Obama’s “Information Czar”, Sunstein effectively interprets the law for the Executive. Sunstein operates in a similar, but much more elevated, role to that of former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo, who infamously re-interpreted the law to legally sanction torture under the Bush Administration.

As we highlighted in our article yesterday, Sunstein has outlined plans for the government to infiltrate “conspiracy groups”, including the 9/11 Truth Movement, in order to undermine them via postings on chat rooms and social networks, as well as real meetings.

Sunstein has effectively penned the blueprint for a Cointelpro “provocateur” style program to silence what have become the government’s most vociferous and influential critics.

The specifics of the plans must be read in full in order to gauge their extreme nature and the threat Sunstein poses to the freedom in America.

On page 14 of Sunstein’s January 2008 white paper entitled “Conspiracy Theories,” he proposed that “under imaginable conditions” the government “might ban conspiracy theorizing” and could “impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories.”

In effect, Obama’s information czar wants to tax or ban outright, as in make illegal, opinions and ideas that the government doesn’t approve of.

Sunstein’s definition of a “conspiracy theorist” encompasses those who question manmade global warming and, most bizarrely, anyone who believes that sunlight is healthy for their bodies.

Presumably if Sunstein had been in power in the latter middle ages he would have attempted to tax and then ban the work of Galileo Galilei for subscribing to the theory that the Earth was not the centre of the universe and that it actually revolved around the Sun.

When he’s not going after those evil sunlight lovers, Sunstein advocates Internet censorship via enforced and regulated links in news pieces to opposing opinions.

Sunstein himself later retracted that proposal, explaining that it would be “too difficult to regulate [the Internet] in a way that would respond to those concerns”, and admitting that it was “almost certainly unconstitutional.”

Sunstein has also called for the re-writing of the First Amendment, and has even proposed a mandatory celebration of tax day in America.

His views on the Second Amendment have also raised serious concerns. In his book “Radicals in Robes,” he wrote: “[A]lmost all gun control legislation is constitutionally fine.”

Sunstein is on record attacking the Second Amendment. Watch in the following clip as he says “The Supreme Court has never suggested that the Second Amendment protects the individual right to have guns.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flfHZgT-SeI

Given his extreme actions and stated intentions, Cass Sunstein should be forced out of office and barred from practicing law with immediate effect. If president Obama has his way, however, we may very soon see his good buddy Sunstein elevated to the highest judicial position in the country.

NY Post Covers Scumstain: “An Obama Official’s Frightening Book about Curbing Free Speech Online”

Bloggers and news organizations must declare war on Cass Sunstein

Sunstein: BAN Conspiracy Theories Against Global Warming and U.S. Government

 

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Obama Advisor: BAN Conspiracy Theories
January 14, 2010, 5:47 pm
Filed under: 1984, 9/11 Truth, Anti-War, Barack Obama, Big Brother, brownshirts, Censorship, CIA, climate change, climategate, cointelpro, Communism, Concentration Camp, conspiracy theories, corruption, CRU, Dictatorship, Dissent, Empire, end the fed, enemy combatant, Fairness Doctrine, False Flag, Fascism, FBI, FCC, FEMA, free speech, Global Warming, global warming hoax, government bureaucracy, government bureaucrat, government control, government crimes, Hadley CRU, hoover, Internet 2, internet censorship, internet police, JFK, journalism, Martial Law, MK ultra, MLK, nanny state, Nazi, New World Order, NWO, obama, obama czar, obama deception, Oliver North, orwell, Police State, political dissidents, progressive, Protest, provocateur, scandal, Sean Hannity, stasi, stasi tactics, Sunstein, Surveillance, tax, trilateral commission, truth movement, u.s. constutiton, warrantless wiretap, White House, ww1, WW2 | Tags: ,

Obama Advisor: BAN Conspiracy Theories Against U.S. Government
Sunstein: Taxation and censorship of dissenting opinions “will have a place” under thought police program advocated in 2008 white paper

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
January 14, 2010

The controversy surrounding White House information czar and Harvard Professor Cass Sunstein’s blueprint for the government to infiltrate political activist groups has deepened, with the revelation that in the same 2008 dossier he also called for the government to tax or even ban outright political opinions of which it disapproved.

Sunstein was appointed by President Obama to head up the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, an agency within the Executive Office of the President.

On page 14 of Sunstein’s January 2008 white paper entitled “Conspiracy Theories,” the man who is now Obama’s head of information technology in the White House proposed that each of the following measures “will have a place under imaginable conditions” according to the strategy detailed in the essay.

    1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing.

    2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories.

That’s right, Obama’s information czar wants to tax or ban outright, as in make illegal, political opinions that the government doesn’t approve of. To where would this be extended? A tax or a shut down order on newspapers that print stories critical of our illustrious leaders?

And what does Sunstein define as “conspiracy theories” that should potentially be taxed or outlawed by the government? Opinions held by the majority of Americans, no less.

The notion that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in killing JFK, a view shared by the vast majority of Americans in every major poll over the last ten years, is an example of a “conspiracy theory” that the federal government should consider censoring, according to Sunstein.

A 1998 CBS poll found that just 10 per cent of Americans believed that Oswald acted alone, so apparently the other 90 per cent of Americans could be committing some form of thought crime by thinking otherwise under Sunstein’s definition.

Sunstein also cites the belief that “global warming is a deliberate fraud” as another marginal conspiracy theory to be countered by government action. In reality, the majority of Americans now believe that the man-made explanation of global warming is not true, and that global warming is natural, according to the latest polls.

But Sunstein saves his most ludicrous example until last. On page 5 he characterizes as “false and dangerous” the idea that exposure to sunlight is healthy, despite the fact that top medical experts agree prolonged exposure to sunlight reduces the risk of developing certain cancers.

To claim that encouraging people to get out in the sun is to peddle a dangerous conspiracy theory is like saying that promoting the breathing of fresh air is also a thought crime. One can only presume that Sunstein is deliberately framing the debate by going to such absurd extremes so as to make any belief whatsoever into a conspiracy theory unless it’s specifically approved by the kind of government thought police system he is pushing for.

Despite highlighting the fact that repressive societies go hand in hand with an increase in “conspiracy theories,” Sunstein’s ’solution’ to stamp out such thought crimes is to ban free speech, fulfilling the precise characteristic of the “repressive society” he warns against elsewhere in the paper.

“We could imagine circumstances in which a conspiracy theory became so pervasive, and so dangerous, that censorship would be thinkable,” he writes on page 20. Remember that Sunstein is not just talking about censoring Holocaust denial or anything that’s even debatable in the context of free speech, he’s talking about widely accepted beliefs shared by the majority of Americans but ones viewed as distasteful by the government, which would seek to either marginalize by means of taxation or outright censor such views.

No surprise therefore that Sunstein has called for re-writing the First Amendment as well as advocating Internet censorship and even proposing that Americans should celebrate tax day and be thankful that the state takes a huge chunk of their income.

The government has made it clear that growing suspicion towards authority is a direct threat to their political agenda and indeed Sunstein admits this on page 3 of his paper.

That is why they are now engaging in full on information warfare in an effort to undermine, disrupt and eventually outlaw organized peaceful resistance to their growing tyranny.

 

Sunstein’s Paper Provides More Evidence COLINTELPRO Still Operational

Kurt Nimmo
Prison Planet.com
January 14, 2009

Cass Sunstein’s white paper, entitled “Conspiracy Theories,” is an exclamation point in the latest chapter of a long history of government tyranny against citizens who organize in opposition to the government. Sunstein argues that individuals and groups deviating from the official government narrative on a number of political issues and events are a national security threat. The administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs formulates “a plan for the government to infiltrate conspiracy groups in order to undermine them via postings on chat rooms and social networks, as well as real meetings, according to a recently uncovered article Sunstein wrote for the Journal of Political Philosophy,” writes Paul Joseph Watson.


FDR, an icon for many liberals, sent the FBI after citizens who opposed his war policies.

Sunstein’s plan is a reformulation of a long-standing effort to subvert the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights. Concerted government attacks against organized political opposition began soon after the founding of the republic — specifically with the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798 by the Federalists — but have gained critical momentum in the modern era.

During the First World War, the government created the Bureau of Investigation, predecessor to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and appointed J. Edgar Hoover as its head. Hoover’s Bureau of Investigation, with the assistance of police and the military — described as a “citizens auxiliary” — conducted mass raids against the anti-war movement of the time, according to documents released by the Church Committee in the 1970s. The Bureau, specifically designed as a national political police force, “rounded up some 50,000 men without warrants of sufficient probable cause for arrest” for the crime of opposing the First World War.

In 1920, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer conducted a massive program in 33 cities and rounded up over 10,000 people. The Church Committee report (p.384) talks of “the abuses of due process of law incident to the raids.” According to Robert Preston (Aliens And Dissenters), the Palmer Raids involved “indiscriminate arrests of the innocent with the guilty, unlawful seizures by federal detectives” and other violations of constitutional rights. The Church Committee (p.385) “found federal agents guilty of using third-degree tortures, making illegal searches and arrests, using agents provocateurs.” Palmer and Hoover found no evidence of a proposed Bolshevik revolution as they claimed but a large number of the rounded up suspects continued to be held without trial.

The Second World War brought a new wave of government terrorism against political opponents. President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a 1940 issued a memorandum giving the FBI the power to use warrantless wiretaps against suspected subversives, that is to say activists opposed to U.S. involvement in the war. FDR not only unleashed the FBI on activists, but concerned citizens as well. After giving a speech on national defense in 1940, FDR had his press secretary, Stephen Early, send Hoover the names of 128 people who had sent telegrams to the White House criticizing the address. “The President thought you might like to look them over,” Early’s note instructed Hoover.

Following the Second World War, the government engineered the immensely profitable (for the military-industrial complex) Cold War and the attendant Red Scare. In 1956, the FBI established COINTELPRO, short for Counter Intelligence Program. COINTELPRO was ostensibly manufactured to counter communist subversion, but as a numerous documents reveal the program focused almost exclusively on domestic opposition to government policies.

The Church Committee explains that COINTELPRO “had no conceivable rational relationship to either national security or violent activity. The unexpressed major premise of much of COINTELPRO is that the Bureau has a role in maintaining the existing social order, and that its efforts should be aimed toward combating those who threaten that order.”

“This is a rough, tough, dirty business, and dangerous,” former Assistant to Director Hoover, William C. Sullivan, told the Church Committee. “No holds were barred.”

This “rough, tough, dirty business” included infiltration of political groups, psychological warfare, legal harassment, and extralegal force and violence. “The FBI and police threatened, instigated and conducted break-ins, vandalism, assaults, and beatings. The object was to frighten dissidents and disrupt their movements,” write Mike Cassidy and Will Miller. “They used secret and systematic methods of fraud and force, far beyond mere surveillance, to sabotage constitutionally protected political activity. The purpose of the program was, in FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s own words, to ‘expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit and otherwise neutralize’ specific groups and individuals.”

After the Church Committee exposed COINTELPRO, the government claimed it had dismantled the program. However, in the 1980s, the Reagan administration legalized the tactics by signing Executive Order 12333.

“There is every reason to believe that even what was not legalized is still going on as well. Lest we forget, Lt. Col. Oliver North funded and orchestrated from the White House basement break-ins and other ‘dirty tricks’ to defeat congressional critics of U.S. policy in Central America and to neutralize grassroots protest. Special Prosecutor Walsh found evidence that North and Richard Secord (architect of the 1960s covert actions in Cambodia) used Iran-Contra funds to harass the Christic Institute, a church-funded public interest group specializing in exposing government misconduct,” Cassidy and Miller continue.

In addition, North worked with FEMA to develop contingency plans for suspending the Constitution, establishing martial law, and holding political dissidents in concentration camps. Since the false flag attacks of September 11, 2001, the government has worked incessantly to fine tune plans to impose martial law. It has also worked to federalize and militarized law enforcement around the country.

Brian Glick (War at Home) argues that COINTELPRO is a permanent feature of the government. “The record of the past 50 years reveals a pattern of continuous domestic covert action,” Glick wrote in the 1990s. “Its use has been documented in each of the last nine administrations, Democratic as well as Republican. FBI testimony shows ‘COINTELPRO tactics’ already in full swing during the presidencies of Democrats Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman. COINTELPRO itself, while initiated under Eisenhower, grew from one program to six under the Democratic administrations of Kennedy and Johnson… After COINTELPRO was exposed [by the Church Committee], similar programs continued under other names during the Carter years as well as under Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. They have outlived J. Edgar Hoover and remained in place under all of his successors.”

Sunstein’s call for authoritarian action against government critics — including outright censorship in addition to the established tactics mentioned above — reveals that COINTELPRO has indeed outlived Hoover.

“Some conspiracy theories create serious risks. They do not merely undermine democratic debate; in extreme cases, they create or fuel violence,” writes Sunstein. “Even if only a small fraction of adherents to a particular conspiracy theory act on the basis of their beliefs, that small fraction may be enough to cause serious harms.”

Sunstein’s analysis dovetails with that of the Department of Homeland Security. In its now infamous report on “rightwing extremism,” the DHS insists members of the constitutionalist movement (including Libertarians and advocates of the Second Amendment) are not only violent but also virulent racists (a conclusion provided pre-packaged by the ADL and the SPLC).

If realized, Cass Sunstein’s call for outright censorship and the absurd proposal to impose fines and taxes on people who hold political views contrary to those of our rulers will naturally result in a redoubling of political activity on the part of the truth movement (specifically mentioned as “kooks” by Sunstein) and Libertarians and Constitutionalists.

As history repeatedly demonstrates, when faced with a strong and determined political opposition government invariably turns to more brutal and violent methods to enforce its will. Our rulers understand this and that is why they are hurriedly finishing their high-tech police and surveillance grid.

Obama Regulation Czar Advocated Removing People’s Organs Without Explicit Consent

 

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Global treaty could ban file-sharers from Internet after ‘three strikes’
November 14, 2009, 2:34 pm
Filed under: 1984, ACTA, Big Brother, Censorship, Control Grid, copyright, Darpa, Dictatorship, Echelon, Empire, european union, Fascism, file sharing, global treaty, government control, government regulations, international treaty, internet, Internet 2, internet blackout, internet censorship, Internet Filtering, internet manipulation, internet police, internet regulations, manipulation, nanny state, orwell, Police State, Surveillance, world treaty

Global treaty could ban file-sharers from Internet after ‘three strikes’
File-sharers could be jailed under proposed ACTA provisions

Raw Story
November 4, 2009

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMIUwxEgVpY

Leaked details of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement being negotiated in secret by most of the world’s largest economies suggest Internet file-sharers could be blocked from accessing the Internet if they are repeatedly accused of sharing copyrighted material, say media and digital-rights watchdogs.

And the worst-case scenario could see popular Web sites like YouTube and Flickr shut down because of a provision in the treaty that would force them to monitor everything uploaded to the site for copyright violations.

Internet law professor Michael Geist published details of “leaked” portions of the discussions on ACTA on his blog Tuesday, as a new round of ACTA negotiations began in Seoul, South Korea. The US, along with all the countries of the European Union as well as Japan, Canada, Australia and a handful of other countries, are involved in the negotiations.

“The provisions would pave the way for a globalized three-strikes and you’re out system,” Geist blogged Wednesday, referring to a proposal from copyright holders to have Internet service providers cut off service to anyone accused at least three times of illegally sharing copyrighted material.

DARPA Plans for Interplanetary Internet

 

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Internet Moves Towards Global Government
October 14, 2009, 2:31 pm
Filed under: 1st amendment, Communism, Dictatorship, Empire, european union, Fascism, free speech, global government, Globalism, internet, Internet 2, internet blackout, internet censorship, internet manipulation, Nazi, New World Order, NWO, socialism, US Constitution, world government | Tags: ,

Internet moves towards Global Government

EU Observer
October 1, 2009

The body responsible for managing the development of the internet, Icann, has cut its umbilical cord to the US government, a move the European Union has been demanding for four years.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which oversees domain names – the .com, .eu, .org and so on at the end of a web address – as of 30 September will no longer be subject to review by the US Department of Commerce.

Instead, independent review panels appointed by Icann Governmental Advisory Committee (Gac) and Icann itself with the involvement of governments around the world. will perform this task.

Since 2005, the EU has been calling for reform of the governance of the internet, saying that the internet is a global resource and should not be tied to one national government – a position echoed by many other countries and a number of companies.

Read Full Article Here

 

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Google-Earth To Track People In Real-Time
October 3, 2009, 3:49 pm
Filed under: 1984, augmented earth, Big Brother, biometrics, cameras, cell phone, cell phones, CNN, Control Grid, Darpa, data mining, Dictatorship, Echelon, Empire, global elite, global government, Globalism, google, google earth, government control, government takeover, gps, internet, Internet 2, internet 3, internet of things, internet police, IOT, Media, microchip, microchips, Microsoft, nanny state, New World Order, NWO, Oppression, orwell, Pentagon, Police State, RFID, RFID bracelet, Science and technology, south korea, Spy, Surveillance, surveillance cameras, Total Information Awareness, traffic cameras, uav, Verichip | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Editor’s Note: This could be the start of the New World Order MATRIX, where every ‘thing’ in the world can be located and tracked on the internet
Augmented Google-Earth Tracks Real-Time People, Cars, Weather

Cryptogon
September 30, 2009

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGe2DGe_FFQ

The surveillance side of this is the chickenfeed. There’s something far more sinister than the simple surveillance… an angle we haven’t heard about yet.

Tice never did tell his story to Congress about this different aspect of the program.

Well, my guess is that it has something to do with providing surveillance data for this SEAS World Sim thing, and that individual Americans are being watched and potentially targeted with it. Tice’s background seems to involve a lot of traditional electronic warfare, radar and ELINT stuff. Maybe Tice’s deal involved the collection of the mobile phone GPS and/or triangulation data which would provide realtime spacial/geographic data to the SEAS system. In other words, SEAS sees you. They could bring up a map of a city and plot your path based on the information that your phone is exchanging with the mobile network.

—Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation

Via: Popular Science:

Researchers from Georgia Tech have devised methods to take real-time, real-world information and layer it onto Google Earth, adding dynamic information to the previously sterile Googlescape.

They use live video feeds (sometimes from many angles) to find the position and motion of various objects, which they then combine with behavioral simulations to produce real-time animations for Google Earth or Microsoft Virtual Earth.

They use motion capture data to help their animated humans move realistically, and were able to extrapolate cars’ motion throughout an entire stretch of road from just a few spotty camera angles.

From their video of an augmented virtual Earth, you can see if the pickup soccer game in the park is short a player, how traffic is on the highway, and how fast the wind is blowing the clouds across the sky.

Up next, they say they want to add weather, birds, and motion in rivers.

 

Ubiquitous Computing: Big Brother’s All-Seeing Eye

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I3T_kLCBAw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKZm34jsNHY

DARPA building search engine for video surveillance footage

 

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Chertoff: 9/11 Truth Is Akin To Holocaust Denial
September 21, 2009, 2:18 pm
Filed under: 9/11, 9/11 commission report, 9/11 Explosions, 9/11 Mysteries, 9/11 Truth, C-Span, DHS, domestic terror, domestic terrorism, False Flag, FBI, Homeland Security, inside job, internet, Internet 2, internet police, michael chertoff, nano thermite, New York, Official 9/11 Story, patriot movement, Pentagon, State Sponsored Terrorism, thermite, Truth Action, truth movement, twin towers, War On Terror, World Trade Center

Chertoff: 9/11 Truth Is Akin To Holocaust Denial

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT5JZVUKPrs

 

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NBC’s Meet The Press Attacks Internet & Bloggers
September 11, 2009, 12:18 pm
Filed under: 1984, 1st amendment, 9/11, 9/11 Truth, Barack Obama, Big Brother, Bloggers, DHS, Dictatorship, domestic terror, domestic terrorism, Empire, False Flag, free press, free speech, giuliani, Ground Zero, Homeland Security, inside job, internet, Internet 2, internet blackout, internet censorship, Media, media bias, media deception, Media Fear, Media Manipulation, meet the press, MSNBC, NBC, net neutrality, obama, orwell, Pentagon, Propaganda, Rudy Giuliani, State Sponsored Terrorism, Surveillance, thought crimes, thought criminal, truth movement, twin towers, US Constitution, World Trade Center

NBC’s Meet The Press Attacks Internet & Bloggers

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28ohz-zfM6c

 

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Bill would give president emergency control of Internet
September 6, 2009, 4:32 am
Filed under: 1st amendment, 9/11, Barack Obama, catastrophic event, Congress, Dictatorship, domestic terror, domestic terrorism, Empire, Fascism, free speech, George Bush, globalist elite, Hitler, House, Internet 2, internet blackout, internet censorship, internet police, internet regulations, internet security alliance, jay rockefeller, Martial Law, Nazi, Neolibs, New World Order, NWO, obama, obama deception, rockefeller, Senate, socialism, stasi, stasi tactics, US Constitution, War On Terror, White House | Tags: , ,

Bill would give president emergency control of Internet

Declan McCullagh
CNet News
August 28, 2009

Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.

They’re not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.

The new version would allow the president to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” relating to “non-governmental” computer networks and do what’s necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for “cybersecurity professionals,” and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.

“I think the redraft, while improved, remains troubling due to its vagueness,” said Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, which counts representatives of Verizon, Verisign, Nortel, and Carnegie Mellon University on its board. “It is unclear what authority Sen. Rockefeller thinks is necessary over the private sector. Unless this is clarified, we cannot properly analyze, let alone support the bill.”

Representatives of other large Internet and telecommunications companies expressed concerns about the bill in a teleconference with Rockefeller’s aides this week, but were not immediately available for interviews on Thursday.

A spokesman for Rockefeller also declined to comment on the record Thursday, saying that many people were unavailable because of the summer recess. A Senate source familiar with the bill compared the president’s power to take control of portions of the Internet to what President Bush did when grounding all aircraft on Sept. 11, 2001. The source said that one primary concern was the electrical grid, and what would happen if it were attacked from a broadband connection.

Read Full Article Here

 

Jay Rockefeller: Internet should have never existed

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ct9xzXUQLuY

‘Thought Crime’ bill will allow government to prosecute people involved in ‘hate speech’ on the internet.

 

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Australia To Enforce Mandatory Internet Censorship
November 5, 2008, 3:54 pm
Filed under: 1984, 1st amendment, 9/11 Truth, Airport Security, Anti-War, Australia, Big Brother, biometrics, Bloggers, Britain, California, cashless society, cell phones, Censorship, China, Cold War, Congress, Control Grid, copyright, Darpa, data mining, DHS, Dictatorship, Dissent, Echelon, Empire, Europe, european union, facebook, False Flag, free speech, George Bush, Germany, global elite, global government, Globalism, google, gps, Homeland Security, inside job, internet, Internet 2, internet blackout, internet censorship, Internet Filtering, internet of things, internet police, IOT, IP, ISP, John McCain, john roberts, korea, london, Media, michael chertoff, microchip, microchips, Microsoft, nanny state, New World Order, New York, Oppression, orwell, Pentagon, Police State, Propaganda, RFID, RIAA, Science and technology, south korea, Spy, Surveillance, Tony Blair, uav, United Kingdom, US Constitution, Verichip, War On Terror, White House | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Australia To Enforce Mandatory Chinese-Style Internet Censorship
Government to block “controversial” websites with universal national filter

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
October 29, 2008

The Australian government is set to impose Chinese-style Internet censorship by enforcing a universal national filter that will block websites deemed “controversial,” as part of a wider agenda to regulate the Internet according to free speech advocates.

A provision whereby Internet users could opt out of the filter by contacting their ISP has been stripped from the legislation, meaning the filter will be universal and mandatory.

The System Administrators Guild of Australia and Electronic Frontiers Australia have attacked the proposal, saying it will restrict web access, raise prices and slow internet traffic speeds.

The plan was first created as a way to combat child pornography and adult content, but could be extended to include controversial websites on euthanasia or anorexia,” reports the Australian Herald Sun.

Communications minister Stephen Conroy revealed the mandatory censorship to the Senate estimates committee as the Global Network Initiative, bringing together leading companies, human rights organisations, academics and investors, committed the technology firms to “protect the freedom of expression and privacy rights of their users”. (Complete black is white, up is down, double talk).

Human Rights Watch has condemned internet censorship, and argued to the US Senate “there is a real danger of a Virtual Curtain dividing the internet, much as the Iron Curtain did during the Cold War, because some governments fear the potential of the internet, (and) want to control it.”

Speaking from personal experience, not only are “controversial” websites blocked in China, meaning any website that is critical of the state, but every website the user attempts to visit first has to pass through the “great firewall,” causing the browser to hang and delay while it is checked against a government blacklist.

This causes excruciating delays, and the user experience is akin to being on a bad dial-up connection in the mid 1990’s. Even in the center of Shanghai with a fixed ethernet connection, the user experience is barely tolerable.

Not only are websites in China blocked, but e mails too are scanned for “controversial” words and blocked from being sent if they contain phrases related to politics or obscenities.

Googling for information on certain topics is also heavily restricted. While in China I tried to google “Bush Taiwan,” which resulted in Google.com ceasing to be accessible and my Internet connection was immediately terminated thereafter.

The Australian government will no doubt insist that their filter is in our best interests and is only designed to block child pornography, snuff films and other horrors, yet the system is completely pointless because it will not affect file sharing networks, which is the medium through which the vast majority of such material is distributed.

If we allow Australia to become the first “free” nation to impose Internet censorship, the snowball effect will only accelerate – the U.S. and the UK are next.

Indeed, Prime Minister Tony Blair called for Internet censorship last year.

In April 2007, Time magazine reported that researchers funded by the federal government want to shut down the internet and start over, citing the fact that at the moment there are loopholes in the system whereby users cannot be tracked and traced all the time. The projects echo moves we have previously reported on to clamp down on internet neutrality and even to designate a new form of the internet known as Internet 2.

Moves to regulate the web have increased over the last two years.

– In a display of bi-partisanship, there have been calls for all out mandatory ISP snooping on all US citizens by both Democrats and Republicans alike.

– In December 2006, Republican Senator John McCain tabled a proposal to introduce legislation that would fine blogs up to $300,000 for offensive statements, photos and videos posted by visitors on comment boards. It is well known that McCain has a distaste for his blogosphere critics, causing a definite conflict of interest where any proposal to restrict blogs on his part is concerned.

– During an appearance with his wife Barbara on Fox News in November 2006, George Bush senior slammed Internet bloggers for creating an “adversarial and ugly climate.”

– The White House’s own de-classified strategy for “winning the war on terror” targets Internet conspiracy theories as a recruiting ground for terrorists and threatens to “diminish” their influence.

– The Pentagon has also announced its effort to infiltrate the Internet and propagandize for the war on terror.

– In an October 2006 speech, Homeland Security director Michael Chertoff identified the web as a “terror training camp,” through which “disaffected people living in the United States” are developing “radical ideologies and potentially violent skills.” His solution is “intelligence fusion centers,” staffed by Homeland Security personnel which will are already in operation.

– The U.S. Government wants to force bloggers and online grassroots activists to register and regularly report their activities to Congress. Criminal charges including a possible jail term of up to one year could be the punishment for non-compliance.

– A landmark November 2006 legal case on behalf of the Recording Industry Association of America and other global trade organizations sought to criminalize all Internet file sharing of any kind as copyright infringement, effectively shutting down the world wide web – and their argument was supported by the U.S. government.

– A landmark legal ruling in Sydney goes further than ever before in setting the trap door for the destruction of the Internet as we know it and the end of alternative news websites and blogs by creating the precedent that simply linking to other websites is breach of copyright and piracy.

– The European Union, led by former Stalinist John Reid, has also vowed to shut down “terrorists” who use the Internet to spread propaganda.

– The EU data retention bill, passed after much controversy and implemented in 2007, obliges telephone operators and internet service providers to store information on who called who and who emailed who for at least six months. Under this law, investigators in any EU country, and most bizarrely even in the US, can access EU citizens’ data on phone calls, sms’, emails and instant messaging services.

– The EU also proposed legislation that would prevent users from uploading any form of video without a license.

– The US government is also funding research into social networking sites and how to gather and store personal data published on them, according to the New Scientist magazine. “At the same time, US lawmakers are attempting to force the social networking sites themselves to control the amount and kind of information that people, particularly children, can put on the sites.”

Governments are furious that their ceaseless lies are being exposed in real time on the World Wide Web and have resolved to stifle, regulate and control what truly is the last outpost of real free speech in the world. Internet censorship is perhaps the most pertinent issue that freedom advocates should rally to combat over the course of the next few years, lest we allow a cyber-gag to be placed over our mouths and say goodbye to our last medium of free and open communication.

 

DARPA building search engine for video surveillance footage

Ars Technica
October 21, 2008

The government agency that birthed the Internet is developing a sophisticated search engine for video, and when complete will allow intelligence analysts to sift through live footage from spy drones, as well as thousands of hours worth of archived recordings, in order to spot a variety of selected events or behaviors. In the past month, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced nearly $20 million in total contracts for private firms to begin developing the system, which is slated to take until at least 2011 to complete.

According to a prospectus written in March but released only this month, the Video and Image Retrieval and Analysis Tool (VIRAT) will enable intel analysts to “rapidly find video content of interest from archives and provide alerts to the analyst of events of interest during live operations,” taking both conventional video and footage from infrared scanners as input. The VIRAT project is an effort to cope with a growing data glut that has taxed intelligence resources because of the need to have trained human personnel perform time- and labor-intensive review of recorded video.

The DARPA overview emphasizes that VIRAT will not be designed with “face recognition, gait recognition, human identification, or any form of biometrics” in mind. Rather, the system will search for classes of activities or events. A suggested partial list in the prospectus includes digging, loitering, exploding, shooting, smoking, following, shaking hand, exchanging objects, crawling under a car, breaking a window, and evading a checkpoint. As new sample clips are fed into the system, it will need to recognize the signature features of new classes of search terms.

Read Full Article Here

 

EU Set to Move ‘Internet of Things’ Closer to Reality

Daniel Taylor
Old-Thinker News
November 2, 2008

If the world-wide trend continues, ‘Web 3.0′ will be tightly monitored, and will become an unprecedented tool for surveillance. The “Internet of Things”, a digital representation of real world objects and people tagged with RFID chips, and increased censorship are two main themes for the future of the web.

The future of the internet, according to author and “web critic” Andrew Keen, will be monitored by “gatekeepers” to verify the accuracy of information posted on the web. The “Outlook 2009″ report from the November-December issue of The Futurist reports that,

“Internet entrepreneur Andrew Keen believes that the anonymity of today’s internet 2.0 will give way to a more open internet 3.0 in which third party gatekeepers monitor the information posted on Web sites to verify its accuracy.”

Keen stated during his early 2008 interview withThe Futurist that the internet, in its current form, has undermined mainline media and empowered untrustworthy “amateurs”, two trends that he wants reversed. “Rather than the empowerment of the amateur, Web 3.0 will show the resurgence of the professional,” states Keen.

Australia has now joined China in implementing mandatory internet censorship, furthering the trend towards a locked down and monitored web.

The Internet of Things

Now, the European Union has announced that it will pursue the main component of Web 3.0, the Internet of Things (IoT).

According to Viviane Reding, Commissioner for Information Society and Media for the EU, “The Internet of the future will radically change our society.” Ultimately, the EU is aiming to “lead the way” in the transformation to Web 3.0.

Reporting on the European Union’s pursuit of the IoT, iBLS reports,

“New technology applications will need ubiquitous Internet coverage. The Internet of Things means that wireless interaction between machines, vehicles, appliances, sensors and many other devices will take place using the Internet. It already makes electronic travel cards possible, and will allow mobile devices to exchange information to pay for things or get information from billboards (or streetlights).”

The Internet of Things consists of objects that are ‘tagged’ with Radio Frequency Identification Chips (RFID) that communicate their position, history, and other information to an RFID reader or wireless network. Most, if not all major computer companies and technology developers (HP, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, etc.) are putting large amounts of time and money into the Internet of Things.

Cisco and Sun Microsystems have founded an alliance to promote the Internet of Things and further its implementation.

South Korea is at the forefront in implementing ubiquitous technology and the Internet of Things. An entire city, New Songdo, is being built in South Korea that fully utilizes the technology. Ubiquitous computing proponents in the United States admit that while a large portion of the technology is being developed in the U.S., it is being tested in South Korea where there are less traditional, ethical and social blockades to prevent its acceptance and use. As the New York Times reports

“Much of this technology was developed in U.S. research labs, but there are fewer social and regulatory obstacles to implementing them in Korea,” said Mr. Townsend [a research director at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California], who consulted on Seoul’s own U-city plan, known as Digital Media City. ‘There is an historical expectation of less privacy. Korea is willing to put off the hard questions to take the early lead and set standards.’”

An April 2008 report from the National Intelligence Council discussed the Internet of Things and its possible implications.

A timeline shown in the April 2008 NIC report

The report outlines uses for the technology:

“Sensor networks need not be connected to the Internet and indeed often reside in remote sites, vehicles, and buildings having no Internet connection. Smart dust is a term that some have used to express a vision of tiny, wireless-connected sensors; more recently, others use the term to describe any of several technologies that range from the size of a pack of gum to a pack of cigarettes, and that are widely available to system developers.

Ubiquitous positioning describes technologies for locating objects that may reside anywhere, including indoors and underground locations where satellite signals may be unavailable or otherwise inadequate.

Biometrics enables technology to recognize people and other living things, rather than inanimate objects. Connected everyday objects could recognize authorized users by means of fingerprint, voiceprint, iris scan, or other biometric technology.”

These trends towards internet censorship and the internet of things are undoubtedly going to continue, but restricting your free speech and violating your privacy will be harder with your outspoken resistance.

DARPA spies on analyst brains; hopes to offload image analysis to computers
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20..-image-analysis-to-computers.html

Security services want personal data from sites like Facebook
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/oct/15/terrorism-security

UK.gov says: Regulate the internet
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/20/government_internet_regulation/

 

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Fairness Doctrine May Give Web Control to Government
August 13, 2008, 4:01 pm
Filed under: 1984, 1st amendment, 2008 Election, Big Brother, Bloggers, Censorship, comcast, Congress, corporations, corporatism, Dictatorship, Empire, facism, FCC, free speech, google, house senate, internet, Internet 2, internet blackout, Internet Filtering, internet police, Media, Nazi, net neutrality, poll, Surveillance, US Constitution, Washington D.C. | Tags: ,

Fairness Doctrine Might Give Control of Web Content to the Government

Business and Media Institute
August 12, 2008

There’s a huge concern among conservative talk radio hosts that reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine would all-but destroy the industry due to equal time constraints. But speech limits might not stop at radio. They could even be extended to include the Internet and “government dictating content policy.”

FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell raised that as a possibility after talking with bloggers at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. McDowell spoke about a recent FCC vote to bar Comcast from engaging in certain Internet practices – expanding the federal agency’s oversight of Internet networks.

The commissioner, a 2006 President Bush appointee, told the Business & Media Institute the Fairness Doctrine could be intertwined with the net neutrality battle. The result might end with the government regulating content on the Web, he warned. McDowell, who was against reprimanding Comcast, said the net neutrality effort could win the support of “a few isolated conservatives” who may not fully realize the long-term effects of government regulation.

“I think the fear is that somehow large corporations will censor their content, their points of view, right,” McDowell said. “I think the bigger concern for them should be if you have government dictating content policy, which by the way would have a big First Amendment problem.”

“Then, whoever is in charge of government is going to determine what is fair, under a so-called ‘Fairness Doctrine,’ which won’t be called that – it’ll be called something else,” McDowell said. “So, will Web sites, will bloggers have to give equal time or equal space on their Web site to opposing views rather than letting the marketplace of ideas determine that?”

McDowell told BMI the Fairness Doctrine isn’t currently on the FCC’s radar. But a new administration and Congress elected in 2008 might renew Fairness Doctrine efforts, but under another name.

“The Fairness Doctrine has not been raised at the FCC, but the importance of this election is in part – has something to do with that,” McDowell said. “So you know, this election, if it goes one way, we could see a re-imposition of the Fairness Doctrine. There is a discussion of it in Congress. I think it won’t be called the Fairness Doctrine by folks who are promoting it. I think it will be called something else and I think it’ll be intertwined into the net neutrality debate.”

A recent study by the Media Research Center’s Culture & Media Institute argues that the three main points in support of the Fairness Doctrine – scarcity of the media, corporate censorship of liberal viewpoints, and public interest – are myths.

 

Some Web Firms Say They Track Behavior Without Explicit Consent

Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post
August 12, 2008

Several Internet and broadband companies have acknowledged using targeted-advertising technology without explicitly informing customers, according to letters released yesterday by the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

And Google, the leading online advertiser, stated that it has begun using Internet tracking technology that enables it to more precisely follow Web-surfing behavior across affiliated sites.

The revelations came in response to a bipartisan inquiry of how more than 30 Internet companies might have gathered data to target customers. Some privacy advocates and lawmakers said the disclosures help build a case for an overarching online-privacy law.

Read Full Article Here


Law Professor: There’s going to be an Internet 9/11
August 10, 2008, 1:07 pm
Filed under: 4th amendment, 9/11, 9/11 Truth, al-qaeda, civil liberties, civil rights, copyright, Department of justice, Dictator, DoD, Empire, False Flag, hackers, Hegelian Dialectic, Homeland Security, internet, Internet 2, michael chertoff, Nuke, Patriot Act, Problem Reaction Solution, Ron Paul, State Sponsored Terrorism, US Constitution, War On Terror | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Law Professor: Counter Terrorism Czar Told Me There Is Going To Be An i-9/11 And An i-Patriot Act

Steve Watson
Infowars.net
August 5, 2008

Amazing revelations have emerged concerning already existing government plans to overhaul the way the internet functions in order to apply much greater restrictions and control over the web.

Lawrence Lessig, a respected Law Professor from Stanford University told an audience at this years Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Half Moon Bay, California, that “There’s going to be an i-9/11 event” which will act as a catalyst for a radical reworking of the law pertaining to the internet.

Lessig also revealed that he had learned, during a dinner with former government Counter Terrorism Czar Richard Clarke, that there is already in existence a cyber equivalent of the Patriot Act, an “i-Patriot Act” if you will, and that the Justice Department is waiting for a cyber terrorism event in order to implement its provisions.

During a group panel segment titled “2018: Life on the Net”, Lessig stated:

There’s going to be an i-9/11 event. Which doesn’t necessarily mean an Al Qaeda attack, it means an event where the instability or the insecurity of the internet becomes manifest during a malicious event which then inspires the government into a response. You’ve got to remember that after 9/11 the government drew up the Patriot Act within 20 days and it was passed.

The Patriot Act is huge and I remember someone asking a Justice Department official how did they write such a large statute so quickly, and of course the answer was that it has been sitting in the drawers of the Justice Department for the last 20 years waiting for the event where they would pull it out.

Of course, the Patriot Act is filled with all sorts of insanity about changing the way civil rights are protected, or not protected in this instance. So I was having dinner with Richard Clarke and I asked him if there is an equivalent, is there an i-Patriot Act just sitting waiting for some substantial event as an excuse to radically change the way the internet works. He said “of course there is”.

Watch Lessig reveal the details at 4.30 into the following video:

Lessig is the founder of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. He is founding board member of Creative Commons and is a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and of the Software Freedom Law Center. He is best known as a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications.

These are clearly not the ravings of some paranoid cyber geek.

The Patriot Act, as well as its lesser known follow up the Domestic Security Enhancement Act 2003, also known as USA Patriot Act II, have been universally decried by civil libertarians and Constitutional scholars from across the political spectrum. They have stripped back basic rights and handed what have been described by even the most moderate critics as “dictatorial control” over to the president and the federal government.

Many believed that the legislation was a response to the attacks of 9/11, but the reality was that the Patriot Act was prepared way in advance of 9/11 and it sat dormant, awaiting an event to justify its implementation.

In the days after the attacks it was passed in the House by a majority of 357 to 66. It passed the Senate by 98 to 1. Congressman Ron Paul (R-Tex) told the Washington Times that no member of Congress was even allowed to read the legislation.

Now we discover that exactly the same freedom restricting legislation has already been prepared for the cyber world.

An i-9/11, as described by Lawrence Lessig, would provide the perfect pretext to implement such restrictions in one swift motion, as well as provide the justification for relegating and eliminating specific content and information on the web.

Such an event could come in the form of a major viral attack, the hacking of a major city’s security or transport systems, or some other vital systems, or a combination of all of these things. Considering the amount of unanswered questions regarding 9/11 and all the indications that it was a covert false flag operation, it isn’t hard to imagine such an event being played out in the cyber world.

However, regardless of any i-9/11 or i-Patriot Act, there is already a coordinated effort to stem the reach and influence of the internet.

We have tirelessly warned of this general movement to restrict, censor, control and eventually completely shut down the internet as we know it, thereby killing the last real vestige of free speech in the world today and eliminating the greatest communication and information tool ever conceived.

Our governments have reams of legislation penned to put clamps on the web as we know it. Legislation such as the PRO-IP Act of 2007: H.R. 4279, that would create an IP czar at the Department of Justice and the Intellectual Property Enforcement Act of 2007: S. 522, which would create an entire ‘Intellectual Property Enforcement Network’. These are just two examples.

In addition, we have already seen how the major corporate websites and social networks are decentralizing and coming together to implement overarching identification, verification and access systems that have been described by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as “the beginning of a movement and the beginning of an industry.”

Some of these major tech companies have already joined efforts in projects such as the Information Card Foundation, which has proposed the creation of a system of internet ID cards that will be required for internet access. Of course, such a system would give those involved the ability to track and control user activity much more effectively. This is just one example.

In addition, as we reported yesterday, major transportation hubs like St. Pancras International, as well as libraries, big businesses, hospitals and other public outlets that offer wi-fi Internet, are blacklisting alternative news websites and making them completely inaccessible to their users.

These precedents are merely the first indication of what is planned for the Internet over the next 5-10 years, with the traditional web becoming little more than a vast spy database that catalogues people’s every activity and bombards them with commercials, while those who comply with centralized control and regulation of content will be free to enjoy the new super-fast Internet 2.

We must speak out about this rampant move to implement strict control mechanisms on the web NOW before it is too late, before the spine of the free internet is broken and its body essentially becomes paralyzed beyond repair.

Homeland Security Invokes Internet Nuclear Bomb Senario
http://earthhopenetwork.net/forum/printthread.php?tid=572

The Future of the ‘iPatriot Act’
http://futureoftheinternet.org/the-future-of-the-ipatriot-act

 

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Google searches could be used against you in court
July 29, 2008, 2:53 pm
Filed under: 1984, 4th amendment, Big Brother, CIA, CNBC, corporations, corporatism, Dictatorship, Empire, Fascism, FBI, google, internet, Internet 2, internet police, IP, Nazi, orwell, pedophilia, Police State, Surveillance, US Constitution | Tags: , , , ,

Google searches could be used against you in court

 

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Obama’s Nazi Youth Brigade
July 24, 2008, 6:32 am
Filed under: 1984, 1st amendment, 2-party system, 2008 Election, 2nd Amendment, 4th amendment, Air Force, Alex Jones, anti gun, army, Barack Obama, Big Brother, Bill Clinton, bill of rights, Britain, Chicago, China, CIA, Communism, Control Grid, DEBT, DHS, Dick Cheney, Dictatorship, Dissent, domestic terror, domestic terrorism, Drivers License, Empire, Europe, european union, Fascism, FBI, free speech, George Bush, Germany, Globalism, Gun Control, hackers, Hitler, hitler youth, Homeland Security, internet, Internet 2, internet blackout, Internet Filtering, internet police, left right paradigm, mao, Martial Law, Military, nanny state, national guard, Nazi, nazi youth, neocons, Neolibs, New World Order, obama, Oppression, Police State, Protest, rally, rome, Soviet Union, stasi, stasi tactics, Surveillance, Troops, United Kingdom, US Constitution, War On Terror, White House | Tags: , , , ,

Obama’s Nazi Youth Brigade
Presidential candidate wants domestic “security force” as powerful as U.S. military, columnist compares proposal to Hitler Youth

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
July 17, 2008

Presidential frontrunner Barack Obama has called for a “civilian national security force” as powerful as the U.S. military, comments that were ignored by the vast majority of the corporate media but compared by one journalist to the Nazi Hitler Youth.

“We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded,” Obama told a Colorado Springs audience earlier this month.

World Net Daily editor Joseph Farah asked if he was the only journalist in America who found Obama’s statement troubling.

“If we’re going to create some kind of national police force as big, powerful and well-funded as our combined U.S. military forces, isn’t this rather a big deal?” wrote Farah.

“Are we talking about creating a police state here? The U.S. Army alone has nearly 500,000 troops. That doesn’t count reserves or National Guard. In 2007, the U.S. Defense budget was $439 billion. Is Obama serious about creating some kind of domestic security force bigger and more expensive than that? If not, why did he say it? What did he mean?”

KnoxNews.com is seemingly the only other media outlet to express interest in exactly what Obama is proposing.

“The statement was made in the context of youth service. Is this an organization for just the youth or are adults going to participate? How does one get away from the specter of other such “youth” organizations from Nazi Germany and the former Soviet Union when talking about it?” wrote Michael Silence.

Obama’s proposal smacks of an expanded version of an existing program in which hundreds of police, firefighters, paramedics and utility workers have been trained and recently dispatched as “Terrorism Liaison Officers” in Colorado, Arizona and California to watch for “suspicious activity” which is later fed into a secret government database.

It is also reminiscent of the supposedly canned 2002 Operation TIPS program, which would have turned 4 per cent of Americans into informants under the jurisdiction of the Justice Department.

TIPS lived on in other guises, such as the Highway Watch program, a $19 billion dollar Homeland Security-run project which trains truckers to watch for suspicious activity on America’s highways.

More recently, ABC News reported that “The FBI is taking cues from the CIA to recruit thousands of covert informants in the United States as part of a sprawling effort…..to aid with criminal investigations.”

Since authorities now define mundane activities like buying baby formula, beer, wearing Levi jeans, carrying identifying documents like a drivers license and traveling with women or children or mentioning the U.S. constitution as the behavior of potential terrorists, the bounty for the American Stasi to turn in political dissidents is sure to be too tempting to resist under Obama’s new program.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVjcRkeKFsc

 

Obama Wages Cyberwar

Wired
July 17, 2008

Since the start of the year, the Bush administration has kickstarted a $30 billion effort to shore up cyber security, installed a new “czar” for online defense, and reserved the right to snoop on everyone’s net traffic, to ward off a digital attack.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama says the White House is still asleep at the switch, when it comes to network defense.

“We know that cyber-espionage and common crime is already on the rise. And yet while countries like China have been quick to recognize this change, for the last eight years we have been dragging our feet,” he said in a speech today at Purdue University, focusing on unconventional threats.

His recommendations on network security were vague, mostly. But they did include some subtle digs at the current administration.

As President, I’ll make cyber security the top priority that it should be in the 21st century. I’ll declare our cyber-infrastructure a strategic asset, and appoint a National Cyber Advisor who will report directly to me.

The current cyber chief serves under the Department of Homeland Security. He also, it should be noted, had no experience in security, whatsoever.

And while Obama avoided some of the more bellicose rhetoric that’s been been skipping around the government — like the Air Force’s calls for network “dominance” — he did highlight his concerns about a potential online takeover of our country’s infrastructure.

To protect our national security, I’ll bring together government, industry, and academia to determine the best ways to guard the infrastructure that supports our power…. We need to prevent terrorists or spies from hacking into our national security networks. We need to build the capacity to identify, isolate, and respond to any cyberattack. And we need to develop new standards for the cyber security that protects our most important infrastructure –- from electrical grids to sewage systems; from air traffic control to our markets.

Intelligence officers and security officials claim hackers have been able to shut down American power grids. That’s an assertion our cohorts at Threat Level have vigorously contested.

Obama Bans Signs from German Rally
http://infowars.net/articles/july2008/220708Obama.htm

Obama Advisor: Prosecuting Bush and Cheney Risks a Cycle of Criminalizing Public Service
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/34929

Obama’s “Civilian National Security Force”
http://www.infowars.com/?p=3417

 

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UK: Big Brother recording all calls, texts and e-mails
July 16, 2008, 4:10 pm
Filed under: 1984, 1st amendment, 4th amendment, Airport Security, apple, army, Big Brother, Bloggers, Britain, Canada, cell phone, Control Grid, Europe, european union, free speech, google, hackers, India, internet, Internet 2, internet police, ISPs, Mi5, New York, NSA, Police State, Posse Comitatus, Surveillance, United Kingdom, US Constitution, viacom, War On Terror, Youtube | Tags: , ,

Big Brother database recording all our calls, texts and e-mails will ’ruin British way of life’

Daily Mail
July 16, 2008

Plans for a massive database snooping on the entire population were condemned yesterday as a ‘step too far for the British way of life’.

In an Orwellian move, the Home Office is proposing to detail every phone call, e-mail, text message, internet search and online purchase in the fight against terrorism and other serious crime.

But the privacy watchdog, Information Commissioner Richard Thomas, warned that the public’s traditional freedoms were under grave threat from creeping state surveillance.

Apart from the Government’s inability to hold data securely, he said the proposals raised ‘grave questions’.

‘Do the risks we face provide justification for such a scheme in the first place? Do we want the state to have details of more and more aspects of our private lives?

‘Whatever the benefits, would such a scheme amount to excessive surveillance? Would this be a step too far for the British way of life?’

It is thought the scheme would allow the police or MI5 to access the exact time when a phone call was made, the number dialled, the length of the call and, in the case of mobile phones, the location of the handset to within an accuracy of a few hundred yards.

Similarly for e-mails, it would provide details of when they were sent and who the recipients were. Police recovering a suspect’s computer would then be able to trawl through hard-drive records and recover particular messages. The content of telephone calls could not be recovered unless they were being intercepted at the time.

Mr Thomas’s warnings were backed by privacy campaigners, who claimed such Big Brother powers would give Government agencies unprecedented abilities to trawl through intimate details of ordinary people’s private lives at will.

He used the launch of his annual report to speak out after ministers signalled their intentions in their programme of legislation earlier this year, describing the new Bill as ‘modifying procedures for acquiring communications data’.

There are fears that the data will be shared with foreign governments – such as the Americans demanding personal details of air passengers – accessed by internet hackers or lost by bungling civil servants.

Opponents pointed out that town halls are already using extraordinary surveillance powers under the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act to investigate minor issues such as littering, or checking whether parents are abusing school catchment area rules, and they could be given access to almost unthinkable levels of personal data under the new scheme.

Currently police and MI5 can access customer records stored by telephone companies, but only with a warrant to examine individual accounts.

Mr Thomas said: ‘I am absolutely clear that the targeted and duly-authorised interception of the communications of suspects can be invaluable in the fight against terrorism and other serious crime.

‘But there needs to be the fullest public debate about the justification for, and implications of, a specially created database – potentially accessible to a wide range of law enforcement authorities – holding details of everyone’s telephone and internet communications.

’Do we really want the police, security services and other organs of the state to have access to more and more aspects of our private lives?’

Opposition MPs said the Government’s dismal records on safeguarding private data – most notably the loss of the entire child benefit database holding millions of people’s financial details – showed it was incapable of safeguarding such a vast volume of information safely, and the scheme should be dropped immediately.

An estimated 3billion emails are sent in Britain every day and last year 57billion text messages were sent.

The Home Office yesterday defended the need to keep its surveillance powers up to date with changing internet technology, and said full details of the plans would be published this year as part of a new Communications Data Bill.

Officials said the internet was rapidly revolutionising communications and it was vital for surveillance powers to keep up with technology in order to fight serious crime and terrorism.

Read Full Article Here

 

India: NSA to tap data traffic passing through Blackberry devices

Business Line
July 13, 2008

New Delhi, July 12 – In a bid to find a solution to the security concerns around Blackberry services, the National Security Adviser is now supervising a discussion between National Test Research Organisation, under the Home Ministry, Department of Telecom and Canada-based Research In Motion.

The discussions are being held to find a spot on RIM’s network where the data traffic passing through Blackberry could be intercepted by security agencies.

The agencies had earlier rejected any temporary solution to the Blackberry controversy and told the Government that it must make sure that traffic originating and terminating on the device should not travel outside the country without proper monitoring.

DoT was considering deploying certain software that would allow the security agencies to snoop into Blackberry network without having to break into the service codes.

Blackberry handsets are designed by Research In Motion and uses high encryption code, making it impossible for the Indian agencies to monitor data being transmitted by users.

The DoT had earlier asked the company to set up a local server in the country which would allow the security forces to snoop into the network. However, Research In Motion said that it was not possible to give decryption codes or set up a local data centre in the country.

The DoT had earlier asked RIM to give its codes to Indian security agencies that will enable them to monitor the data being transmitted through Blackberry. The key problem was that Indian agencies do not have the required technology to monitor data that has encryption codes higher than 40 bits.

On the issue of setting up a local data centre within the country, RIM had said that Blackberry was designed to perform as a global system independent of geography. “The location of data centres and the customer’s choice of wireless network are irrelevant factors from a security perspective since end-to-end encryption is utilised,” RIM had said.

NY subpoenas blogger id
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/0..er=MYWAY&pagewanted=print

YouTube, Viacom Agree To Anonymize Data
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20..hxV5G7yprV84FDlzM55TmZk24cA

Canadian ISPs Plan Net Censorship
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/canada_net_censorship.html

Airport scans for illegal downloads on iPods, mobile phones and laptops
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/conn..nected/2008/07/10/nairport110.xml

Army Forms Network Warfare Batallion
http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htiw/articles/20080712.aspx

 

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Internet Police: G8 Ratifies Crackdown on Illegal Downloads
July 12, 2008, 4:00 pm
Filed under: 4th amendment, ACTA, army, Britain, brussels, corporations, corporatism, DHS, Dictatorship, Empire, Europe, european union, FCC, g8, global elite, global government, Globalism, google, Homeland Security, internet, Internet 2, internet blackout, Internet Filtering, internet police, london, mediaopoly, nanny state, New World Order, Oppression, paris, Police State, Posse Comitatus, telecom, United Kingdom, US Constitution, viacom, virgin, Youtube | Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Internet Police State: G8 Ratifies Crackdown on Illegal Downloads

Charles Arthur
London Guardian
July 10, 2008

The heads of the G8 governments, meeting this week, are about to ratify the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which – it’s claimed – could let customs agents search your laptop or music player for illegally obtained content. The European Parliament is considering a law that would lead to people who illicitly download copyrighted music or video content being thrown off the internet. Virgin Media is writing to hundreds of its customers at the request of the UK record industry to warn them that their connections seem to have been used for illegal downloading. Viacom gets access to all of the usernames and IP addresses of anyone who has ever used YouTube as part of its billion-dollar lawsuit in which it claims the site has been party to “massive intentional copyright infringement”.

It seems that 20th-century ideas of ownership and control – especially of intellectual property such as copyright and trademarks – are being reasserted, with added legal muscle, after a 10-year period when the internet sparked an explosion of business models and (if we’re honest) casual disregard, especially of copyright, when it came to music and video.

But do those separate events mark a swing of the pendulum back against the inroads that the internet has made on intellectual property?

‘A finger in the dyke’

Saul Klein, a venture capitalist with Index Ventures who has invested in the free database company MySQL, Zend (the basis of the free web-scripting language PHP) and OpenX, an open-source advertising system, is unconvinced. “In a world of abundance – which the internet is quintessentially – that drives the price of everything towards ‘free’,” he says. “People don’t pay for any content online. Not for music, not for video. They get it, either legally or illegally.”

Is that sustainable? “The model of suing your best customers and subpoenaing private information is doomed to failure,” Klein observes. “It’s putting a finger in the dyke. It won’t change the macro trend, which is that there’s an abundance of information. Copyright owners need to find new ways to generate income from their product. The fact is, the music industry is in rude health – more people than ever before are going to concerts, making it, listening to it. It’s the labels that are screwed. The artists and managers are making money. The labels aren’t.

Read Full Article Here

Europe votes on anti-piracy laws

BBC
July 7, 2008

Europeans suspected of putting movies and music on file-sharing networks could be thrown off the web under proposals before Brussels.

The powers are in a raft of laws that aim to harmonise the regulations governing Europe’s telecom markets.

Other amendments added to the packet of laws allow governments to decide which software can be used on the web.

Campaigners say the laws trample on personal privacy and turn net suppliers into copyright enforcers.

Piracy plan

MEPs are due to vote on the so-called Telecom Packet on 7 July. The core proposals in the packet were drawn up to help European telecoms firms cope with the rapid pace of change in the industry.

Technological and industry changes that did not respect borders had highlighted the limitations of Europe’s current approach which sees national governments oversee their telecoms markets.

“The current fragmentation hinders investment and is detrimental to consumers and operators,” says the EU document laying out the proposals.

But, say digital rights campaigners, anti-piracy lobbyists have hijacked the telecoms laws and tabled amendments that turn dry proposals on industry reform into an assault on the freedom of net users.

Among the amendments are calls to enact a Europe-wide “three strikes” law. This would see users banned from the web if they fail to heed three warnings that they are suspected of putting copyrighted works on file-sharing networks.

In addition it bestows powers on governments to decide which programs can be “lawfully” used on the internet.

A coalition of European digital rights groups have banded together to galvanise opposition.

“[The amendments] pave the way for the monitoring and filtering of the internet by private companies, exceptional courts and Orwellian technical measures,” said Christophe Espern, co-founder of French rights group La Quadrature du Net (Squaring the Net) in a statement.

The UK’s Open Rights Group said the laws would be “disproportionate and ineffective”.

The Foundation for a Free Internet Infrastructure (FFII) warned that if the amendments were accepted they would create a “Soviet internet” on which only software and services approved by governments would be allowed to run.

“Tomorrow, popular software applications like Skype or even Firefox might be declared illegal in Europe if they are not certified by an administrative authority,” warned Benjamin Henrion, FFII representative in Brussels, in a statement.

“This is compromising the whole open development of the internet as we know it today,” he said.

Read Full Article Here

U.S. Homeland Security Defends Laptop Searches At Border

Christian Science Monitor
July 11, 2008

Is a laptop searchable in the same way as a piece of luggage? The Department of Homeland Security believes it is.

For the past 18 months, immigration officials at border entries have been searching and seizing some citizens’ laptops, cellphones, and BlackBerry devices when they return from international trips.

In some cases, the officers go through the files while the traveler is standing there. In others, they take the device for several hours and download the hard drive’s content. After that, it’s unclear what happens to the data.

The Department of Homeland Security contends these searches and seizures of electronic files are vital to detecting terrorists and child pornographers. It also says it has the constitutional authority to do them without a warrant or probable cause.

But many people in the business community disagree, saying DHS is overstepping the Fourth Amendment bounds of permissible routine searches. Some are fighting for Congress to put limits on what can be searched and seized and what happens to the information that’s taken. The civil rights community says the laptop seizures are simply unconstitutional. They want DHS to stop the practice unless there’s at least reasonable suspicion.

Legal scholars say the issue raises the compelling and sometimes clashing interests of privacy rights and the need to protect the US from terrorists and child pornographers. The courts have long held that routine searches at the border are permissible, simply because they take place at the border. Opponents of the current policy say a laptop search is far from “routine.”

“A laptop can hold [the equivalent of] a major university’s library: It can contain your full life,” says Peter Swire, a professor of law at Ohio State University in Columbus. “The government’s never gotten to search your entire life, so this is unprecedented in scale what the government can get.”

Read Full Article Here

Digital copyright: it’s all wrong. The ACTA draft is Scary.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/pe..06/09/1212863545123.html

FCC Chairman Seeks to End Comcast’s Delay of File Sharing
http://www.washingtonpost.com/w..08/07/11/AR2008071102917.html

They’re Watching Us: U.S. Army Contract for “Internet Awareness Services”
https://www.fbo.gov/index?tab..218cda1e&cck=1&au=&ck=

Google’s spycar revs up UK privacy fears
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/07/google_spycar_slammed/

Viacom to Violate YouTube User’s Privacy
http://noworldsystem.com/2008/07/10/..-user%e2%80%99s-privacy/

 

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Viacom to Violate YouTube User’s Privacy
July 10, 2008, 3:14 pm
Filed under: 1984, 4th amendment, Big Brother, California, corporations, corporatism, EFF, google, internet, Internet 2, Internet Filtering, internet police, Media, mediaopoly, mtv, Police State, Surveillance, US Constitution, Youtube | Tags:

Viacom to Violate YouTube User’s Privacy

Bloomberg
July 4, 2008

Google Inc., owner of the YouTube video-sharing Web site, may be exposed to heightened privacy complaints from Internet users after a U.S. judge ordered it to give Viacom Inc. a database about online viewers.

Google was ordered two days ago to turn over records of videos viewed on YouTube, the login name of viewers and their computer’s Internet address. Google already faces scrutiny over its storage of user data in the U.S. and Europe.

“The chickens have come home to roost for Google,’’ said Simon Davies, director of Privacy International in London. “If they were going to unnecessarily keep this information, there was always the chance someone was going to grab it.’’

Viacom, owner of Comedy Central and MTV television networks, wants the information to find out if YouTube viewers watch copyrighted shows, in an effort to bolster its $1 billion infringement lawsuit against Google. The ruling may lead some Web surfers to avoid using Google, which makes money based on traffic to and from its Web sites.

Google, owner of the most-used Internet search engine, has resisted attempts to get at its troves of user data. In 2006, the company fought a U.S. subpoena for months as it sought to assure users that their search records weren’t easily accessible. Google founder Sergey Brin said it’s the Mountain View, California-based company’s “obligation’’ to protect users’ privacy.

Read Full Article Here

 

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Radical Iranian Bloggers Could Face Death
July 10, 2008, 3:02 pm
Filed under: 1984, 1st amendment, Big Brother, Bloggers, Censorship, Communism, Congress, free speech, hackers, Homegrown Terrorism, internet, Internet 2, internet blackout, Internet Filtering, internet police, Iran, Joe Lieberman, Media, moscow, Oppression, police brutality, Police State, prison industrial complex, racial profiling, Racism, Russia, Surveillance, Tehran, Torture, US Constitution

Radical Iranian Bloggers Could Face Death

Daily Tech
July 8, 2008

A draft bill in the Iranian parliament is set to give bloggers the death penalty, if the government deems their writing as advocating corruption, prostitution, or desertion of Islam.

If so classified, bloggers will join those guilty of the above crimes in the real world to be branded as mohareb (an enemy of God) and “corrupt of the earth” – making him or her eligible for punishments ranging from exile, to amputations, to execution.

Further, if the bill becomes law, punishment bestowed by the system “cannot be commuted, suspended, or changed.”

Iranian bloggers and human rights activists fear the ease in which the government could casually accuse bloggers of offending the country’s strict interpretation of Islamic law.

Anti-censorship activist group Global Voice Online notes that about 18 months ago the Iranian government demanded bloggers register their websites, although the initiative failed to produce meaningful results. Bloggers widely considered registration as an enabler for future government suppression, and many proudly displayed an “I do not register my blog/site” badge in defiance of the mandate.

“Mentioning ‘blogging’ among crimes such as kidnapping, raping, armed robbery makes accusing bloggers easier than before… Such a law will harm the mental security of society more than the poor bloggers, who do not know what awaits them,” said Iranian blogger Mojtaba Saminejad. According to a Wikipedia bio linked by his “About Me” page, Saminejad spent 21 months in an Iranian prison beginning in 2005, including an alleged 88 days of solitary confinement and torture, due to a 2004 post reporting the arrest of three other bloggers. His official charges listed Saminejad as having insulted Iran’s head of state and “endangering national security.”

Another Iranian blogger notes that Iranian Parliament president Ali Larijani said the bill was discussed for “hours” with the country’s Judiciary before a draft was settled. After the number of executions last year almost doubled, from 177 to 317 according to Amnesty International, the Iranian government said the punishment is not given casually, and results only after an extensive legal process.

A censored version of the internet sees wide use in Iran, and young, tech-savvy Iranians have joined the rest of the world in blogging about everything from menial personal gossip to obscenities and questioning the government. The Iranian government actively filters out content it considers obscene, including websites promoting pornography, heresy, or political dissent.

The Iranian government considers blogging a threat to “mental security,” a doctrine that human rights advocates consider to be a scapegoat used in the government’s historically oppressive policies. It joins a variety of other countries, including Yemen and China, in monitoring online expression for politically and morally sensitive material.

The draft bill still needs inspection from the Guardian Council, which ensures the bills’ adherence to the Iranian constitution and Islamic law, and then needs to be “rubber-stamped” by a conservative government watchdog before being made into law.

 

Russian blogger sentenced for “extremist” post

Chris Baldwin
Reuters
July 7, 2008

A Russian man who described local police as “scum” in an Internet posting was given a suspended jail sentence on Monday for extremism, prompting bloggers to warn of a crackdown on free speech online.

Savva Terentiev, a 28-year-old musician from Syktyvkar, 1,515 kilometres (940 miles) north of Moscow, wrote in a blog last year that the police force should be cleaned up by ceremonially burning officers twice a day in a town square.

Convicted on charges of “inciting hatred or enmity”, Terentiev was given a one-year suspended term on Monday, Russian news agencies reported.

Free speech campaigners said the ruling could create a dangerous precedent for free speech on the Internet, a vibrant forum for political debate in a country where the mainstream traditional media is deferential to authority.

“This was an absolutely unjustified verdict,” Alexander Verkhovsky, director of the SOVA centre in Moscow, a non-governmental group that monitors extremism, told Reuters. “Savva for sure wrote a rude comment … but this verdict means it will be impossible to make rude comments about anybody.”

Read Full Article Here

Joe Lieberman all set to label US Jews as more likely to be “homegrown terrorists”
http://mparent7777-1.livejournal.com/814290.html

Fearmongering On An Internet Meltdown
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/t..web/article4271879.ece

AP: Right to free speech not guaranteed online
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/AP..ctions_not_guaranteed_online_0707.html

Congress Studies How Online Use Is Tracked
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/200807..=AuMBBb0JkMsxGvh4ui0tdwlk24cA

Web & Media Moguls Conduct Meeting
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080707/media_uncertainty.html?.v=4

Internet Flaw Could Let Hackers Take Over Web
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?..zxdxcmkx&show_article=1

 

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U.S. Military To Patrol Internet
July 5, 2008, 2:42 pm
Filed under: 1984, 4th amendment, army, Big Brother, google, internet, Internet 2, internet police, Military, Military Industrial Complex, mtv, Posse Comitatus, Surveillance, US Constitution, viacom, War On Terror, Youtube | Tags: ,

U.S. Military To Patrol Internet

UPI
June 30, 2008

The U.S. military is looking for a contractor to patrol cyberspace, watching for warning signs of forthcoming terrorist attacks or other hostile activity on the Web.

“If someone wants to blow us up, we want to know about it,” Robert Hembrook, the deputy intelligence chief of the U.S. Army’s Fifth Signal Command in Mannheim, Germany, told United Press International.

In a solicitation posted on the Web last week, the command said it was looking for a contractor to provide “Internet awareness services” to support “force protection” — the term of art for the security of U.S. military installations and personnel.

“The purpose of the services will be to identify and assess stated and implied threat, antipathy, unrest and other contextual data relating to selected Internet domains,” says the solicitation.

Hembrook was tight-lipped about the proposal. “The more we talk about it, the less effective it will be,” he said. “If we didn’t have to put it out in public (to make the contract award), we wouldn’t have.”

He would not comment on the kinds of Internet sites the contractor would be directed to look at but acknowledged it would “not (be) far off” to assume violent Islamic extremists would be at the top of the list.

The solicitation says the successful contractor will “analyze various Web pages, chat rooms, blogs and other Internet domains to aggregate and assess data of interest,” adding, “The contractor will prioritize foreign-language domains that relate to specific areas of concern … (and) will also identify new Internet domains” that might relate to “specific local requirements” of the command.

Officials were keen to stress the contract covered only information that could be found by anyone with a computer and Internet connection.

“We’re not interested in being Big Brother,” said LeAnne MacAllister, chief spokeswoman for the command, which runs communications in Europe for the U.S. Army and the military’s joint commands there.

“I would not characterize it as monitoring,” added Hembrook. “This is a research tool gathering information that is already in the public domain.”

Read Full Article Here

 

Google must divulge YouTube user’s logs to Viacom

BBC
July 3, 2008

The ruling comes as part of Google’s legal battle with Viacom over allegations of copyright infringement.

Digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) called the ruling a “set-back to privacy rights”.

The viewing log, which will be handed to Viacom, contains the log-in ID of users, the computer IP address (online identifier) and video clip details.

While the legal battle between the two firms is being contested in the US, it is thought the ruling will apply to YouTube users and their viewing habits everywhere.

Viacom, which owns MTV and Paramount Pictures, has alleged that YouTube is guilty of massive copyright infringement.

The UK’s Premier League association is also seeking class action status with Viacom on the issue, alleging YouTube, which was bought by Google in 2006, has been used to watch football highlights.

Google Faces More Privacy Woes After YouTube Ruling
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=..5S5DU&refer=home

 

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Governments step up blogger arrests
June 23, 2008, 1:03 pm
Filed under: 1st amendment, Air Force, Britain, Canada, censorchip, Censorship, China, Dictatorship, egypt, Europe, european union, Fascism, France, free speech, google, Internet 2, internet blackout, Internet Filtering, internet police, Iran, kentucky, Saudi Arabia, Syria, thailand, United Kingdom, US Constitution

Governments step up blogger arrests

Jonathan M. Gitlin
Ars Technica
June 17, 2008

No matter what you think of blogging, Internet-based citizen journalism is a real threat, not just to traditional media business models but to totalitarian governments. How do we know that bloggers are drawing blood? Because some governments are hitting back harder and harder; last year saw a tripling in the number of bloggers arrested around the world compared to 2006, according to a report from the University of Washington.

“Last year, 2007, was a record year for blogger arrests, with three times as many as in 2006. Egypt, Iran and China are the most dangerous places to blog about political life, accounting for more than half of all arrests since blogging became big,” said Assistant Professor Phil Howard, lead author of the World Information Access Report. Howard also suggests that the real number of arrests may be much higher, as not every arrest makes it into the media.

The report separates the reason for arrests into six categories: violation of cultural norms, blogging involved with social protest, blogging about public policy, blogging about political figures, exposing corruption or human rights violations, and finally “other.” In addition to Iran, Egypt and China, Middle Eastern regimes in Syria and Saudi Arabia, and South East Asian nations such as Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand also figure in the report. 2007 saw 36 bloggers arrested around the world, and since 2003 at least 64 have been arrested, with a total of 940 months of prison time served.

Even liberal democracies are not immune; France, Canada, the USA, and UK have all arrested people following their blogging activity since 2004. However, some of these cases might not seem so egregious; last year a blogger was arrested in Los Angeles following his postings about his attraction to young girls, and the beginning of 2008 saw an arrest in the UK after one Gavin Best used his blog to threaten a police officer’s family following his arrest for a large number of thefts.

Another troubling trend has been the complicity of western Internet firms such as Yahoo and Google, both of whom have handed over details of bloggers to the Chinese government, despite publicly condemning such policies.

Are Bloggers ’Killing’ Old Media in Campaign Coverage?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg..magazine_b_108073.html

Kentucky Settles Internet Censorship Suit, Agrees to Lift Ban on Blogs
http://www.citizen.org/pressroom/release.cfm?ID=2676

France To Ban Illegal Downloaders From Internet
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article4165519.ece

EU Says China Internet Control Unacceptable
http://www.breitbart.com/article..o6d&show_article=1

Air Force Spreads Cyber Command to All 50 States
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/06/air-forces-50-s.htmlmore

Death of the Internet! Long Live Internet 2!
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/technology/15cable.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

 

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Secret Plan To Kill Internet By 2012
June 17, 2008, 1:01 pm
Filed under: 1984, 1st amendment, Alex Jones, AOL, apple, Australia, Big Brother, bill gates, Britain, Canada, Censorship, China, comcast, Communism, corporatism, DHS, Europe, european union, Fascism, FCC, France, free speech, Homeland Security, Internet 2, internet blackout, Internet Filtering, internet police, internet tax, ISP, ISPs, michael chertoff, Microsoft, net neutrality, NSA, Pentagon, Propaganda, ration, Surveillance, Time Warner, United Kingdom, US Constitution, verison, virgin, War On Terror, White House | Tags: , , ,

Secret Plan To Kill Internet By 2012

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
June 11, 2008

ISP’s have resolved to restrict the Internet to a TV-like subscription model where users will be forced to pay to visit selected corporate websites by 2012, while others will be blocked, according to a leaked report. Despite some people dismissing the story as a hoax, the wider plan to kill the traditional Internet and replace it with a regulated and controlled Internet 2 is manifestly provable.

“Bell Canada and TELUS (formerly owned by Verizon) employees officially confirm that by 2012 ISP’s all over the globe will reduce Internet access to a TV-like subscription model, only offering access to a small standard amount of commercial sites and require extra fees for every other site you visit. These ’other’ sites would then lose all their exposure and eventually shut down, resulting in what could be seen as the end of the Internet,” warns a report that has spread like wildfire across the web over the last few days.

The article, which is accompanied by a You Tube clip, states that Time Magazine writer “Dylan Pattyn” has confirmed the information and is about to release a story – and that the move to effectively shut down the web could come as soon as 2010.

People have raised questions about the report’s accuracy because the claims are not backed by another source, only the “promise” that a Time Magazine report is set to confirm the rumor. Until such a report emerges many have reserved judgment or outright dismissed the story as a hoax.

What is documented, as the story underscores, is the fact that TELUS’ wireless web package allows only restricted pay-per-view access to a selection of corporate and news websites. This is the model that the post-2012 Internet would be based on.

People have noted that the authors of the video seem to be more concerned about getting people to subscribe to their You Tube account than fighting for net neutrality by prominently featuring an attractive woman who isn’t shy about showing her cleavage. The vast majority of the other You Tube videos hosted on the same account consist of bizarre avante-garde satire skits on behalf of the same people featured in the Internet freedom clip. This has prompted many to suspect that the Internet story is merely a stunt to draw attention to the group.

Whether the report is accurate or merely a crude hoax, there is a very real agenda to restrict, regulate and suffocate the free use of the Internet and we have been documenting its progression for years.

The first steps in a move to charge for every e mail sent have already been taken. Under the pretext of eliminating spam, Bill Gates and other industry chieftains have proposed Internet users buy credit stamps which denote how many e mails they will be able to send. This of course is the death knell for political newsletters and mailing lists.

The New York Times reported that “America Online and Yahoo, two of the world’s largest providers of e-mail accounts, are about to start using a system that gives preferential treatment to messages from companies that pay from 1/4 of a cent to a penny each to have them delivered. The senders must promise to contact only people who have agreed to receive their messages, or risk being blocked entirely.”

The first wave will simply attempt to price people out of using the conventional Internet and force people over to Internet 2, a state regulated hub where permission will need to be obtained directly from an FCC or government bureau to set up a website.

The original Internet will then be turned into a mass surveillance database and marketing tool. The Nation magazine reported in 2006 that, “Verizon, Comcast, Bell South and other communications giants are developing strategies that would track and store information on our every move in cyberspace in a vast data-collection and marketing system, the scope of which could rival the National Security Agency. According to white papers now being circulated in the cable, telephone and telecommunications industries, those with the deepest pockets–corporations, special-interest groups and major advertisers–would get preferred treatment. Content from these providers would have first priority on our computer and television screens, while information seen as undesirable, such as peer-to-peer communications, could be relegated to a slow lane or simply shut out.”

Over the past few years, a chorus of propaganda intended to demonize the Internet and further lead it down a path of strict control has spewed forth from numerous establishment organs:

  • Time magazine reported last year that researchers funded by the federal government want to shut down the internet and start over, citing the fact that at the moment there are loopholes in the system whereby users cannot be tracked and traced all the time.

    • The projects echo moves we have previously reported on to clamp down on internet neutrality and even to designate a new form of the internet known as Internet 2.

  • In a display of bi-partisanship, there have recently been calls for all out mandatory ISP snooping on all US citizens by both Democrats and Republicans alike.
  • The White House’s own recently de-classified strategy for “winning the war on terror” targets Internet conspiracy theories as a recruiting ground for terrorists and threatens to “diminish” their influence.

  • The Pentagon recently announced its effort to infiltrate the Internet and propagandize for the war on terror.

  • In a speech last October, Homeland Security director Michael Chertoff identified the web as a “terror training camp,” through which “disaffected people living in the United States” are developing “radical ideologies and potentially violent skills.” His solution is “intelligence fusion centers,” staffed by Homeland Security personnel which will go into operation next year.

  • The U.S. Government wants to force bloggers and online grassroots activists to register and regularly report their activities to Congress. Criminal charges including a possible jail term of up to one year could be the punishment for non-compliance.

  • A landmark legal case on behalf of the Recording Industry Association of America and other global trade organizations seeks to criminalize all Internet file sharing of any kind as copyright infringement, effectively shutting down the world wide web – and their argument is supported by the U.S. government.

  • A landmark legal ruling in Sydney goes further than ever before in setting the trap door for the destruction of the Internet as we know it and the end of alternative news websites and blogs by creating the precedent that simply linking to other websites is breach of copyright and piracy.

  • The European Union, led by former Stalinist and potential future British Prime Minister John Reid, has also vowed to shut down “terrorists” who use the Internet to spread propaganda.

  • The EU data retention bill, passed last year after much controversy and with implementation tabled for late 2007, obliges telephone operators and internet service providers to store information on who called who and who emailed who for at least six months. Under this law, investigators in any EU country, and most bizarrely even in the US, can access EU citizens’ data on phone calls, SMS messages, emails and instant messaging services.

  • The EU also recently proposed legislation that would prevent users from uploading any form of video without a license.

  • The US government is also funding research into social networking sites and how to gather and store personal data published on them, according to the New Scientist magazine. “At the same time, US lawmakers are attempting to force the social networking sites themselves to control the amount and kind of information that people, particularly children, can put on the sites.”

The development of a new form of internet with new regulations is also designed to create an online caste system whereby the old internet hubs would be allowed to break down and die, forcing people to use the new taxable, censored and regulated world wide web.

Make no mistake, the internet, one of the greatest outposts of free speech ever created is under constant attack by powerful people who cannot operate within a society where information flows freely and unhindered. Both American and European moves mimic stories we hear every week out of state controlled Communist China, where the internet is strictly regulated and virtually exists as its own entity away from the rest of the web.

The Internet is freedom’s best friend and the bane of control freaks. Its eradication is one of the short term goals of those that seek to centralize power and subjugate their populations under tyranny by eliminating the right to protest and educate others by the forum of the free world wide web.

Corporations Plan To Pull Plug On The Free Internet
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/june2008/061208_pull_plug.htm

Ransomware: Hackers can hold your PC files for ransom
http://blogs.computerworld.com/rans..are_armageddon_approaches

Record Percentage Of Americans Use Internet For Politics, Survey Finds
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/06/record-percenta.html

Copyright deal could toughen rules governing info on iPods, computers
http://www.canada.com/topics/t..ae997868-220b-4dae-bf4f-47f6fc96ce5e

Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/1..&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin

 

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ISP’s confirm ’End of The Internet’ by 2012
June 11, 2008, 11:49 am
Filed under: 1st amendment, AOL, Britain, Canada, comcast, Europe, european union, France, free speech, Internet 2, internet blackout, Internet Filtering, internet police, internet tax, ISPs, Pentagon, ration, Time Warner, United Kingdom, US Constitution, verison, virgin | Tags:

ISP’s confirm ’End of The Internet’ by 2012

Ipower
June 8, 2008

Bell Canada and TELUS (formerly owned by Verizon) employees officially confirm that by 2012 ISP’s all over the globe will reduce Internet access to a TV-like subscription model, only offering access to a small standard amount of commercial sites and require extra fees for every other site you visit. These ’other’ sites would then lose all their exposure and eventually shut down, resulting in what could be seen as the end of the Internet.

Dylan Pattyn *, who is currently writing an article for Time Magazine on the issue, has official confirmation from sources within Bell Canada and is interviewing a marketing representative from TELUS who confirms the story and states that TELUS has already started blocking all websites that aren’t in the subscription package for mobile Internet access. They could not confirm whether it would happen in 2012 because both stated it may actually happen sooner (as early as 2010). Interviews with these sources, more confirmation from other sources and more in-depth information on the issue is set to be published in Time Magazine soon.

What can we do?

The reason why we’re releasing this information is because we believe we can stop it. More awareness means more mainstream media shedding light on it, more political interest and more pressure on the ISP’s to keep the Internet an open free space. We started this social network as a platform for Internet activism where we can join forces, share ideas and organize any form of protest that may have an impact. If we want to make a difference in this, we have to join together and stand united as one powerful voice against it.

Join the movement

Don’t let the Internet evolve to this:

 

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U.S. Media Blackout On Bilderberg 2008
June 7, 2008, 12:43 pm
Filed under: 2008 Election, Afghanistan, Ahmadinejad, airstrikes, Alex Jones, Barack Obama, bernanke, bilderberg, Britain, Chicago, Condoleezza Rice, Coup, Daniel Estulin, David Rockefeller, Department of justice, Dianne Feinstein, DOJ, eric schmidt, Europe, european union, False Flag, fannie mae, Federal Reserve, George Bush, global elite, global government, Globalism, google, Henry Kissinger, Hillary Clinton, International Bankers, Internet 2, Iran, Iraq, jim johnson, jim tucker, logan act, Media, media blackout, military strike, New World Order, obama, Pakistan, paul wolfowitz, Preemptive Strike, preemptive war, queen beatrix, Richard Perle, Rick Perry, Robert Zoellick, Russia, secret meetings, Secret Societies, spain, Taxpayers, Tehran, United Kingdom, virginia, War On Terror, Washington D.C., World Bank, ww4 | Tags: ,

U.S. Media Blackout On Bilderberg 2008
Condi Rice, Ben Bernanke, Head of Google and many others in attendance

Lee Rogers
Rogue Government
June 6, 2008

The 2008 Bilderberg Meeting is now in full swing at the Westfields Marriott in Chantilly, Virginia, USA but you wouldn’t know it from the media blackout of this event by virtually all mainstream media outlets in the United States. Each year, Bilderberg hosts some of the most powerful people in North America and Europe where these individuals set and shape policies for the world. The 2008 Bilderberg Meeting is slated to run from June 5th through June 8th. Since 1954, Bilderberg has met in secrecy primarily thanks to the intentional lack of media attention paid to it. One would think that an event where over 100 of the most high profile and powerful people from North America and Europe are meeting would receive a great deal of mainstream media attention, but there is virtually none. As a result of the media blackout, only independent journalists and alternative researchers have been covering this event on a year to year basis. Due to a greater amount of attention being paid to this event, a press release on the Bilderberg Meeting was issued from a group that identified themselves as the American Friends of Bilderberg. The press release provides spin on how wonderful Bilderberg is and even provides a contact number that can be used to obtain a list of attendees. The Logan Act states that it is illegal for those holding public office in the United States to attend secret meetings like Bilderberg where policy is set. Regardless, that has not stopped people like Rick Perry from attending the 2007 Bilderberg Meeting as the sitting Texas governor. Jim Tucker, who has covered the Bilderberg meeting for over 30 years, has accurately made future predictions based upon information he has received from moles within Bilderberg. There is no doubt that policy is set at this meeting and quite frankly if you think that some of the most powerful people in the world are getting together just for laughs, you are sorely mistaken.

Below is taken directly from the press release on the Bilderberg Meeting issued by the American Friends of Bilderberg which provides positive spin for the Bilderberg Meeting.

The 56th Bilderberg Meeting will be held in Chantilly, Virginia, USA 5 – 8 June 2008. The Conference will deal mainly with a nuclear free world, cyber terrorism, Africa, Russia, finance, protectionism, US-EU relations, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Islam and Iran. Approximately 140 participants will attend, of whom about two-thirds come from Europe and the balance from North America. About one-third is from government and politics, and two-thirds are from finance, industry, labor, education and communications. The meeting is private in order to encourage frank and open discussion.

Bilderberg takes its name from the hotel in Holland, where the first meeting took place in May 1954. That pioneering meeting grew out of the concern expressed by leading citizens on both sides of the Atlantic that Western Europe and North America were not working together as closely as they should on common problems of critical importance. It was felt that regular, off-the-record discussions would help create a better understanding of the complex forces and major trends affecting Western nations in the difficult post-war period. The Cold War has now ended. But in practically all respects, there are more, not fewer, common problems – from trade to jobs, from monetary policy to investment, from ecological challenges to the task of promoting international security. It is hard to think of any major issue in either Europe or North America whose unilateral solution would not have repercussions for the other. Thus the concept of a European-American forum has not been overtaken by time. The dialogue between these two regions is still – even increasingly – critical. What is unique about Bilderberg as a forum, is the broad cross-section of leading citizens that are assembled for nearly three days of informal and off-the-record discussion about topics of current concern especially in the fields of foreign affairs and the international economy; the strong feeling among participants that in view of the differing attitudes and experiences of the Western nations, there remains a clear need to further develop an understanding in which these concerns can be accommodated; the privacy of the meetings, which has no purpose other than to allow participants to speak their minds openly and freely. In short, Bilderberg is a small, flexible, informal and off-the-record international forum in which different viewpoints can be expressed and mutual understanding enhanced.

No where in the press release does it explain why many alternative researchers and independent journalists have been harassed and in many cases threatened in their attempts to cover this meeting. In fact, for many decades there were consistent denials of Bilderberg’s existence so it is quite amazing that they have finally decided to make an official recognition of the meeting. Not only that, but if the meeting really is just an informal discussion to allow its participants to speak openly and freely, than there shouldn’t be any need for threats, harassment and decades of secrecy. The meeting has been kept secret for many years because it is quite obvious that the participants do not want sunlight shone on the meeting’s agenda. This press release is nothing more than a smoke screen to make the average person believe that this is a legitimate meeting when it is not. All of of these very powerful people would not be meeting once a year if there wasn’t a real specific purpose for them to do so.

According to the official list of Bilderberg attendees, there is no doubt that this is the who’s who of elites in the Western world. The list includes the likes of banking and oil tycoon David Rockefeller, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Zoellick, CEO of the Washington Post Donald Graham, Richard Perle, the Queen of Spain and many other incredibly powerful and well known people. Often times the list of Bilderberg attendees does not actually include everyone who makes an appearance.

There is also speculation that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama met at the Bilderberg Meeting yesterday. Jim Johnson the former Fannie Mae CEO and 2008 Bilderberg attendee is one of the individuals tasked to choose Obama’s running mate so an appearance at Bilderberg by Obama and Clinton makes perfect sense. Despite that, the media has been running a story saying that Clinton and Obama met at Senator Dianne Feinstein’s house which flies in the face of logic. There is a distinct possibility that this story is actually cover so Obama and Clinton could briefly attend Bilderberg and possibly work out a deal. Of course, we will probably never know the entire truth. Despite that, both Clinton and Obama were in the Washington DC area yesterday, and Obama’s campaign actually misdirected the press core that follows him. While Obama stayed in the Washington DC area, the media was told to fly out to Chicago only to find out Obama did not fly out with them. Needless to say, the press was not very happy about this. But either way, why all the secrecy if Clinton and Obama are just meeting at Feinstein’s house? The more likely answer is that the secrecy and misdirection was required to conceal the fact that they were actually going to Bilderberg to work something out. If the media tracked down Clinton or Obama to the Bilderberg Meeting, the chances of the mainstream media covering Bilderberg would increase substantially. Currently, several protesters have gathered outside of the Westfields Marriott expressing disgust at the secretive and conspiratorial agenda that these elites have to destroy United States sovereignty and form a centralized world government. There is little doubt that the Bilderberg Meeting would quickly turn into a media circus if mainstream media outlets tracked Obama back to this location.

It remains to be seen what sort of agenda the Bilderberg Group will decide to push forward throughout the next year, but we should find out bits and pieces over the next few weeks and months. The lack of mainstream media coverage of this event is simply incredible especially considering that the American Friends of Bilderberg issued a press release on the meeting. This is more evidence that the mainstream media is run by a bunch of fascist hacks. When over 100 of the most powerful people in the world meet in one location it should be front page news. Instead, the corporate controlled media prefers to focus in on tabloid news stories covering the antics of celebrities and other rubbish. The fact that there has been almost no media coverage of this event in the United States is evidence as to how bought and paid for the corporate controlled media in the United States actually is. Be sure to continue to check out the alternative media for coverage on this very important yearly meeting of the global elite. Simply put, it doesn’t look as if the corporate controlled media has the balls to cover Bilderberg so the alternative media has to do their job for them.

 

Inside the Bilderberg Hotel

 

Department of Justice ordered 125 ipods for Bilderberg Group
Your tax dollars at work…

Infowars
June 5, 2008

Infowars has received an anonymous email reporting that the Department of Justice has placed an order for a large number of ipods with “Bilderberg 2008″ engraved on the back and shipping to Chantilly, Virginia, at American tax payer expense. According to the source, the DOJ is “freaking out” because the order will arrive late.

Of course, it should probably come as no surprise a gaggle of global elitists, meeting in secret outside of the District of Criminals to plot their one world agenda, would get engraved iPod freebies. It is, however, yet another indication that a Bilderberg coterie indeed exists and is meeting in Chantilly, Virginia this week. Thanks to Alex Jones, Jim Tucker, Daniel Estulin and others, we have a better understanding of the Bilderberg agenda, never mind the concerted effort of the corporate media to characterize the Bilderbergers as a harmless association of politicians and business types.

Read Full Article Here

 

Jim Tucker On the Scene at This Year’s Bilderberg

Recent News:

Video from Bilderberg
http://www.infowars.com/?p=2570

Bilderberg Announces 2008 Conference
http://www.centredaily.com/business/story/640197.html

Bilderberg meeting attracts prominent politicians, businessmen
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/..minent_politicians_businessmen_0606.html

Official 2008 Bilderberg Participant List
http://prisonplanet.com/articles/june2008/060608_b_list.htm

Secretive meeting held in United States
http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?enewsid=106654

Photos: Bilderberg 2008 at the Westfields
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/june2008/060608Photos.htm

Dutch PM and foreign minister visit Bush & Bilderberg
http://www.radionetherlands.nl/new..-PM-and-foreign-minister-visit-the-US

Portuguese Newspaper Admits Bilderberg Kingmaker Power
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/..bilderberg_kingmaker.htm

Spooks Infest Marriott Hotel As Bilderberg Begins
Alex Jones’ Bilderberg Report on Coast to Coast AM
Bilderberg, Shadow Supergovernment

 

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Time Warner Tries Internet Rationing
June 3, 2008, 11:19 am
Filed under: 1st amendment, Air Force, AOL, carbon ration, comcast, FCC, free speech, Internet 2, internet allowance, internet blackout, Internet Filtering, internet police, internet tax, Pentagon, ration, Texas, Time Warner, US Constitution | Tags: , ,

Time Warner Tries Internet Rationing

AP
June 2, 2008

You’re used to paying extra if you use up your cell phone minutes, but will you be willing to pay extra if your home computer goes over its Internet allowance?

Time Warner Cable Inc. customers — and, later, others — may have to, if the company’s test of metered Internet access is successful.

On Thursday, new Time Warner Cable Internet subscribers in Beaumont, Texas, will have monthly allowances for the amount of data they upload and download. Those who go over will be charged $1 per gigabyte, a Time Warner Cable executive told the Associated Press.

Metered billing is an attempt to deal fairly with Internet usage, which is very uneven among Time Warner Cable’s subscribers, said Kevin Leddy, Time Warner Cable’s executive vice president of advanced technology.

Just 5 percent of the company’s subscribers take up half of the capacity on local cable lines, Leddy said. Other cable Internet service providers report a similar distribution.

“We think it’s the fairest way to finance the needed investment in the infrastructure,” Leddy said.

Metered usage is common overseas, and other U.S. cable providers are looking at ways to rein in heavy users. Most have download caps, but some keep the caps secret so as not to alarm the majority of users, who come nowhere close to the limits. Time Warner Cable appears to be the first major ISP to charge for going over the limit: Other companies warn, then suspend, those who go over.

Phone companies are less concerned about congestion and are unlikely to impose metered usage on DSL customers, because their networks are structured differently.

Time Warner Cable had said in January that it was planning to conduct the trial in Beaumont, but did not give any details. On Monday, Leddy said its tiers will range from $29.95 a month for relatively slow service at 768 kilobits per second and a 5-gigabyte monthly cap to $54.90 per month for fast downloads at 15 megabits per second and a 40-gigabyte cap. Those prices cover the Internet portion of subscription bundles that include video or phone services. Both downloads and uploads will count toward the monthly cap.

A possible stumbling block for Time Warner Cable is that customers have had little reason so far to pay attention to how much they download from the Internet, or know much traffic makes up a gigabyte. That uncertainty could scare off new subscribers.

Those who mainly do Web surfing or e-mail have little reason to pay attention to the traffic caps: a gigabyte is about 3,000 Web pages, or 15,000 e-mails without attachments. But those who download movies or TV shows will want to pay attention. A standard-definition movie can take up 1.5 gigabytes, and a high-definition movie can be 6 to 8 gigabytes.

Time Warner Cable subscribers will be able to check out their data consumption on a “gas gauge” on the company’s Web page.

The company won’t apply the gigabyte surcharges for the first two months. It has 90,000 customers in the trial area, but only new subscribers will be part of the trial.

Billing by the hour was common for dial-up service in the U.S. until AOL introduced an unlimited-usage plan in 1996. Flat-rate, unlimited-usage plans have been credited with encouraging consumer Internet use by making billing easy to understand.

“The metered Internet has been tried and tested and rejected by the consumers overwhelmingly since the days of AOL,” information-technology consultant George Ou told the Federal Communications Commission at a hearing on ISP practices in April.

Metered billing could also put a crimp in the plans of services like Apple Inc.’s iTunes that use the Internet to deliver video. DVD-by-mail pioneer Netflix Inc. just launched a TV set-top box that receives an unlimited stream of Internet video for as little as $8.99 per month.

Comcast Corp., the country’s largest cable company, has suggested that it may cap usage at 250 gigabytes per month. Bend Cable Communications in Bend, Ore., used to have multitier bandwidth allowances, like the ones Time Warner Cable will test, but it abandoned them in favor of an across-the-board 100-gigabyte cap. Bend charges $1.50 per extra gigabyte consumed in a month.

Air Force Seeks Full Spectrum Dominance Over “Any And All” Computers
http://infowars.net/articles/may2008/140508Computers.htm

Pentagon Secretly Goes To War With The Internet
http://infowars.net/articles/may2008/060508DARPA.htm

FCC proposes free Internet… as long as it’s censored
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/FCC_proposes_free_Internet…_as_long_0529.html

 

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FBI Spies On IMs E-Mails And Cell Phones
April 13, 2008, 2:45 pm
Filed under: 1984, 4th amendment, ACLU, army, Big Brother, bill of rights, Britain, CCTV, Censorship, civil liberties, civil rights, Condoleezza Rice, Coup, DHS, Europe, False Flag, FBI, FOIA, George Bush, google, Hegelian Dialectic, Hillary Clinton, Homeland Security, Internet 2, Iraq, manhattan project, michael chertoff, microchip, Military, nation building, Nuke, occupation, Oppression, Police State, Problem Reaction Solution, Propaganda, Saddam Hussein, spy satellite, Surveillance, United Kingdom, US Constitution, verison, warrantless wiretap, Washington D.C., WMD | Tags: ,

FBI Spies On IMs E-Mails And Cell Phones

John Bryne
Raw Story
April 8, 2008

FBI also spies on home soil for military, documents show; Much information acquired without court order

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been routinely monitoring the e-mails, instant messages and cell phone calls of suspects across the United States — and has done so, in many cases, without the approval of a court.

Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act and given to the Washington Post — which stuck the story on page three — show that the FBI’s massive dragnet, connected to the backends of telecommunications carriers, “allows authorized FBI agents and analysts, with point-and-click ease, to receive e-mails, instant messages, cellphone calls and other communications that tell them not only what a suspect is saying, but where he is and where he has been, depending on the wording of a court order or a government directive,” the Post says.

But agents don’t need a court order to track to track the senders and recipients names, or how long calls or email exchanges lasted. These can be obtained simply by showing it’s “relevant” to a probe.

RAW STORY has placed a request to the Electronic Frontier Foundation for the new documents, and will post them upon receipt.

Some transactional data is obtained using National Security Letters. The Justice Department says use of these letters has risen from 8,500 in 2000 to 47,000 in 2005, according to the Post.

Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union released letters showing that the Pentagon is using the FBI to skirt legal restrictions on domestic surveillance.

Documents show the FBI has obtained the private records of Americans’ Internet service providers, financial institutions and telephone companies, for the military, according to more than 1,000 Pentagon documents reviewed by the ACLU — also using National Security Letters, without a court order.

The new revelations show definitively that telecommunications companies can transfer “with the click of a mouse, instantly transfer key data along a computer circuit to an FBI technology office in Quantico” upon request.

A telecom whistleblower, in an affidavit, has said he help maintain a high-speed DS-3 digital line referred to in house as the “Quantico circuit,” which allowed an outside organization “unfettered” access to the the carrier’s wireless network.

The network he’s speaking of? Verizon.

Verizon denies the allegations vaguely, saying “no government agency has open access to the company’s networks through electronic circuits.”

The Justice Department downplayed the new documents.

A spokesman told the Post that the US is asking only for “information at the beginning and end of a communication, and for information “reasonably available” by the network.

The FBI’s budget for says the collection system increased from $30 million in 2007 to $40 million in 2008, the paper said.

 

Homeland Security invokes nuclear bomb, as Bush quietly links cybersecurity program to NSA

John Byrne
Raw Story
April 9, 2008

Department of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff has dropped the bomb.

At a speech to hundreds of security professionals Wednesday, Chertoff declared that the federal government has created a cyber security “Mahattan Project,” referencing the 1941-1946 project led by the Army Corps of Engineers to develop American’s first atomic bomb.

According to Wired’s Ryan Singel, Chertoff gave few details of what the government actually plans to do.

He cites a little-noticed presidential order: “In January, President Bush signed a presidential order expanding the role of DHS and the NSA in government computer security,” Singel writes. “Its contents are classified, but the U.S. Director of National Intelligence has said he wants the NSA to monitor America’s internet traffic and Google searches for signs of cyber attack.“

The National Security Agency was the key player in President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program, which was revealed by the New York Times in 2005.

Sound familiar? Yesterday, documents acquired by the Electronic Frontier Foundation under the Freedom of Information act showed the FBI has engaged in a massive cyber surveillance project that targets terror suspects emails, telephone calls and instant messages — and is able to get some information without a court order.

Last week, the ACLU revealed documents showing that the Pentagon was using the FBI to spy on Americans. The military is using the FBI to skirt legal restrictions on domestic surveillance to obtain private records of Americans’ Internet service providers, financial institutions and telephone companies, according to Pentagon documents.

Chertoff sought to calm those who worry that Homeland Security will begin to take an invasive Internet role.

“We don’t have to sit on the internet and prevent things from coming in or going out,” Chertoff said, which Singel says refers to China and other countries that censor what web sites their citizens can see. “That’s not what we are going to do.”

Bush wants $42 million more for program
But Chertoff may have had another reason for hyping threats of cyber terrorism. Money.

Congress appropriated $150 million in funding for the program this year, Singel notes. The administration has sought $192 million for 2009.

Speaking of threats, Chertoff remarked: “Imagine, if you will, a sophisticated attack on our financial systems that caused them to be paralyzed. It would shake the foundation of trust on which our financial system works.”

Remarked Singel wryly, “That digital mushroom cloud scenario means the government’s role in computer security must extend beyond federal networks, and reach to shared responsibility for financial, telecommunication and transportation infrastructure, Chertoff said. “The failure of any single system has cascading effects across our country.”

Which recalls another quote by a senior administration official.

Speaking of the alleged threat of Saddam Hussein in 2003, then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice remarked, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

Zombie Computers Called National Threat
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/04/zombie-computer.html

Cyber Security Efforts Like Manhattan Project
http://www.ajc.com/business/content/..ebsecurity_0408.html

New Documents Detail FBI Eavesdropping On Americans’ Emails, IMs and Phone Calls
http://infowars.net/articles/april2008/080408FBI.htm

DHS Wants to Install Permanent Checkpoint in Vermont
http://www.wcax.com/global/story.asp?s=8117897

Hillary Supports Expanded Police State
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/l..r12,0,2210184,print.story

3-Years For Laser Pointer Assault On Helicopter
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,347932,00.html

Anti-Terror Laws Used To Spy On Family
http://www.independent.co.uk/n..sed-to-spy-on-family-807873.html

100 Officers Raid Car Show To Give Tickets
http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/23/2302.asp

D.C. police set to monitor 5,000 cameras
http://www.washingtontimes.c..9/METRO/769331158/1004

CCTV could be used in exam rooms
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7342432.stm

Police officers to be microchipped
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pag..article_id=558597&in_page_id=1770

 

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UK Internet users could be banned over illegal downloads
February 17, 2008, 2:42 pm
Filed under: 1984, Big Brother, Britain, Europe, european union, Internet 2, Police State, RIAA, Surveillance, United Kingdom

UK Internet users could be banned over illegal downloads

The Times
February 12, 2008

People who illegally download films and music will be cut off from the internet under new legislative proposals to be unveiled next week.

Internet service providers (ISPs) will be legally required to take action against users who access pirated material, The Times has learnt.

Users suspected of wrongly downloading films or music will receive a warning e-mail for the first offence, a suspension for the second infringement and the termination of their internet contract if caught a third time, under the most likely option to emerge from discussions about the new law.

Broadband companies who fail to enforce the “three-strikes” regime would be prosecuted and suspected customers’ details could be made available to the courts. The Government has yet to decide if information on offenders should be shared between ISPs.

Read Full Article Here

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Florida Cops Use Serial Killer as Excuse to DNA Swab Drivers
February 9, 2008, 4:58 pm
Filed under: 4th amendment, al-qaeda, Arizona, Border Patrol, Canada, Checkpoints, Control Grid, DHS, DNA Database, enemy combatant, Fascism, FBI, florida, free speech, hate speech, Homeland Security, Internet 2, internet police, Mike Chitwood, Nazi, Police State, RIAA, US Constitution

Florida Cops Use Serial Killer as Excuse to DNA Swab Drivers

Local6
February 7, 2008

Police officers in Daytona Beach are swabbing the mouths of persons of interests during traffic stops with special DNA kits in the hunt for an elusive serial killer, sources close to the investigation told Local 6.

A profiler said the serial killer is likely clean cut and probably has a wife or girlfriend.

And, the Daytona Beach police Chief, Mike Chitwood, said detectives have the killer’s DNA.

“Genetically, we know who he is,” Chitwood said. “We have DNA evidence from the murder scenes — so, we got that. That is never going to go away. And, sooner or later, we will match the DNA to the physical person and bring closure to everything that is going on.”

Agents are using the DNA kits to collect as much DNA as possible during traffic stops and special operations in hopes on making a match.

Local 6 showed agents stopping a person of interest from Canada, who gave his DNA to officers on the street using the DNA kit.

The DNA kits are also being used in prostitution stings in the area.

Chitwood said over time, modern technology will lead to the killer.

“I can tell you that we are working really, really hard,” Chitwood said. “I can tell you that there are a lot of things going on behind the scenes.”

 

Checkpoint USA: Documenting Police State Power

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKDdH8xtpN4

FBI: Professors and Students Are Al-Qaeda
http://rawstory.com//printstory.php?story=9190

BC Man Gets Jail For Internet Hate Speech
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/..06.BCHATE06/TPStory/National

 

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Middle East Internet Blackouts Spur Geopolitical Suspicions
February 3, 2008, 6:36 am
Filed under: Ahmadinejad, Bloggers, egypt, India, Internet 2, internet blackout, Iran, kuwait, Media, middle east, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, UAE


Middle East Internet Blackouts Spur Geopolitical Suspicions
Bloggers says big event could be right around the corner, Iran completely cut off

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
February 1, 2008

Unprecedented mass Internet outages throughout the Middle East and Asia after no less than four undersea Internet cables were cut without explanation are spurring suspicions that a major event of geopolitical proportions may be just around the corner.

Internet blackouts are impacting large tracts of Asia, the Middle East and North Africa after four undersea cable connections were severed. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Pakistan and India, are all experiencing severe problems.

According to InternetTraffic.com, Iran has been completely cut off from the Internet, though Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s blog can still be accessed.

Most notably, Israel and Iraq are unaffected by the outage.

“Stephan Beckert, an analyst with TeleGeography, a research company that consults on global Internet issues, said the damaged cables collectively account for the majority of international communications between Europe and the Middle East,” reports CNN.

Officials say that the cause behind the severing of the cables remains unknown, but United Arab Emirates’ second largest telecom company said the cables were cut due to ships dragging their anchors.

Is this a pre-cursor to throw a veil over an imminent staged event in the Middle East?

“What are the odds? Who benefits? asks the Crimes and Corruptions blog. “Let’s see. Iranian rapprochement: “Recent months have brought signs of a growing rapprochement between Iran and Egypt.”

“What nation would not like this and has subs which could cut the cables? Why do it? Payback as over the net business is badly damaged. Or is this a setup for more? Note the internet is working just fine in Israel.”

Over at WhatReallyHappened.com, Mike Rivero points out that the mysterious cable sabotage could portend another imperial Neo-Con crusade in the works.

“The biggest problem the Bush administration faced during Iraq were images coming over the internet that showed the horrors being visited on the Iraqi people, and exposed the government’s lies about Saddam,” he writes.

“I am greatly concerned that these undersea cable cuttings are intended to prevent the world from seeing something that is about to happen, other than through the government-controlled propaganda/media.”

It’s 2008 — Do You Know Where Your Internet Cables Are?
http://mparent7777-2.blogspot.co..u-know-where-your.html

 

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