The Ministry of Truth was how George Orwell described the mechanism used by government to control information in his seminal novel 1984. A recent trip to Europe has convinced me that the governments of the world have been rocked by the power of the internet and are seeking to gain control of it so that they will have a virtual monopoly on information that the public is able to access.
In Italy, Germany and Britain, the anonymous internet that most Americans are still familiar with is slowly being modified. If one goes into an internet café, it is now legally required in most countries in the European Union to present a government issued form of identification. When I used an internet connection at a Venice hotel, my passport was demanded as a precondition and the inner page, containing all my personal information, was scanned and a copy made for the Ministry of the Interior — which controls the police force. The copy is retained and linked to the transaction.
For home computers, the IP address of the service used is similarly recorded for identification purposes. All records of each and every internet usage, to include credit information and keystrokes that register everything that is written or sent, is accessible to the government authorities on demand, not through the action of a court or an independent authority. That means that there is, de facto, no right to privacy; and a government bureaucrat decides what can and cannot be “reviewed” by the authorities. Currently, the records are maintained for a period of six months, but there is a drive to make the retention period even longer.
The excuses being given for the increasing government intervention into the internet are essentially two:
First is that the anonymity of the internet has permitted criminal behavior, fraud, pornography, and libel.
Second is the security argument that managing the internet is an integral part of the “global war on terror” in that it is used by terrorists to plan their attacks, requiring governments to control those who use it.
The United States government takes the latter argument one step farther, claiming that the internet itself is a vulnerable “natural asset” that could be seized or damaged by terrorists and must be protected, making the case for a massive $100 billion program of cyberwarfare. Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) argues that “violent Islamist extremists” rely on the internet to communicate and recruit; and he has introduced a bill in the Senate that will empower the president to “kill” the internet in case of a national emergency.
But all of the arguments for intervention are essentially themselves fraudulent and are in reality being exploited by those who favor big government and state control.
The anonymity and low-cost nature of the internet means that it can be used to express views that are unpopular or unconventional, which is its strength. It is sometimes used for criminal behavior because it is a mechanism, not because there is something intrinsic in it that makes it a choice of wrongdoers. Before it existed, fraud was carried out through the postal service and over the telephone; pornography circulated freely by other means. As for the security argument, the tiny number of actual terrorists who use the internet do so because it is there and it is accessible. If it did not exist, they would find other ways to communicate, just as they did in pre-internet days. In fact, intelligence sources report that internet use by terrorists is rare because of persistent government monitoring of the websites.
The real reason for controlling the internet is to restrict access to information, something every government seeks to do.
If the American Departments of Defense, Homeland Security and Senator Lieberman have their way, new cybersecurity laws will enable Obama’s administration to take control of the internet in the event of a national crisis. How that national crisis might be defined would be up to the White House, but there have been some precedents that suggest that the response would hardly be respectful of the Bill of Rights.
Many countries already monitor and censor the internet on a regular basis, forbidding access to numerous sites that they consider to be subversive or immoral. During recent unrest, the governments of both Iran and China effectively shut down the internet by taking control of or blocking servers. Combined with switching off cell phone transmitters, the steps proved effective in isolating dissidents. Could it happen here? Undoubtedly.
Once the laws are in place, a terrorist incident, or something that could be plausibly described in those terms, would be all that is needed to have government officials issue the order to bring the internet to a halt.
But the ability to control the internet technically is only part of the story. Laws are being passed that criminalize expressing one’s views on the internet, including both “hate crime” legislation and broadly-drafted laws that make it a crime to support what the government describes loosely as terrorism in any way shape or form.
Regular extra-legal government intrusion in the private lives of citizens is already a reality, particularly in the so-called Western Democracies that have the necessary technology and tech-savvy manpower to tap phones and invade computers.
In Europe, draconian anti-terrorism laws enable security agencies to monitor phone calls and e-mails, in many cases without any judicial oversight. In Britain, the monitoring includes access to detailed internet records that are available for inspection by no less that 653 government agencies, most of which have nothing whatsoever to do with security or intelligence, all without any judicial review.
In the United States, the Pentagon recently sought an internet and news “instant response capability,” which it dubbed the Office of Strategic Influence; and it has also seeded a number of retired military analysts into the major news networks to provide a pro-government slant on the war news. The State Department is also in the game, tasking young officers to engage presumed radicals in debate on their websites, while the growing use of national security letters means that private communications sent through the internet can be accessed by Federal law enforcement agencies. The Patriot-Act-created national security letter does not require judicial oversight — more than 35,000 were issued by the FBI last year; and the recipient of a letter commits a felony if he or she reveals the receipt of the document. In a recent case involving an internet provider in Philadelphia, a national security letter demanded all details of internet messages sent on a certain date, to include account information on clients with social security numbers and credit card references.
The danger is real. Most Americans who are critical of the actions of their own government rely on the internet for information that is uncensored and often provocative, including sites like Campaign for Liberty.
As this article was being written, a story broke reporting that Wordpress-host Blogetery had been shut down by United States authorities along with all 73,000 Blogetery-hosted blogs. The company’s ISP is claiming that it had to terminate Blogetery’s account immediately after being ordered to do so by law enforcement officials “due to material hosted on the server.” The extreme response implies a possible presumed terrorist connection, but it is important to note that no one was charged with any actual offense, revealing that the government can close down sites based only on suspicion.
It is also likely only a matter of time before Obama’s internet warfare teams surface either at the Defense Department or at State. Deliberately overloading and attacking the internet to damage its credibility, witness the numerous sites that have been “hacked” and have had to cease or restrict their activities. But the moves afoot to create a legal framework to completely shut down the internet, and thereby control the “message,” are far more dangerous.
American citizens who are concerned about maintaining their few remaining liberties should sound the alarm and tell the politicians that we don’t need more government abridgement of our First Amendment rights.
Paul Joseph Watson & Kurt Nimmo, PrisonPlanet June 1, 2009
The Obama administration’s new Cybersecurity system will only make the Internet more vulnerable to attack, while creating the framework for a massively upgraded government surveillance grid that will control and regulate every aspect of our daily lives through the implementation of “smart” technology.
Obama’s announcement of the new cybersecurity grid dovetails with a recently introduced Senate bill, the Cybersecurity Act of 2009, that would hand the president the power to shut down the entire Internet in the event of a “cybersecurity” crisis.
“The bill’s draft states that “the president may order a cybersecurity emergency and order the limitation or shutdown of Internet traffic” and would give the government ongoing access to “all relevant data concerning (critical infrastructure) networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting such access,” reports Raw Story.
The legislation would allow the government to tap into any digital aspect of every citizen’s information without a warrant. Banking, business and medical records would be wide open to inspection, as well as personal instant message and e-mail communications.
This is President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program on steroids, yet the reaction from the liberal left has been muted to say the least. Furthermore, the reasoning behind the proposal is a farce, since cybersecurity will make the Internet even more vulnerable to attack. According to Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the program would “basically establish a path for the bad guys to skip down.”
One of the bill’s authors, Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, admitted that the bill was about more than just military or intelligence concerns. “It is a lot more than that. It suddenly gets into the realm of traffic lights and rail networks and water and electricity,” said Rockefeller.
Essentially, this is the framework within which every aspect of our lives will be managed and regulated by a gargantuan government bureaucracy designed to control and shape every aspect of our behavior through our dependence on technology.
Under the cybersecurity grid, our electricity consumption, our water consumption, and every other basic utility that we rely upon will be subject to state regulation.
This is already being introduced through “smart” technology, manifesting in such things as fridges that are controlled by power companies and not the individual. If you are deemed to have bypassed government-approved levels of consumption, your fridge will be automatically turned off remotely.
“A domestic refrigerator that can be turned on and off by the electricity supplier without the homeowner being aware is to go on trial,” reported the Daily Mail in January. “Npower will distribute 300 ‘smart fridges’ free to homeowners throughout Britain within the next five weeks as part of the energy companies’ efforts to tackle climate change.”
“At times of high demand, the National Grid will activate the switches in the fridges to achieve a balance in the power supply. The development means that, for the first time, consumers will lose control over the use of electricity in their own homes,” stated the report.
All British homes are also set to have “smart” electricity and gas meters installed by law by 2020. The meters would “record energy use” according to a Reuters report. Likewise, water companies are preparing to force homeowners to install water meters so that water consumption can be accurately recorded and restricted in times of drought.
This is just the beginning of the imposition of a suffocating prison planet whereby our every action will not only be recorded by Big Brother but also subject to government approval and control.
The Cybersecurity grid will also be an upgrade of the pervasive snoop network that has already been operating under NSA auspices for decades.
During a speech last week on “cybersecurity,” Obama told a whopper. He said the government’s effort to protect us from cyber bad guys “will not include monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic. We will preserve and protect the personal privacy and civil liberties that we cherish as Americans.”
Is it possible Obama has never heard of Mark Klein, the retired AT&T communications technician who said years ago that the company shunted all Internet traffic — including traffic from peering links connecting to other Internet backbone providers — to semantic traffic analyzers, installed in a secret room inside the AT&T central office on Folsom Street in San Francisco? There are similar rooms in Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego, all sucking up internet data.
Klein explained that the multinational corporation is doing this at the behest of the NSA. It is “vacuum-cleaner surveillance” approach that grabs everything. “Despite what we are hearing, and considering the public track record of [the Bush] administration, I simply do not believe their claims that the NSA’s spying program is really limited to foreign communications or is otherwise consistent with the NSA’s charter or with FISA [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act],” said Klein in 2006.
After the NSA showed up in 2002 at AT&T’s Folsom Street facility, Klein began connecting the dots. “You might recall there was a big blowup in the news about the Total Information Awareness [TIA] program, led by Adm. [John] Poindexter, which caused the big upsetness in Congress, because what Poindexter was proposing to do was draw in databases from everywhere — and this was in the New York Times — draw in Internet data, bank records, travel records, everything into one big conglomeration which could be searchable by the government so they could find out everything about what anybody’s doing at any time of day,” Klein told PBS. “And all this would be done without any warrants. This is how it was presented by Poindexter himself in the New York Times, and that caused a great upset, brouhaha, in Congress.”
On January 16, 2003, Senator Russ Feingold introduced legislation to suspend the activity of the Total Information Awareness program pending a Congressional review of privacy issues involved. In February 2003, Congress passed legislation suspending activities of the IAO (Information Awareness Office) pending a Congressional report of the office’s activities.
Congress acted after William Safire published an article in the New York Times claiming “[TIA] has been given a $200 million budget to create computer dossiers on 300 million Americans” (see You Are a Suspect, November 14, 2002).
Of course, the program didn’t go away. Legislators included a classified annex to the Defense Appropriations Act that preserved funding for TIA’s component technologies, if they were transferred to other government agencies. TIA projects continued to be funded under classified annexes to Defense and Intelligence appropriation bills.
“Total Information Awareness — the all-seeing terrorist spotting algorithm-meets-the-mother-of-all-databases that was ostensibly de-funded by Congress in 2003, never actually died, and was largely rebuilt in secret by the NSA, according to the Wall Street Journal’s Siobhan Gorman,” Ryan Singel wrote for Wired on March 10, 2008. “There’s been no real debate in Congress or in the press about whether the government should be allowed to track every Americans phone calls, emails and web browsing.”
Jon Stokes, writing for Ars Technica, notes that TIA technology is nothing new. “TIA-like efforts are still going on” Stokes wrote in 2005, and “the government has been trying to use new technology, like database tech and voice recognition, for domestic surveillance for a long time. And when I say a long time, I mean well before the current administration came into office.” It really got a boost under Clinton in 1995 when the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) was passed. “CALEA mandated that the telcos aid wiretapping by installing remote wiretap ports onto their digital switches so that the switch traffic would be available for snooping by law enforcement.”
In other words, Mark Klein had but scratched the surface.
Truman created the NSA in 1952, supposedly to serve as “America’s ears” abroad, but the agency has long served as a secret Stasi-like organization dedicated to snooping on Americans. The NSA, writes Siobhan Gorman for the Wall Street Journal, “and other intelligence agencies were found to be using their spy tools to monitor Americans for political purposes.”
The NSA’s predecessor, the Armed Forces Security Agency, launched Project SHAMROCK in 1945. It obtained copies of all telegraphic information exiting or entering the United States with the full cooperation of RCA, ITT and Western Union. A sister project known as Project MINARET involved the creation of “watch lists,” by each of the intelligence agencies and the FBI, of those accused of “subversive” domestic activities. The watch lists included such notables as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Jane Fonda, Joan Baez and Dr. Benjamin Spock, according to Patrick S. Poole, writing for Nexus Magazine in 1999. The FBI, the NSA, and other intelligence agencies were actively involved in creating the watch lists.
NSA has attempted to keep up on technology as the secretive agency continues to snoop on “subversives” and others the government considers miscreants. In February, trade publications reported the agency is offering “billions” to any firm able to offer reliable eavesdropping on Skype IM and voice traffic. Skype is particularity troublesome because it utilizes P2P networks, that is to say peer-top-peer (no central server owned and operated by a telecom required). The government and the corporate media may tell you they want to crack down on P2P — for instance, the vastly popular BitTorrent — because of copyright infringement, but a more practical reason is because the government has yet to figure out how to crack the file sharing protocol. Skype and BitTorrent account for a large amount of traffic on the internet.
If you think Obama will roll back the government’s massive and unconstitutional snoop program, think again. On April 3, the Obama Department of Justice filed a motion to dismiss one of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s landmark lawsuits against illegal spying by the NSA. The DOJ demanded that the entire lawsuit be dismissed based on both the Bush administration’s claim that a “state secrets” privilege bars any lawsuits against the executive branch for illegal spying, as well as a novel “sovereign immunity” claim that the Patriot Act bars lawsuits of any kind for illegal government surveillance (see the EFF press release, Obama Administration Embraces Bush Position on Warrantless Wiretapping and Secrecy).
In March, Obama’s coordinator for cybersecurity programs, Rod Beckstrom, a former Silicon Valley entrepreneur, quit because he opposed the role of the NSA in the so-called cybersecurity initiative. Beckstrom said “the threats to our democratic processes are significant if all top level government network security and monitoring are handled by” the NSA.
“Obama’s moves drew praise from key lawmakers on Capitol Hill, who vowed to work with the president to implement new security measures as needed,” CQPolitics reported shortly after his “cybersecurity” speech. “Obama said his cybersecurity adviser — who will be a member of both the National Security Staff and the National Economic Council staff — will head a new office within the White House.”
“We applaud President Obama for highlighting the extraordinarily serious issue of cybersecurity,” Sens. Johns D. Rockefeller IV, D-W.V., and Olympia J. Snowe , R-Maine, said in a joint statement. “No other president in American history has elevated this issue to that level and we think him for his leadership.”
No other president so far has had the power to shut down the internet. The Rockefeller-Snowe bill, S 778, would grant Obama dictatorial power declare a so-called “cyber emergency” and pull the plug, or at least cripple networks deemed a threat. The U.S. government is not seriously worried about Chinese hackers or mischievous kids in Latvia (as Rockefeller cited as a danger) but rather fear free and unfettered speech and activism on the part of its own citizens.
Obama’s promise is merely an effort to string you along with a big fat lie. He has absolutely no respect for you or the Bill of Rights.
YouTube accelerated its aggressive purge against free speech today after the video networking website suspended the Infowarrior Channel, which was the replacement for the previously censored Alex Jones Channel.
When attempting to visit the Infowarrior Channel this morning, one is met with the message, “This account is suspended.”
Just as before, no credible reason has been provided for the suspension of channel. The original Alex Jones Channel was suspended because YouTube claimed that showing a computer print out of a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette news article on camera constituted “copyright violation,” despite the fact that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette denied ever making a copyright complaint.
However, YouTube’s decision to ban both the Infowarrior and the Alex Jones Channel has seemingly backfired, with more Alex Jones videos appearing on YouTube than ever before.
A general video search by date of the term “Alex Jones” on the YouTube website shows that YouTube users have met our challenge to fight back against Internet censorship, not by admitting defeat and abandoning YouTube, but by bombarding the website with more Alex Jones video uploads than ever before.
Not only are there multiple times more Alex Jones videos being added to YouTube on an hourly basis, but they are being uploaded from numerous different user accounts, making it difficult for YouTube to target individual accounts for suspension.
At time of writing, the first two pages of Alex Jones related videos, when one searches by “recently added,” have been uploaded by no less than 14 different user accounts.
The London Daily News has now picked up on the story, reporting on its website:
“Radio and internet journalist Alex Jones has been censored by the internet giant YouTube with the removal of the 'Alex Jones Channel' from the site, causing revulsion across the United States and Europe, in what is increasingly being seen as another example of a 'Big Brother' intervention in the democratic process.”
“Increasingly YouTube has been scorned for its move away from its foundation of 'free speech video' to being seen as part of the establishment it tried to redefine when it was first established,” states the report.
In a related development, Google Video has now suspended all new content from being uploaded and is re-directing users to YouTube, where full videos longer than 10 minutes cannot be uploaded without a special “director” account.
“If current videos will remain online, and for how long, is anyone’s guess. The move to suspend all new content from being uploaded adds another attempt to the growing list of methods used to remove viral content from the Internet that is damaging to the Establishment and the New World Order,” writes Mark Dice of the Resistance Manifesto.
We would normally encourage people to subscribe to the new official Alex Jones channel on YouTube, The Infowarrior, but since that has now also been banned we can only reiterate our challenge for YouTube users to continue to upload Alex Jones videos in large quantities in order to break down the electronic Berlin Wall that YouTube and other large video sharing websites are apparently trying to erect at the behest of their corporate masters.
YouTube’s disdain for free speech is rivaled only by their unsurpassed stupidity. Don’t they realize that the more Alex Jones channels they ban, the more resentment they will create amongst YouTube users? This will only lead to more Alex Jones related videos being posted on YouTube. In engaging in this wanton censorship, YouTube is only making a rod for its own back.
While allowing all kinds of x-rated trash to appear on a website that is frequented by millions of children, YouTube is waging a war on free speech and the alternative media by consistently banning our video channels under phony pretexts invented as a way to hide the real reason behind the purge—YouTube’s transformation from a much-loved and popular user-driven video website to a hollow shell that puts the interests of its corporate sponsors above those of the people who helped make it one of the biggest websites in the world today.
Perhaps YouTube should be renamed “Corporate Tube,” because the “You” is certainly being taken out of the equation altogether.
Infowars Under Sophisticated Denial of Service Attack - Alex Jones and his websites have covered the so-called swine flu “pandemic” and have built a solid case that the outbreak is part of a larger campaign by the government to frighten the populace and institute martial law as specifically detailed in the Department of Defense’s “Implementation Plan for Pandemic Influenza” and other government documents. Alex Jones is the primary media source calling the government’s bluff on the bogus “pandemic” elevated earlier to a level 5 under World Health Organization guidelines. Special Weekend Broadcast: Alex Jones, Swine Flu Hoax - Alex’s emergency weekend broadcast on the Swine Flu Hoax posted on YouTube until the Alex Jones Channel was closed down.
The New World Order Plan is spiritually based: it is a conflict between God and His forces, on the one hand, and Satan and his demonic forces on the other side. Anyone who does not know Biblical doctrine about God and Satan, and who does not know Scriptural prophecy, cannot comprehend the nature of the struggle facing the world today. - David Bay, Cutting Edge Ministries
For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. - Ephesians 6:12
Now the brother shall betray the brother to death, and the father the son; and children shall rise up against their parents, and shall cause them to be put to death. And ye shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake: but he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved. - Mark 13:12,13
For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence... Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. - President John F. Kennedy, April 27, 1961
The book in which they are embodied was first published in the year 1897 by Philip Stepanov for private circulation among his intimate friends. The first time Nilus published them was in 1901 in a book called The Great Within the Small and reprinted in 1905. A copy of this is in the British Museum bearing the date of its reception, August 10, 1906. All copies that were known to exist in Russia were destroyed in the Kerensky regime, and under his successors the possession of a copy by anyone in Soviet land was a crime sufficient to ensure the owner's of being shot on sight. The fact is in itself sufficient proof of the genuineness of the Protocols. The Jewish journals, of course, say that they are a forgery, leaving it to be understood that Professor Nilus, who embodied them in a work of his own, had concocted them for his own purposes.
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