Floridians, Help Us Stop Your State From Outlawing Anonymous Websites

Mitch Stoltz

Floridians, we need your help to stop a dangerous anti-anonymity bill. This week, the Florida state legislature is considering a bill that would make it illegal to run any website or service anonymously, if the site fits a vague category of “disseminat[ing]” “commercial” recordings or videos—even the site owner’s own work. Outlawing anonymous speech raises a serious First Amendment problem, and laws like this one have been abused by police and the entertainment industry.

The bill, which is moving through Florida House and Senate committees this week, requires anyone who operates a website or Internet service to “disclose his or her true and correct name, physical address, and telephone number or e-mail address.” It would apply to any website or service “dealing in substantial part in the electronic dissemination of commercial recordings or audiovisual works, directly or indirectly,” to Florida consumers.

A great many websites could be de-anonymized by this statute, whether they are hosted in Florida or not.

Man shot and kicked in the face by LAPD during downtown artwalk

Youtube

Many many helicopters hover above the streets. Full riot gear was worn by some officers during the ordeal. Rubber bullets and other projectiles were in use. The police were very aggressive. All this over chalk painting on the sidewalk?

In the video @ 4:49, you can see a man in a white t-shirt shot at very close range with a projectile weapon. He falls to the ground and is clearly incapacitated. The police then run up and violently kick him in the face while he is laying on the ground. He is then taken away in cuffs.

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Video Exposing Google Chief Schmidt Censored by You Tube

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars

Google-owned You Tube has sensationally censored a video clip showing Eric Schmidt at the 2011 Bilderberg Group conference, by removing the “honors” associated with the Alex Jones Channel and preventing the clip from going viral, while You Tube has also threatened to terminate the account altogether after baseless accusations of racism were made against an Obama Joker video for the second time.

Google chief Eric Schmidt betrayed his notorious disregard for online privacy in 2009 when he told CNBC, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

Maybe Schmidt should take his own advice, because he’s obviously keen to prevent the world from finding out about his 2011 attendance of the Bilderberg conference and how he discussed new ways to police the Internet with other technology moguls from the likes of Facebook and Microsoft.

Journalists Attacked by Police For Filming Protest (Video)

YouTube -- RT

Wisconsin police are filmed arresting members of the press that were covering a demonstration at the state's Capitol Building this week. A cuffed reporter is dragged to the ground as an irate cop goes after another journalist.

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News St. Paul Activists Awarded $50,000 for Repressive 2008 Government Raids

In 2008, the FBI and St. Paul Police raided the home of an activist before the Republican National Convention.  Three years later, righteous victory against repression. 

DJ Pangburn
Death and Taxes

In 2008, just before the Republican National Convention, the home of Sarah Coffey, Erin Stalnaker and Kris Hermes–all activists–was raided by the FBI and St. Paul Police.  The police arrived at the home without a warrant and the three activists denied the task-force entry, which was well within their rights.

The police then sought and received a warrant from a judge.  The motivation?  A box said to contain weapons, but which actually housed (dramatic pause) vegan literature.  The Theater of the Absurd rearing its ugly political head yet again.  According to Infoshop News, that was only a bit of the absurdity surrounding this illegal raid.

The search warrant affidavit, which was under seal until a month after the raid in a likely attempt to avoid media scrutiny, relied solely on a confidential informant who made the claim that weapons were being shipped to 951 Iglehart using the U.S. Postal Service. In a sensationalist move, the police also tried to tie property owner Michael Whalen to a defunct 1970s political group, the Symbionese Liberation Army, in order to bolster the warrant’s outrageous claim of arms shipments. However, once inside 951 Iglehart, police discovered that the boxes contained only vegan literature. Unsatisfied, police broke through a locked attic door to enter the neighboring but separate 949 Iglehart, which plaintiffs claimed was the operation’s true objective.

In 2009, Coffey, Stalnaker and Hermes filed a lawsuit against the FBI and the St. Paul Police for violating their First, Fourth and Fourteenth amendment rights.

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The Patriot Act: When Truth Becomes Treason

Dees Illustration

Susan Lindauer
former CIA Asset covering Iraq & Libya
The Intel Hub

Most Americans believe they understand the dangers of the Patriot Act, which Congress has vowed to extend 4 more years in a vote later this week. Trust me when I say, Americans are not nearly frightened enough.

Ever wonder why the truth about 9/11 never got exposed? Why Americans don’t have a clue about leadership fraud surrounding the War on Terror?

Why Americans don’t know if the 9/11 investigation was really successful? Why the Iraqi Peace Option draws a blank? Somebody has known the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden— or his grave—for the past 10 years. But nobody’s talking to the people.

In significant part, that’s because of the Patriot Act— a law that equates free speech with sedition. It’s got a big agenda, with 7,000 pages of Machiavellian code designed to interrupt individual questioning of government policy.

In this brave new world, free speech under the Bill of Rights effectively has been declared a threat to government controls for maintaining stability. And the Patriot Act has become the premiere weapon to attack whistle blowers and dissidents who challenge the comfort of political leaders hiding inconvenient truths from the public.

It’s all the rage on Capitol Hill, as leaders strive to score TV ratings, while demogauging their “outstanding leadership performance” on everything from national security to environmental policy.

Gagged By Huffington Post For Questioning Official Bin Laden Assassination Story

The Slog

After comment-threading at Huffpost this afternoon about the range of inconsistencies between the White House account of the anti-Bin Laden operation and what appear to be the facts, this little message greeted me when I went to leave a link to tonight’s piece there an hour ago:

Post a comment

Sorry, but you have been banned from commenting.

There was nothing obscene, hateful or libellous in what I wrote. Just a comment saying how come helicopters fell out of the sky but no Navy seals died; and by the way where does it say in the Q’ran that Muslims should be buried at sea.

Two weeks ago, a threader here told me to ‘expect more censorship now Arianna has sold out to the right-wing AOL mavericks’. Oh how I laughed then. Oh how silly I feel now….especially given this post from a couple of days ago:

http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2011/05/01/stop-moaning-and-demand-the-right-to-complain/

So, it looks like the Democrats have caught the Guardian disease.

I believe Bin Laden is dead. But I also believe we are being fed a stream of bollocks about who knew what, and when. I believe it is my right in a liberal democratic society and a free Web to post about it. 

Clearly, I’m mistaken.

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Why Are Wars Not Being Reported Honestly?

The public needs to know the truth about wars. So why have journalists colluded with governments to hoodwink us?

John Pilger
Global Research

In the US Army manual on counterinsurgency, the American commander General David Petraeusdescribes Afghanistan as a "war of perception . . . conducted continuously using the news media". What really matters is not so much the day-to-day battles against the Taliban as the way the adventure is sold in America where "the media directly influence the attitude of key audiences". Reading this, I was reminded of the Venezuelan general who led a coup against the democratic government in 2002. "We had a secret weapon," he boasted. "We had the media, especially TV. You got to have the media."

Never has so much official energy been expended in ensuring journalists collude with the makers of rapacious wars which, say the media-friendly generals, are now "perpetual". In echoing the west's more verbose warlords, such as the waterboarding former US vice-president Dick Cheney, who predicated "50 years of war", they plan a state of permanent conflict wholly dependent on keeping at bay an enemy whose name they dare not speak: the public.


At Chicksands in Bedfordshire, the Ministry of Defence's psychological warfare (Psyops) establishment, media trainers devote themselves to the task, immersed in a jargon world of "information dominance", "asymmetric threats" and "cyberthreats". They share premises with those who teach the interrogation methods that have led to a public inquiry into British military torture in Iraq. Disinformation and the barbarity of colonial war have much in common.

Of course, only the jargon is new. In the opening sequence of my film, The War You Don't See, there is reference to a pre-WikiLeaks private conversation in December 1917 between David Lloyd George, Britain's prime minister during much of the first world war, and CP Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian. "If people really knew the truth," the prime minister said, "the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know, and can't know."

In the wake of this "war to end all wars", Edward Bernays, a confidante of President Woodrow Wilson, coined the term "public relations" as a euphemism for propaganda "which was given a bad name in the war". In his book, Propaganda (1928), Bernays described PR as "an invisible government which is the true ruling power in our country" thanks to "the intelligent manipulation of the masses". This was achieved by "false realities" and their adoption by the media. (One of Bernays's early successes was persuading women to smoke in public. By associating smoking with women's liberation, he achieved headlines that lauded cigarettes as "torches of freedom".)


The War You Don't See trailer from John Pilger on Vimeo.

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Assange Prosecution: A Brazen Effort to Kill Alternative Media

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars

Now that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is in custody, we can expect the U.S. government to request his extradition and prosecute the Australian for espionage. “Any such proceedings would set up a test of whether the First Amendment’s protection for a free press extends to a website with a worldwide audience,” notes McClatchy today.

In 1917 the United States enacted the Espionage Act, a law that has made it a crime to “willfully communicate” secret government information that could expose national secrets held by officialdom. Since the law was passed, however, the government has avoided prosecuting journalists for publishing classified information.



“The First Amendment’s freedom of speech and the press has protected journalists in the past, though it is not clear whether the courts would consider Assange a journalist,” writes McClatchy.

Assange’s “actions are not those of a responsible journalist that would enjoy the protection of the Constitution,” opines Jeffrey H. Smith, a former general counsel at the CIA. Government, of course, will decided what is responsible and irresponsible journalism and the high court will enshrine this in law.

The establishment – including its highest court – may eventually restrict the First Amendment and have its protection apply only to selected corporate media journalists and other propaganda functionaries of the elite.

Any such ruling by the Supreme Court will send a message to investigative journalists and alternative news organizations and publications – you will be prosecuted for revealing “government secrets,” in short it may soon be illegal to report information the government wants to keep hidden from the American people.

According to a Congressional Research Service analysis, the Supreme Court has not resolved the question of “whether, in cases where information has been acquired unlawfully by a newspaper or by a source, government may ever punish not only the unlawful acquisition, but the ensuing publication as well.”

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Meet the Most Dangerous Man in Cyberspace: The American Behind Wikileaks

Rolling Stone

Photograph by Peter Yang

In the spring of this year, before Wikileaks unleashed a flood of secret U.S. government documents, Rolling Stone met with "hacktivist" Jacob Appelbaum, a volunteer for the organization and a die-hard true believer in freedom of speech and personal privacy. Reporter Nathaniel Rich learned about Appelbaum's troubled childhood, his first forays into activism — in 2005, he set up unauthorized satellite internet connections in Iraq and, right after Hurricane Katrina, in one of New Orleans's poorest neighborhoods — and his growth into a global force for his beliefs.

Appelbaum is the public face of Tor Project, an organization that, by introducing intermediaries between computers, is used to prevent some of the world's most repressive regimes from tracking activists' movements online. Dissidents from China, Tunisia and a suspected high-level member of the Iranian military have used it to protect their identities.

While Appelbaum's work for Tor has been substantial, more notorious is his extensive work for Wikileaks. "Jake has been a tireless promoter behind the scenes of our cause," founder Julian Assange said.

The Wikileaks controversy has led Appelbaum to go underground, using Tor to protect himself and evade surveillance. He's set about living a life of anonymity, one where his mail is sent to a private drop, he pays rent in cash, and he doesn't enter his home address into any computer.

"You can never take that information back once it's out there," he said. "And it takes very little information to ruin a person's life."

Meet the American Hacker Behind Wikileaks [RS]

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Don't Shoot Messenger for Revealing Uncomfortable Truths

Julian Assange
WikiLeaks

In 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide's The News, wrote: "In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win."

His observation perhaps reflected his father Keith Murdoch's exposé that Australian troops were being needlessly sacrificed by incompetent British commanders on the shores of Gallipoli. The British tried to shut him up but Keith Murdoch would not be silenced and his efforts led to the termination of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.


Nearly a century later, WikiLeaks is also fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public.

I grew up in a Queensland country town where people spoke their minds bluntly. They distrusted big government as something that could be corrupted if not watched carefully. The dark days of corruption in the Queensland government before the Fitzgerald inquiry are testimony to what happens when the politicians gag the media from reporting the truth.

These things have stayed with me. WikiLeaks was created around these core values. The idea, conceived in Australia, was to use internet technologies in new ways to report the truth.

WikiLeaks coined a new type of journalism: scientific journalism. We work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to prove it is true. Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately?

Democratic societies need a strong media and WikiLeaks is part of that media. The media helps keep government honest. WikiLeaks has revealed some hard truths about the Iraq and Afghan wars, and broken stories about corporate corruption.

People have said I am anti-war: for the record, I am not. Sometimes nations need to go to war, and there are just wars. But there is nothing more wrong than a government lying to its people about those wars, then asking these same citizens to put their lives and their taxes on the line for those lies. If a war is justified, then tell the truth and the people will decide whether to support it.

If you have read any of the Afghan or Iraq war logs, any of the US embassy cables or any of the stories about the things WikiLeaks has reported, consider how important it is for all media to be able to report these things freely.

WikiLeaks is not the only publisher of the US embassy cables. Other media outlets, including Britain's The Guardian, The New York Times, El Pais in Spain and Der Spiegel in Germany have published the same redacted cables.

Yet it is WikiLeaks, as the co-ordinator of these other groups, that has copped the most vicious attacks and accusations from the US government and its acolytes. I have been accused of treason, even though I am an Australian, not a US, citizen. There have been dozens of serious calls in the US for me to be "taken out" by US special forces. Sarah Palin says I should be "hunted down like Osama bin Laden", a Republican bill sits before the US Senate seeking to have me declared a "transnational threat" and disposed of accordingly. An adviser to the Canadian Prime Minister's office has called on national television for me to be assassinated. An American blogger has called for my 20-year-old son, here in Australia, to be kidnapped and harmed for no other reason than to get at me.

And Australians should observe with no pride the disgraceful pandering to these sentiments by Julia Gillard and her government. The powers of the Australian government appear to be fully at the disposal of the US as to whether to cancel my Australian passport, or to spy on or harass WikiLeaks supporters. The Australian Attorney-General is doing everything he can to help a US investigation clearly directed at framing Australian citizens and shipping them to the US.

Prime Minister Gillard and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have not had a word of criticism for the other media organisations. That is because The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel are old and large, while WikiLeaks is as yet young and small.

We are the underdogs. The Gillard government is trying to shoot the messenger because it doesn't want the truth revealed, including information about its own diplomatic and political dealings.

Has there been any response from the Australian government to the numerous public threats of violence against me and other WikiLeaks personnel? One might have thought an Australian prime minister would be defending her citizens against such things, but there have only been wholly unsubstantiated claims of illegality. The Prime Minister and especially the Attorney-General are meant to carry out their duties with dignity and above the fray. Rest assured, these two mean to save their own skins. They will not.

Every time WikiLeaks publishes the truth about abuses committed by US agencies, Australian politicians chant a provably false chorus with the State Department: "You'll risk lives! National security! You'll endanger troops!" Then they say there is nothing of importance in what WikiLeaks publishes. It can't be both. Which is it?

It is neither. WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing history. During that time we have changed whole governments, but not a single person, as far as anyone is aware, has been harmed. But the US, with Australian government connivance, has killed thousands in the past few months alone.

US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates admitted in a letter to the US congress that no sensitive intelligence sources or methods had been compromised by the Afghan war logs disclosure. The Pentagon stated there was no evidence the WikiLeaks reports had led to anyone being harmed in Afghanistan. NATO in Kabul told CNN it couldn't find a single person who needed protecting. The Australian Department of Defence said the same. No Australian troops or sources have been hurt by anything we have published.

But our publications have been far from unimportant. The US diplomatic cables reveal some startling facts:

• The US asked its diplomats to steal personal human material and information from UN officials and human rights groups, including DNA, fingerprints, iris scans, credit card numbers, internet passwords and ID photos, in violation of international treaties. Presumably Australian UN diplomats may be targeted, too.
• King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia asked the US to attack Iran.
• Officials in Jordan and Bahrain want Iran's nuclear program stopped by any means available.
• Britain's Iraq inquiry was fixed to protect "US interests".
• Sweden is a covert member of NATO and US intelligence sharing is kept from parliament.
• The US is playing hardball to get other countries to take freed detainees from Guantanamo Bay. Barack Obama agreed to meet the Slovenian President only if Slovenia took a prisoner. Our Pacific neighbour Kiribati was offered millions of dollars to accept detainees.

In its landmark ruling in the Pentagon Papers case, the US Supreme Court said "only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government". The swirling storm around WikiLeaks today reinforces the need to defend the right of all media to reveal the truth.

Article Source: The Australian.

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Mask-wearing protestors in D.C. can now be arrested

"V" at G20 in Toronto

Freeman Klopott
Washington Examiner

Wearing a mask while protesting outside a residence without telling D.C. police first could now get you arrested.

The D.C. Council has unanimously passed a strongly worded bill to deal with an animal rights group that has been known to wear masks and appear unannounced outside District residents' homes shouting things like "You should die." Residents have been complaining to their council members that they felt "terrorized." Critics of the bill say it's too broad and limits First Amendment rights.


"They scared some people so much that they feel like prisoners in their own homes," said Ward 3 Councilwoman Mary Cheh, who sponsored the Residential Tranquility Act of 2010.

Police can be called, Cheh said, but they don't always have the legal grounds to arrest the protesters.

The animal rights group in question, Defending Animal Rights Today and Tomorrow is the local offshoot of Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty. The international group was set up in 1996 to organize protests against Huntington Life Sciences, a European company that provides animals for corporate science experiments.

According to the group's Web site, they recently protested outside the Dupont Circle home of a Goldman Sachs executive, who the group claims is connected to HLS. It's unclear how, and DARTT didn't respond to requests for comment for this story. Pictures show the protesters wearing masks, and white trench coats with a bloodlike substance on them.

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CONFIRMED: Psychiatric Manual Labels Free-Thinkers, Non-conformers as Mentally Ill

ALERT: Thought Police Lurking

Brian D. Hill
USWGO

It is now confirmed by USWGO News that the DSM-IV-TR Manual labels free thinkers, non conformers, civil disobedient advocates, those that question authority, and people considered hostile toward the government (aka Oath keepers and local militias) as mentally ill with the illness titled “oppositional defiant disorder” or ODD.

It was reported on October 8 2010 fromOffTheGrid News that anybody who is disobedient, defiant, a free thinker, or even considered hostile toward authority was to be labeled by psychiatrists as ‘Mentally Ill’.

Now I have got my hands on a ebook version of the year 2000 version of the ‘Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-IV-TR Fourth Edition (Text Revision) By the American Psychiatric Association version DSM-TV-TR (The non TR Version was said to be older and so I got the newer one which had the information that Off The Grid News warned about).

Now as I search up the keywords “oppositional defiant disorder” on adobe reader I found exactly what Off The Grid News was talking about. So it is now Confirmed basically that anyone who disobeys authority or even questions authority is now considered mentally ill and can be thrown in a prison-like mental institution under tax payers dollars.

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RELATED ARTICLE:
Illness is Health

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