Internet was never free or open and never will be, media studies prof. says

Nathan Diebenow
Raw Story Exclusive

Author: If Americans want a truly free network, 'we've got to build it from scratch'

Secrets outlet WikiLeaks' continuing struggle to remain online in the face of corporate and government censorship is a striking example of something few truly realize: that the Internet is not and never has been democratically controlled, a media studies professor commented to Raw Story.

"[T]he stuff that goes on on the Internet does not go on because the authorties can't stop it," Douglas Rushkoff, author of Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age and Life, Inc.: How Corporatism Conquered the World and How to Take it Back", said. "It goes on because the authorities are choosing what to stop and what not to stop."

Rushkoff told Raw Story that the authorities have the ability to quash cyber dissent due to the Internet's original design, as a top-down, authoritarian device with a centralized indexing system.

Essentially, all one needs to halt a rogue site is to delete its address from the domain name system registry.

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BREAKING: WikiLeaks Being Used to Justify "Patriot Act" Legislation For Internet

Eric Blair
Activist Post

Senator Mitch McConnell called Assange a "high-tech terrorist" on NBC's Meet the Press Sunday and said, "if it‘s found that Assange hasn’t violated the law, then the law should be changed."

Over the weekend, an insightful article by Zen Gardner exposed how WikiLeaks resembles an establishment creation. The article correctly pointed out that the WikiLeaks storyline was conforming nicely to the elite's problem-reaction-solution method, with the solution of more tyranny for our safety.

WikiLeaks is being used to bring in the agenda on so many levels, but most importantly by setting the precedent of shutting down websites for politically "dangerous" content. Gardner writes:

After all, if information is now the enemy, we must carefully police any and every aspect of this dangerous medium -- all for the safety and protection of 'we the people.'

Oh, we’ll still have the Internet, just like you can still fly. You’ll just have to be on the 'approved' list, screened, stamped, zapped, mugged and molested if you want to get 'on the net.'  No biggie. Thanks Julian -- job well done.

 First, let's be clear, the 250,000 pages of cables amounted to some geopolitical Jerry Springer he-said-she-said nonsense to make countries look petty and stupid.  They revealed nothing new that wasn't already known or well suspected.  The information simply stoked existing flames by airing geopolitical dirty laundry, nothing more -- no secret weapons, no major arms deals, no tactical locations of troops, and no revealing the ID of secret agents, etc.

Yet, the government has used its corporate muscle to illegally limit access to WikiLeaks.  It was recently revealed that Amazon, the server host for WikiLeaks, caved to political pressure to drop the website.  Then, in dictatorial fashion, PayPal removed its service for donations to WikiLeaks, and now their bank account has been frozen.  And all this comes a week after the shutdown of 80-plus websites for "copyright infringement," apparently in preparation for passing the "Blacklist" bill.

Now, Gardner's weekend speculation and McConnell's call for action has turned into political reality. The Hill reports today that Senators unveil anti-WikiLeaks legislation, which seems to be a sort-of "Patriot Act" for the Internet.  It's astonishing how fast these guys can write legislation when major events occur. And again, it's tyranny-saurus rex, Joe Lieberman, leading the charge with scandal-ridden Ensign (R-Nev.) and empty-suit Scott Brown (R-Mass.).  Ensign was quoted:

WikiLeaks is not a whistleblower website and Assange is not a journalist.

That, we agree with.  Yet, therein lies the concern for establishing new Internet rules of what can and can't be discussed, and who qualifies as a "journalist."  Look, Assange is clearly either a kinda-smart "useful idiot" or a brilliant insider to the elite. He is certainly not a genuine whistleblower.  Admittedly, though, for those of us who hoped he was the real thing, the elite have used some savvy tactics to boost WikiLeaks' rogue credibility in order to confuse us.

The White House has sent down a warning to government agencies to restrict employee access to WikiLeaks in order to make Assange and crew appear dangerously off limits. Apparently, this warning has already trickled down to "potential" government employees as well.  It was revealed that the State Department warned Columbia University students who may apply for a Federal job:

DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter. 

In other words, the Thought Police are out in full force telling job-hungry students to not apply if they discuss current events if authorities label those events dangerous or harmful to America.  Soon, they'll most likely publicly fire a mid-level employee who went over the line to prove how serious they are. After all, they desperately need to keep the slaves on the plantation.

Furthermore, an Interpol arrest warrant has been issued for Julian Assange for shady rape charges, making him an internationally "wanted" man. 

And Assange is playing the clever but likable villain part so well, too, claiming to have an encrypted "insurance" file in case anyone kills him or terminates the website.  Assange is the perfect international man of mystery with the dark shades in press conferences; endless mainstream media interviews with his exotic accent and short temper; and his famous silver-blond locks. What a great show they're putting on for us.  I'm sure the movie industry is already clamoring for the rights to the script.

In the meantime, it has become the typical political game show. Only in America could Cablegate become such a divide-and-conquer partisan issue.  The Right have successfully defined WikiLeaks as a dangerous terrorist organization and desire the assassination of its leader, while the Left defends the public's right to knowledge, but disparages the damage the documents may cause, thus setting up the obvious bipartisan compromise: tighter control and surveillance of the Internet.

It will go down like this: the Right's extreme calls for Assange's execution will give the establishment the publicly defensible compromise to at least shut down their website by way of pressuring their service providers, etc. And the wimpy Left will compromise by letting it happen, while Assange will be allowed to remain alive and free.

It fits ever so perfectly for them to extend the definition of an "enemy combatant" to a website that publishes "anti-government" material.  Enter Attorney General Eric Holder, who has authorized "significant" action into the probe of WikiLeaks.  Can't you just smell the tyranny coming to the Internet?

Ron Paul said it best in his book Revolution: A Manifesto: "Truth is treason in an empire of lies." Paul reiterated this principle of transparency in a recent interview.  Paul said we need more WikiLeaks if we expect to live in a free society:

'In a free society we're supposed to know the truth,' Paul insisted.  'In a society where truth becomes treason, then we're in big trouble.'

Given the angry calls for action and today's developments of government proposals, not to mention the blight of Internet legislation already on the table, we will likely get the exact opposite of the free-flow of information that Paul is advocating.  In fact, if history is any indicator, get ready for nothing less than the Patriot Act for the Internet!

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$335,906 Is The Price Of The Constitution

Daniel Greenfield
Eurasia Review

When Senators give speeches, they will say that you can't put a price on freedom. But as it turns out you can. You can actually put an exact dollar amount on the Constitution. And that amount is $335,906.

That's the amount that Hollywood gave Senator Patrick Leahy. And in return, Leahy gave them COICA. That's not the same of some new disease, it's the abbreviation for Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, the biggest and more comprehensive internet censorship proposal in the history of this country. It would give Attorney General Eric Holder the power to create a blacklist of websites and force all companies that do business in the United States to comply with that blacklist.

Ever since the Clinton Administration's Communications Decency Act, Democrats have been obsessed with censoring the internet. And that drive has kicked into high gear again. COICA is the most ambitious plan to enact government control over freedom of expression on the internet since the days of the CDA.


While this bill was crafted on behalf of the entertainment industry, the applications go far beyond that. Websites that feature collections of articles, such as FreeRepublic or DemocraticUnderground could easily be targeted under the terms of COICA. And so could many blogs, which list entire articles or cite extensively from them. Any site or blog that embeds videos or images which are not authorized by the copyright holder could be similarly targeted. And with the Attorney General of a highly politicized administration wielding the power to preemptively shutter and blacklist entire websites, it would be all too easy for COICA to be used as a club for suppressing dissent.

While on paper COICA is only supposed to apply to 0.01 percent of the internet, in its broadest interpretation it could apply to anywhere between 30/40 percent of the internet. And the damage can go even beyond that. COICA gives the AG's office a billy club that can destroy any company's business overnight. And will that billy club be used strictly for copyright oversight alone? When the Attorney General's office has the power to shut down any webhost, costing its owners millions in revenues, what will the owners do when they're asked to shut down a site that does not actually fall under COICA? Will they call the AG's bluff and prepare for a legal battle to restore the site and hope their business survives, or will they do the practical thing and comply?

We already know the answer to that. Some larger companies with deep pockets will put up a fight. Maybe. Smaller companies will just go along. And this is not what free speech was supposed to look like in America.

COICA is just the beginning. It's the first step in transforming the internet into an environment completely controlled by the government. If the Senate can move along a law that creates a copyright blacklist, the next step is to create a blacklist for political extremism. Once we've established the principle that you can just pull a switch and blacklist sites that the government doesn't like, where does it end?

Liberals screeched for years about the Patriot Act, but very little attention is being paid to COICA, which is primarily co-sponsored by Democratic senators. The endless Hollywood movies bemoaning the oppression of the Patriot Act, won't give way to movies bemoaning COICA. But that's because COICA was written for Hollywood's benefit. And the forms of oppression that are practiced by the people who make movies about oppression, naturally don't make it into movies.

Some conservatives are defending COICA as a means of protecting private property, but it's not. It creates a privileged status for specific industries through government action, which those specific industries paid for. This is classic 'Rent Seeking Behavior' which uses government force to protect a bad business model. Hollywood is suffering from the plague of piracy because of its own convoluted structure and its need to negotiate every iota of every action with its own unions. Rather than adapt and evolve, it uses lawyers and lobbyists to protect its defective business practices. And having a 'red phone' to the AG's office in order to protect defective business practices does the entertainment industry no favors in the long term.

COICA is a unconstitutional bailout of our freedoms and internet civil rights for a specific industry that has troubling implications for everyone. And it's a demonstration of just how dangerous the intersection of corporate lobbyists and politicians can be. Some conservatives believe that supporting capitalism means blindly endorsing any corporate action. It does not. When corporations subvert public representation and harness government force for their own benefit, then they act like a part of the government.

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Endgame Legislation: Lame Duck Session Ushers in Tyranny
End of Free Internet: US Senate Committee Approves Internet "Blacklist" Bill

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US Senate Bill S.3804 - Allows Government To Shutdown Whistleblower Websites

Just the other day, President Obama urged other countries to stop censoring the Internet. But now the United States Congress is trying to censor the Internet here at home. A new bill being debated this week would have the Attorney General create an Internet blacklist of sites that US Internet providers would be required to block. - The first vote is scheduled Thursday!



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Independent News Site Fraudulently Blacklisted by Internet Explorer After Negative Bill Gates Article

Activist Post

Is the Internet Blacklist already being enforced via web browsers?  Microsoft's Internet Explorer recommended that visitors should not access Activist Post today, claiming the site contains threats to outside computers.  First, we want to assure all of our visitors that this is blatantly FALSE. Our site does not contain any viruses, malware, or data-harvesting capabilities.  We have a voluntary and confidential sign-up mechanism for our free weekly newsletter, which apparently now falls under the category of illegal data mining according to Microsoft.

Our website runs on a Google Blogger back-end which immediately declines any material that may be "malicious."  This back-end also makes it easy for us to scan our entire site for potential viruses or other problems.  This scan is, and always has been, 100% clean.  Furthermore, our technical team ran a check at Website Grader which tests various aspects of a site, including cleanliness Activist Post scored a 97% (FAR above the average).  Yet, Microsoft has taken an anonymous tip from a user as enough evidence to deter access to our site.  Meanwhile, other browsers such as Chrome, Safari, and Firefox have similar malware protection, yet none of them flagged Activist Post today.

What's interesting about the timing of this possible censorship is that it comes on a day when we posted an article that reflects negatively on Bill Gates.  It appears that his empire carries out vendettas by deterring access to websites not favorable to their overlord.  We did receive a complaint through our contact form from a reader listing the e-mail address: office@heavenaboveyourlife.com.  This email address is not valid and the domain is not currently registered. 

All of the information about the cleanliness of our site, and the potential false tip, was easily obtained by our tech staff within minutes.  Why couldn't a behemoth like Microsoft do the same?

This appears to be the latest tactic the establishment will use to shut down access to alternative voices, making visitors believe that the site is "harmful" to their computer.  We have been informed by Microsoft that this is basically a guilty-until-proven-innocent situation, since we certainly weren't contacted to counter any claim in advance of the warning they posted. 

Internet Explorer users represent 42% of our visitors, while representing a similar overall market share.  For alternative sites that are 100% user-funded through visiting sponsors and donations, this can be a damaging blow that has the potential to force people out of business.  Welcome to the free market of ideas.

Our technical team is working hard on restoring our site to Internet Explorer users.  Presently, it is fully accessible and safe to view from Firefox, Google Chrome, and Safari.  In protest of such shenanigans, we hope that readers will drop IE and use a different browser, as this type of censorship is likely to continue from the Gates Gestapo.  One can also send a statement to Microsoft that our site has been clean in your experience.  Click HERE to submit.

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More Government Idiocy: Internet Black Lists

Karl Denninger
Market Ticker

There's dumb - and then there's really dumb, predicated on people who simply don't understand what they're doing, and should be barred from authoring legislation until they consult with some people who do know what they're doing.

The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) was introduced just one week ago, but it's greased and ready to move, with a hearing in front of the Judiciary Committee this Thursday. If people don't speak out, US citizens could soon find themselves joining Iranians and Chinese in being blocked from accessing broad chunks of the public Internet.

Help us stop this bill in its tracks! Click here to sign our petition.

COICA creates two blacklists of Internet domain names. Courts could add sites to the first list; the Attorney General would have control over the second. Internet service providers and others (everyone from Comcast to PayPal to Google AdSense) would be required to block any domains on the first list. They would also receive immunity (and presumably the good favor of the government) if they block domains on the second list.

The lists are for sites "dedicated to infringing activity," but that's defined very broadly -- any domain name where counterfeit goods or copyrighted material are "central to the activity of the Internet site" could be blocked.

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Age of Censorship and Internet Trade Wars

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