Tag: free speech

Cyberwar Scam Designed to Destroy Open Internet

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
March 2, 2010

On March 1, Ryan Singel, writing for Wired, accused the government of plotting to destroy the open and freedom-loving internet. Readers of Infowars and Prison Planet have known this for some time, but it is nice to know a quasi-establishment publication is now telling the truth and warning its readers about the threat to liberty posed by the government.

Cyber ShockWave, a “war game” designed to hype the supposed threat to U.S. infrastructure.

“The biggest threat to the open internet is not Chinese government hackers or greedy anti-net-neutrality ISPs, it’s Michael McConnell, the former director of national intelligence,” writes Singel. “McConnell’s not dangerous because he knows anything about SQL injection hacks, but because he knows about social engineering. He’s the nice-seeming guy who’s willing and able to use fear-mongering to manipulate the federal bureaucracy for his own ends, while coming off like a straight shooter to those who are not in the know.”

The former intel boss, now vice president of the spooky Booz Allen Hamilton corporation (notorious for connections to 9/11 and a key DARPA client), has been trotted out to sell “Cybaremaggedon” (as Singel appropriately characterizes it) to the American people. McConnell insists the internet needs to be re-engineered:

We need to develop an early-warning system to monitor cyberspace, identify intrusions and locate the source of attacks with a trail of evidence that can support diplomatic, military and legal options — and we must be able to do this in milliseconds. More specifically, we need to re-engineer the Internet to make attribution, geo-location, intelligence analysis and impact assessment — who did it, from where, why and what was the result — more manageable. The technologies are already available from public and private sources and can be further developed if we have the will to build them into our systems and to work with our allies and trading partners so they will do the same.

“He’s talking about changing the internet to make everything anyone does on the net traceable and geo-located so the National Security Administration can pinpoint users and their computers for retaliation if the U.S. government doesn’t like what’s written in an e-mail, what search terms were used, what movies were downloaded,” writes Singel. “Or the tech could be useful if a computer got hijacked without your knowledge and used as part of a botnet.”

McConnell says the government needs to create a new Cold War, “one complete with the online equivalent of ICBMs and Eisenhower-era, secret-codenamed projects.”

Not directed against Muslims in remote backwater caves, mind you, but the real enemy — the American people who are increasingly aroused, thanks in large part to the internet.

Alex Jones talks about cybersecurity legislation on Russia TV.

The Bush era intel boss hyped the overblown Chinese hacker threat in “breathless” stories published in The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. The world’s largest security companies McAfee and Symantec have downplayed the story. Singel points out that such fear-mongering is almost completely void of facts.

The anti-open internet echo chamber includes a speech delivered by Lawrence E. Strickling, Assistant Commerce Secretary:

In fact, “leaving the Internet alone” has been the nation’s internet policy since the internet was first commercialized in the mid-1990s. The primary government imperative then was just to get out of the way to encourage its growth. And the policy set forth in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was: “to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet and other interactive computer services, unfettered by Federal or State regulation.”

This was the right policy for the United States in the early stages of the Internet, and the right message to send to the rest of the world. But that was then and this is now.

Now? The Pentagon wants to take out enemies with the online equivalent of ICBMs in order to prevent cyberattacks, privacy intrusions and copyright violations (and, of course, take out the real threat — the alternative media overshadowing the staid establishment corporate media).

“As anyone slightly versed in the internet knows, the net has flourished because no government has control over it,” writes Singel. “But there are creeping signs of danger.”

The primary creeping sign is the cybersecurity bill now in the Senate under the direction of the renown internet hater, senator Jay Rockefeller. If passed, Obama would have the ability to initiate “network contingency plans to ensure key federal or private services did not go offline during a counterattack of unprecedented scope,” according to Tony Romm of The Hill.

“Too much is at stake for us to pretend that today’s outdated cybersecurity policies are up to the task of protecting our nation and economic infrastructure,” Rockefeller said. “We have to do better and that means it will take a level of coordination and sophistication to outmatch our adversaries and minimize this enormous threat.”

Rockefeller and the government have but one serious adversary — the American people who are circumventing establishment propaganda via the internet.

The recently passed House cybersecurity bill and the Senate’s version now under considered are peddled as urgent action against Russian and Chinese hackers hellbent on taking down the power grid and the smart phone network.

In fact, all the fear-mongering is a smoke screen for the real purpose of this legislation — to close down the free and open internet and viciously attack those who dare tell the truth and organize opposition to a predatory and dictatorial government.

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/cyberwar-scam-designed-to-destroy-open-internet/

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Think Government Is Corrupt? You May Face 10 Years In Jail

South Carolina forces “subversives” to register with the authorities or do hard time

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, February 8, 2010

Subversives who think government is corrupt and should be controlled by the people face 10 years in prison and a $25,000 dollar fine if they fail to register with authorities in South Carolina, in another chilling example of how free speech and dissent is being criminalized in America.

The state’s “Subversive Activities Registration Act” is now officially on the books and mandates that “Every member of a subversive organization, or an organization subject to foreign control, every foreign agent and every person who advocates, teaches, advises or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States … shall register with the Secretary of State.”

Of course, the right to overthrow a government that has become corrupt, abusive and completely unrepresentative of its electorate is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence – that’s how America came to be a Republic in the first place – advocating or teaching that the people should “control” the government via their elected representatives is a basic function of a democratic society, but this law effectively makes it a terrorist offense.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness,” states the Declaration of Independence.

Under the sweeping terms of the law, members of tax protest organizations, the Tea Party movement and the States’ Rights movement based in South Carolina are all domestic terrorists if they fail to register their dissent with the authorities.

It is important to stress that the notion this law somehow only applies to “Islamic terrorists” is completely at odds with the fact that federal and state authorities now consider the main terror threat to be from informed American citizens exercising their constitutional rights in opposition to the big government agenda they are being subjected to.

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Think Government Is Corrupt? You May Face 10 Years In Jail 190110banner4

As we saw with the MIAC report and a plethora of similar training manuals which were leaked over the last decade, police are being trained that libertarians, gun owners, Ron Paul supporters and anyone who is mildly political is a domestic extremist and a potential terrorist – these people are the real target of the subversives list in South Carolina.

The infamous Phoenix Federal Bureau of Investigation manual (page one, page two) produced in association with the Joint Terrorism Task Force listed “defenders of the U.S. constitution” and “lone individuals” as terrorists. Will anyone in South Carolina who defends the Constitution, the very bedrock of what America stands for, have to register with the authorities unless they want to be locked up for a decade?

Of course, since nobody is going to register as a “subversive” with South Carolina authorities, their failure to “comply” with the regulation will later be used against them as a means of eliciting criminal charges, in what represents a clear end run around the First Amendment.

The government isn’t going to just come out all guns blazing and ban free speech, they are simply going to make anyone who refuses to register for permission a criminal for failing to adhere to a separate mandate.

Just like people in places such as New York and Chicago were told that they had to get a license to purchase a gun – at first the process was a mere inconvenience but now the licensing process means they have to jump through 200 flaming hoops and the second amendment has effectively been outlawed in these cities.

They won’t hesitate to pull the same tricks with the First Amendment, and it’s already happening with calls to license Internet users and force them to get government permission to run a website.

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Americans Who Know Their Rights Are The Real Target Of Napolitano’s “Domestic Terror” Warning

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, February 22, 2010

Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano cited examples of Muslim extremists in her warning Sunday that domestic terrorists were now as much a focus as international terrorism, but actual training manuals being used by state and federal authorities across America reveal that the primary target of the anti-terror apparatus hits a lot closer to home.

“Americans who turn to terrorism and plot against the U.S. are now as big a concern as international terrorists, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Sunday,” reports the Associated Press.

“In the last year, Napolitano said, she’s witnessed a movement from international extremism to domestic extremism – cases in which Americans radicalized and decided to plot attacks against the country.”

However, Napolitano’s comments were clearly crafted to appeal to some on the right who claim that the Obama administration, despite its clear intensification of Bush’s “war on terror” with more raids into Pakistan and new targets in Yemen, has been “soft” on terror, with the DHS Secretary listing examples of Muslim Americans who have allegedly planned terror attacks (but not without aggressive prompting by FBI informants in almost every case).

In reality, as leaked state and federal documents illustrate, the primary focus of the war on terror is aimed at American citizens who exercise or merely show an interest in their own constitutional rights.

As President Obama’s would-be TSA head and former FBi agent Erroll Southers stated last month, white Christian “anti-government” types are now the primary target of suspicion for authorities.

In a video interview posted to You Tube, Southers outlined how the government and the TSA has to “pay attention” not to Muslim terrorists but to “anti-government, anti-abortion, survivalist types” who are “christian identity oriented.”

As we have exhaustively documented for years, even if there were cells of Muslim terrorists planning to bomb airliners, the federal government is far more concerned with what politically active conservative and libertarian Americans are up to.

This was illustrated again earlier this month with a story concerning South Carolina’s “Subversive Activities Registration Act,” a law which mandates that “Every member of a subversive organization, or an organization subject to foreign control, every foreign agent and every person who advocates, teaches, advises or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States … shall register with the Secretary of State.”

Under the sweeping terms of the law, members of tax protest organizations, the Tea Party movement and the States’ Rights movement based in South Carolina are all domestic terrorists if they fail to register their dissent with the authorities. If such groups don’t obtain what amounts to a license from the government to engage in free speech, their members face a $25,000 fine and 10 years in prison.

Leaked state and federal documents produced since the early nineties have routinely labeled politically active Americans, or merely those cognizant of their constitutional rights, as the main domestic extremist threat.

An infamous leaked report distributed by the Missouri Information Analysis Center last year listed Ron Paul supporters, libertarians, people who display bumper stickers, people who own gold, or even people who fly a U.S. flag and equated them with radical race hate groups and terrorists.

The 2009 Virginia Terrorism Threat Assessment, produced by the Virginia Fusion Center, smeared anyone who is “anti-government,” “anti-abortion,” as potential terrorists, equated people who enjoy rifle shooting practice and hunting with terrorists, and demonized the use of the Internet and websites like You Tube, Fark and Slashdot as terrorist tools. The use of “e-protests” is also talked about in the context of terrorism.

The document also discusses “special interest groups” who “incorporate a political message” in its section about domestic terrorists, which could be defined as any mildly political organization whatsoever.

These are just two of a plethora of similar police and federal government reports stretching back well over a decade that identify politically active Americans as domestic terrorists and a target of domestic authorities.

The American people are clearly being prepared for more “home grown” false flag terror attacks on soft targets in order to smooth the rollout of stifling airport-style security measures onto the streets. With passengers at bus terminals already being subjected to random pat downs, baggage and sniffer dog searches, shopping malls and other public buildings are next.

The ultimate goal is to have naked body scanners attached to lamp posts that scan your naked body as you innocently walk down the street. The only way to sell this to the public will be for them to witness repeated soft target attacks similar to those seen in Israel over the past decade.

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/americans-who-know-their-rights-are-the-real-target-of-napolitanos-domestic-terror-warning/

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Danish Cops Prepare “Dog Kennel” for Copenhagen Protesters

Infowars
December 3, 2009

The following news article posted on the Ekstra Bladet website is translated from the Danish by Jens Angelsgaard, We Are Change, Denmark.

“The old buildings in Valby, which is intended to house the arrested protesters during the climateconference, bears all the hallmarks of a dog kennel.”

“346 people are to be held in the 37 cages in the old brewery storage facilities of world wide danish corporation Carlsberg.”

tates Ekstra Bladet a newspaper under the Politikens Hus/JP publishing corporation – which houses editor-in-chiefs such as former Bilderberg steering comitee member Tøger Seidenfaden now Trilateral Comitee Executive member and bilderberger Flemming Rose – the world known initiator of the “Mohammed cartoon crises”.

Moreover the danish parliament Folketinget recently passed legeslation – which enables the police to conduct preemptive arrests on the sole assumption – that the person has criminal intend. The danish police states that carrying an ordinary scarf or headdress in a bag – is considered an evidence of criminal intend. This is a surprise to some – beacause of the generally cold danish winterweather.

In ending it is relevant to add that the danish police – as reported by Ekstra Bladet – has announced that they will stop and arrest all passangers on busses loaded with demonstraters as far as 350 km from Copenhagen. Demonstrators against “COP 15″ are called “climate thugs” throughout the danish mainstream media.

Today the danish police held a press event due to its first purchase ever of mobile watercanons.

http://ekstrabladet.dk/nyheder/politik/article1264293.ece

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/danish-cops-prepare-dog-kennel-for-copenhagen-protesters/

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Stealth Treaty Seeks Strict Controls Over Internet

David Bollier
On the Commons
December 2, 2009

A sweeping international treaty to regulate how knowledge and creativity may flow on the Internet is now being negotiated. Haven’t heard of it? Funny thing, that’s exactly what the backers of the treaty want. The film, music, publishing and information industries don’t want a public debate about the issues or an open debate in Congress. So they have been working hand-in-glove with the U.S. Trade Representative to move U.S. policymaking offshore and throw a dark cloak of secrecy around everything. The next stop: draconian penalties for anyone who is accused of violating copyright law.

Details about the treaty are murky. But the latest draft, according to a leak summarized on the Boing Boing website, would require:

That Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn’t infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.

That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet — and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living — if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.

That the whole world must adopt US-style “notice-and-takedown” rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused — again, without evidence or trial — of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the U.S. and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.

Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM [Digital Rights Management systems], even if doing so for a lawful purpose (e.g., to make a work available to disabled people; for archival preservation; because you own the copyrighted work that is locked up with DRM).

Who would have guessed that such nasty stuff was embedded in a treaty called the “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)”? That title was presumably meant to reassure people that it’s a non-controversial measure. But fighting counterfeits seems to be just the cover story. The real goal is to win a backdoor expansion of copyright law, much stronger enforcement powers and greater corporate control of the Internet — all without having to go through that pesky process known as democracy.

If the first subterfuge was the misleading title, the second subterfuge was to call ACTA a “trade agreement” rather than a multilateral intellectual property treaty. A trade agreement can be implemented by the Executive Branch on its own, and does not require congressional approval. An intellectual property treaty would require a congressional vote.

This could turn out to be a fatal legal maneuver, Eddan Katz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out in a recent blog post, because an executive agreement like ACTA must “color within the lines of U.S. law.” Yet the U.S. Trade Representative has been quoted as saying that the treatment will “stick as closely to U.S. law as possible.”

Oh, that’s reassuring. As Katz asks: “How can the USTR negotiate an international agreement that sets new global IP enforcement norms requiring changes to U.S. law and policy as an Executive Agreement, without the knowledge or involvement of Congress?” (For more on this point, see Katz’s law review article in the  Yale Journal of International Law .)

The bad faith only gets worse. Beyond the misleading title and backdoor legal maneuvers is Very Deep Secrecy. Or more accurately, selective Very Deep Secrecy. Key Washington insiders and corporate players have been granted full access to the draft treaty — but we the little people have been excluded. Wanna read the draft? You can’t. The official rationale is that such disclosures would jeopardize national security. Seriously.

When I blogged about the so-called ACTA treaty — Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement — in March 2009, Public Knowledge and others were trying to open up the treaty process through Freedom of Information Act requests and public pressure. As criticism mounted, the U.S. Trade Representative in September came up with an ingenious “solution” — let a handful of public-interest advocates read the ACTA draft — but only after signing a a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) that prohibits them from publicly discussing it.

NDAs are a standard tool among Silicon Valley tech companies to prevent proprietary secrets from circulating. Notwithstanding President Obama’s other laudable initiatives in open government, this NDA approach to citizen participation is worthy of Dick Cheney or George W. Bush.

Wait, there’s more! Even this form of restricted access is selectively granted. The U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) decided to pick and choose who would be invited to sign an NDA and thus be allowed to read the document (but not talk about it publicly).

This Orwellian farce prompted James Love of Knowledge Ecology International — a long-time critic of ACTA and the USTR — to prepare a petition that has garnered thousands of signatories. The petition reads in part:

The opportunity to see the ACTA documents under the NDA was offered to a large number of business interests, but very few public interest or consumer groups, and there were no opportunities for academic experts or the general public to review the documents.

USTR officials have indicated that this policy of access by invitation and NDA fully addresses the legitimate demands for more transparency of the negotiation, and it is being considered as a model for the future.

We are opposed to this approach because it creates a small special class of citizens who have rights superior to the majority of the population, and because it gives the government too much discretion in deciding who can monitor and criticize its operations. We have no confidence in this new approach.

Some of the people who have signed such NDAs are grateful for the chance to have had special access to some information, but they also feel constrained by the inability to discuss the contents of the documents, and are confident that nothing they have seen constitutes information that in any way would prejudice the national security of the United States if it were in fact disclosed.

In our opinion, the ACTA negotiations would not exist without the support and engagement of the U.S. government, and they are too important to continue under such questionable practices.

The only rationale for keeping the proposed ACTA text from the public is to suppress criticism and critical thinking about the norms that are being proposed. It is Orwellian and an insult to our intelligence to claim that the secrecy of the ACTA text has anything to do with national security concerns, as the term is commonly understood.

A secret process of arbitrary access, conditioned upon signing non-disclosure agreements to block public debate, does not enhance openness and transparency, and does not inspire respect for the norms that will eventually emerge.

[The full petition can be read here. ]

Public Knowledge also prepared a petition as well, which has been signed by the American Association of Law Libraries, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Electronic Privacy Information Center, Future of Music Coalition, Internet Archive and Sunlight Foundation, among others.

Even some Senators are getting upset about the USTR’s high-handed approach to democracy. Senators Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders have sent a letter to the USTR asking that the ACTA text be made public:

ACTA involves dozens if not hundreds of substantive aspects of intellectual property law and its enforcement, including those that have nothing to do with counterfeiting. . . . There are concerns about the impact of ACTA on the privacy and civil rights of individuals, on the supply of products under the first sale doctrine, on the markets for legitimate generic medicines, and on consumers and innovation in general.

The Motion Picture Association of America has no qualms about the secrecy. In its own letter to the USTR, the MPAA dismissed such concerns with a wave of the hand: “Outcries on the lack of transparency in the ACTA negotiations are a distraction. They distract from the substance and the ambition of the ACTA…”

You heard right: democratic process is a “distraction.” At a time when the U.S. is trying to rehabilitate its international image and show others how democracy works, the ACTA treaty is not a very good advertisement for the “American way.”

At this point, it’s unclear how the whole misbegotten mess will play out, but there is no doubt that the key players, including the U.S. Government, are trying to use international law to neuter the Internet, subvert the innovation and participation that open platforms enable, and violate people’s privacy and due process rights — all of this without meaningful public dialogue.

I don’t think the USTR or President Obama really want to go there. It would ignite a political and cultural explosion. If they are too frightened to have an open, honest debate at the draft proposal stage — it they are too frightened of the citizenry — imagine the political blowback that will occur if the treaty actually becomes enforceable law. Let’s face it: A public reckoning will have to occur at some point, and the sooner the USTR backs away from the ledge and opens up its deliberations, the better it will be for it, President Obama and the rest of us.

For more about ACTA, see analyses by Public Knowledge, Michael Geist of University of Ottawa, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/stealth-treaty-seeks-strict-controls-over-internet/

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Oakland, PA, Police Response Characterized as “Military-style Occupation”

Jerome L. Sherman
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
September 28, 2009

Activists with the Thomas Merton Center and other groups today blasted the police response to a Friday night protest in Oakland following the G-20 summit, calling it a “military-style occupation” that resulted in the gassing and arrest of dozens of bystanders, including students and journalists.

During a press conference at the center’s Garfield headquarters, some activists threatened lawsuits against the city and placed responsibility for the confrontation with Mayor Luke Ravenstahl and top public safety officials.

“I’ll say it very bluntly: The mayor should be fired. The city council should hold his feet to the fire,” said David Meieran, an organizer with Three Rivers Climate Convergence.

Read entire article

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/oakland-pa-police-response-characterized-as-military-style-occupation/

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Agents Provocateurs Documented at G-20 During March

Infowars
September 28, 2009

Saturday September 26 2009: Three undercover officers attempt to infiltrate a March Against Police Brutality at the University of Pittsburgh, but fail miserably due to their horrendous disguise attempts. During the march, one of them breaks a photographer’s camera. This is just one example of a larger pattern of attempts to silence the media during the G20 protests.

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/agents-provocateurs-documented-at-g-20-during-march/

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