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/

Open Wi-Fi ‘Outlawed’ by Digital Economy Bill

David Meyer
ZDNet UK
March 1, 2010

• 
  

The government will not exempt universities, libraries and small businesses providing open Wi-Fi services from its Digital Economy Bill copyright crackdown, according to official advice released earlier this week.

This would leave many organisations open to the same penalties for copyright infringement as individual subscribers, potentially including disconnection from the internet, leading legal experts to say it will become impossible for small businesses and the like to offer Wi-Fi access.

Lilian Edwards, professor of internet law at Sheffield University, told ZDNet UK on Thursday that the scenario described by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) in an explanatory document would effectively “outlaw open Wi-Fi for small businesses”, and would leave libraries and universities in an uncertain position.

Read entire article

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/open-wi-fi-outlawed-by-digital-economy-bill/

Google’s CEO Demanded His Mistress Take Down Her Blog: Source

By Ryan Tate

Feb 22, 2010 07:08 PM

Eric Schmidt might advocate for making information “even more open and accessible,” but not when it comes to his mistresses. We’re told the Google CEO’s aggressive lawyers brought down ex-girlfriend Kate Bohner‘s online recovery diary this weekend.

We flagged the blog on Friday, reporting that Bohner had repeatedly mentioned Schmidt in a blog tied to a planned book about her recovery from alcohol and drug addiction, and predicting Schmidt, who is married, wouldn’t be thrilled.

Now the site has been removed from Google’s Blogspot, where it was hosted.

Bohner removed the site after threats from Schmidt’s lawyers this weekend, according to a source close to the situation.

“When a billionaire threatens you, you get in line,” this person said.

It made for a frightening weekend for Bohner, and no wonder: Not only is the former CNBC and Forbes journalist trying to come to terms with her sobriety and past addiction, she doesn’t appear to be swimming in the money it would take to mount a plausible legal challenge to a powerful and well-connected tech executive worth $4 billion. A public records search indicates her four-month-old pad in Delray Beach, Florida is the latest in a series of apartments and, according to a sign visible on Google Maps Street View, located in a tidy complex of smallish one- and two-bedroom units.

The nuking of the blog seems especially extreme because Schmidt played such a small part in it. The executive did appear in three different posts (see quotes here), across maybe five paragraphs of text. But Bohner’s entries were long; the three most recent averaged more than 30 paragraphs each, which was typical.

Yes, there was the tidbit about Schmidt (aka “Dr. Strangelove”) giving Bohner an prototype iPhone, and being a “genuinely caring, concerned boyfriend.” But almost everything else was about Bohner’s yoga, time in a Buddhist temple in Thailand, friends in recovery and past addictive escapades.

If Schmidt is so concerned about his privacy, why not just ask Bohner to stop mentioning him? His extramarital dalliances, including with Bohner, are hardly fresh news any more; the Google chief is rumored either separated, as we’ve reported previously, or in an open marriage, as our Bohner-blog source insists. The Google CEO should be more concerned about the release of any fresh details about his sex life. Concerned, that is, assuming he won’t take his own advice and avoid having embarrassing secrets in the first place.

Bohner’s blog and book project seemed to have really inspired the ex-addict. Her entries were long, but also formed a potential lifeline for other addicts. In other words, they had merit aside from the bits on Eric “Not the Center of the World” Schmidt. So it’s too bad they’ll be gone. You can read them for a bit longer; they’re here, on a Web caching server provided, as fate would have it, by Schmidt’s company.

Send an email to Ryan Tate, the author of this post, at ryan@gawker.com.

Senate Bill Allows Obama to Declare “Cybersecurity Emergency”

Tony Romm
The Hill
February 27, 2010

The president would have the power to safeguard essential federal and private Web resources under draft Senate cybersecurity legislation.

According to an aide familiar with the proposal, the bill includes a mandate for federal agencies to prepare emergency response plans in the event of a massive, nationwide cyberattack.

The president would then have the ability to initiate those network contingency plans to ensure key federal or private services did not go offline during a cyberattack of unprecedented scope, the aide said.

Ultimately, the legislation is chiefly the brainchild of Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee, respectively. Both lawmakers have long clamored for a federal cybersecurity bill, charging that current measures — including the legislation passed by the House last year — are too piecemeal to protect the country’s Web infrastructure.

Read entire article

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/senate-bill-allows-obama-to-declare-cybersecurity-emergency/

ACTA “internet enforcement” chapter leaks

By Cory Doctorow at 11:35 AM February 21, 2010

Someone has uploaded a PDF to a Google Group that is claimed to be the proposal for Internet copyright enforcement that the USA has put forward for ACTA, the secret copyright treaty whose seventh round of negotiations just concluded in Guadalajara, Mexico. This reads like it probably is genuine treaty language, and if it is the real US proposal, it is the first time that this material has ever been visible to the public. According to my source, the US proposal is the current version of the treaty as of the conclusion of the Mexico round.

I’ve read it through a few times and it reads a lot like DMCA-plus. It contains, for example, a duty to technology firms to shut down infringement where they have “actual knowledge” that such is taking place. This argument was put forward in the Grokster case, and as Fred von Lohmann argued then, this is a potentially deadly burden to place on technology companies: in the offline world Xerox has “actual knowledge” that its technology is routinely used to infringe copyright at Kinko’s outlets around the world — should that create a duty to stop providing sales and service to Kinko’s?

This also includes takedown procedures for trademark infringement, as well as the existing procedures against copyright infringement. Since trademark infringement is a lot harder for a service provider to adjudicate (and since things that might be trademark infringement take place every time you do something as innocuous as taking a photo of a street-scene that contains hundreds or thousands of trademarks), this sounds like a potential disaster to me.

This calls on all parties to ensure that “third party liability” (the idea that ISPs, web-hosts, application developers, mobile carriers, universities, apartment buildings, and other “third parties” to infringement are sometimes liable for their users’ copyright infringements) is on the books in their countries. It doesn’t spell out what that liability should be, beyond “knowingly and materially aiding” an infringement — see the Kinko’s point above for why this is potentially deadly.

And, of course, this contains the DMCA’s injunction against breaking digital locks (that is, circumventing DRM), even though this provision has been in international treaties since 1996 and has done nothing to reduce infringement, has never shown itself to be effective in shoring up the power of these technologies to prevent copies, and has introduced enormous anti-competitive effects into the market.

Also buried in a footnote is a provision for forcing ISPs to terminate customers who’ve been accused — but not convicted — of copyright infringement (along with their families and anyone else who happens to share their net connection).

There’s plenty more here — and we don’t know what the rest of the treaty reads like, or what the competing drafts said — and I’m sure that more astute legal scholars than I will be along shortly with their commentary.

Update: Here’s an IDG report on the leak, with more analysis.

Article 2.17: Enforcement procedures in the digital environment (PDF)

My mirror (PDF)

(Thanks, Paolo!)

Link to Story: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/21/acta-internet-enforc.html

Evil let loose after Google breaches email privacy

The launch of a networking site has backfired badly

Dominic Rushe

LAST TUESDAY Eva Hibnick, a Harvard law student, opened her Gmail account and saw an offer for Buzz, a new service from Gmail’s owner, Google.

She wasn’t interested. “I just clicked ‘No, go to my inbox’,” she said. Within hours she and millions of others realised that sometimes no means yes.

Now Hibnick is taking Google to court, and the search giant is left fighting a rearguard action in the latest skirmish over privacy on the internet.

Hibnick, 24, is the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit filed against Google over the launch of Buzz, a social networking service that lets people bring their online connections together to share status updates, videos and photos. With 146m users, the sheer size of Gmail instantly catapulted Buzz into the top ranks of social networking sites alongside Facebook and Twitter.

As Gmail users were quick to point out, though, they chose to join those networks, while Buzz’s new army was conscripted. The service raided a Gmail user’s contacts book to set up the social network.

The people we contact most frequently are not necessarily those with whom we have the closest relationship. Within hours of the Buzz launch, angry tales were being told of people’s contact details and other information being passed on to the “psychotic” and “abusive ex-husbands”.

Actress Felicia Day, Vi in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, found herself deluged with messages from strangers after posting one message on Buzz. “Buzz things turn up as a message in your inbox? Disabling now. Heart attack,” she wrote. Before Google changed Buzz, some fans would also have been able to see who Day emailed most frequently.

Hibnick and her lawyer claim that information she had a right to consider private had been shared among her Gmail contacts. “I signed up for a private email account, not for a social networking site. They can’t just opt you in,” she said.

“Basically all my email contacts were accessible. Everyone is so shocked that Google would do this.”

Fellow Harvard law student Benjamin Osborn, who is assisting on the case, said the initial problem was that it was not clear what information was being shared and with whom.

Hibnick’s lawyer said Google could face statutory damages of $1,000 per occurrence — a potentially huge sum given Gmail’s size. But he added that the real aim was to force Google to put better checks and balances in place over privacy.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center, the watchdog based in Washington DC, has now asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether consumers were harmed and has asked the commission to demand that Google ask Gmail users to sign up for Buzz instead of enrolling them automatically.

Google moved swiftly to contain the crisis last week, dropping the automatic sign-up and offering clearer instructions on how to opt out of the service and keep messages private.

“We made some mistakes and we accept that,” said Peter Barron, Google’s head of communications. “But if you look at the way we responded, I hope people will see that we reacted quickly to those criticisms and made significant improvements.

“These days everyone leaves a data trail, whether it’s from shopping online, using your mobile phone or doing a search. When you use a credit card you are exposing far more about yourself than in an online search but people generally trust credit-card companies not to misuse their data. At Google, users’ trust is all we have. We take privacy very seriously and build privacy features into all our products based on the principles of transparency, choice and user control.

“Those features were and are present in Buzz, but we accept they could have been clearer. Buzz is not about making private information public unless you choose to.”

Don Cruse, a Houston-based lawyer, said that what disturbed him most about Buzz was that it was automatic. In a blog he warned clients, and journalists, that they could end up sharing confidential contacts if they used the service. He said Google was “repurposing old data in a way that flouts our expectations of privacy”.

“People have an expectation of privacy with email. There are lots of famous examples of emails making it to people they shouldn’t have reached. But this was not an accident, it was a deliberate change in structure,” he said.

“The big story is that they wanted to set up a social network, something they have failed to do well in the past. The downside is that they have hurt the Gmail brand.”

The Buzz controversy is unlikely to end in epic fines for Google. Last year Facebook paid $9.5m (£6.2m) to settle a similar class-action lawsuit over Beacon, an advertising system that tracked Facebook users’ online activity outside the site and told other users what they had been up to.

Perhaps more damaging is the damage Buzz has done to Google’s image. John Quelch, a Harvard Business School professor, said it faces two problems in any new venture. “First, Google is a hostage to its publicly stated aim to ‘Do no evil’. That definition of evil is open to considerable interpretation. They have to be very careful that this aim isn’t viewed with cynicism rather than respect.”

Second, Quelch said the execution of Google’s search business is so far ahead of its rivals that people had high expectations of any new service. “They rather missed it on Buzz,” he said.

Link to Story:

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article7034912.ece

Google CEO: Secrets Are for Filthy People

Gawker
December 9, 2009

Eric Schmidt suggests you alter your scandalous behavior before you complain about his company invading your privacy. That’s what the Google CEO told Maria Bartiromo during CNBC’s big Google special last night, an extraordinary pronouncement for such a secretive guy.

The generous explanation for Schmidt’s statement is that he’s revolutionized his thinking since 2005, when he blacklisted CNET for publishing info about him gleaned from Google searches, including salary, neighborhood, hobbies and political donations. In that case, the married CEO must not mind all the coverage of his various reputed girlfriends; it’s odd he doesn’t clarify what’s going on with the widely-rumored extramarital dalliances, though.

Schmidt’s philosophy is clear with Bartiromo in the clip below: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” The philosophy that secrets are useful mainly to indecent people is awfully convenient for Schmidt as the CEO of a company whose value proposition revolves around info-hoarding. Convenient, that is, as long as people are smart enough not to apply the “secrets suck” philosophy to their Google passwords , credit card numbers and various other secrets they need to put money in Google’s pockets.

It’s enough to make one pine for the more innocent Google bursting forth in the c. 1999 group picture at the top of this post, also gleaned from CNBC’s special. The hair might have been sillier — dig co-founder Sergey Brin and VP Marissa Mayers’ cuts, top center — but no one was yet audacious enough to argue against the very idea of a secret.

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/google-ceo-secrets-are-for-filthy-people/

The dawn of a new age of muckraking

Luke Rudkowski
Russia Today
December 3, 2009

Today, talking heads, corporations, governments, editors and publishers no longer make the definitive judgment on what is news and what is not. More than 100 years after Upton Sinclair wrote his muckraking book “The Jungle,” the tradition of muckraking has a new life on the Internet.

Sinclair set out on a daunting task: to infiltrate the meatpacking industry in Chicago. He took months off from work and immersed himself in the business, working undercover to expose the gross mistreatment of workers. Sinclair gave vivid details about immigrant life in Chicago, depicting poverty and homelessness and exploitation by the powerful.

Today, all it takes to create an expose is a laptop and a camera, or even just a cell phone. Anyone can take video and upload it to YouTube for the world to see. This accessibility opens up the possibility of an uncontrolled flow of information around the world.

The people now have eyes and ears all over the world, and are waiting to broadcast. This gives them an advantage over the mainstream media, which cannot always be at the right place at the right time. This exposure allows humanity to see and understand issues more clearly than ever, as events unfold in front of our very eyes from all perspectives.

The mainstream media occasionally misses big stories that rock society – either by negligence or on purpose – that online activists uncover. For example, in his book “Here Comes Everybody,” Clay Shirky details how bloggers brought down Trent Lott.

“This would have been a classic story of negative press coverage altering a political career – except that the press didn’t actually cover the story,” Shirky writes. It was the bloggers that picked up on Lott’s racist remarks during his speech at Storm Thurmond’s 100th birthday party, which eventually cost Lott his leadership position in the Senate.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t
• 

Recently, a groundbreaking story coined “Climategate” spread like wildfire through the Internet before making its way into mainstream media. This story concerned emails between scientists who produce studies to support theories of global warming. In the emails, the scientists were openly discussing destroying studies that didn’t support their theories.

This scandal, which was brought to the world’s attention thanks to the Internet, severely damages the validity of the global warming theory. If it weren’t for the Internet, this story might never have seen the light of day.

Major media outlets have not continued the tradition of muckraking for many reasons. It is a lot more efficient for a news organization to keep a reporter in the office writing news stories every day than to send him away for six months on a reporting trip that may only produce three stories.

It also has a lot to do with corporate relations. A news organization run by a corporation does not want to rock the boat and go after other large corporations to which they may have ties. It is impossible for a news agency to report fairly on an issue when their profits are involved. The news programs have been caught many times suppressing stories because their sponsors would be negatively affected by the media attention.

Corporations are only interested in profit and that’s why we have seen them forget about muckraking journalism – it is not profitable. Judith and William Serrin said it best in “Muckraking: The Journalism That Changed The World:” “Some publishers and broadcast executives might as well be selling shoes as selling news.”

Today, five corporations control nearly 90 percent of the mainstream media. Almost everything we see, hear or read in newspapers, magazines, books, radio and television is owned by Time Warner, Disney, News Corporation, Bertelsmann or Viacom. The democratization of information via the Internet could not have come at a better time.

The Internet not only allows us a greater and richer perspective on events, but covers events that would naturally be censored by the mainstream media and their corporate interests. It gives activists an opportunity to see, hear and smell for the people, looking out for the masses and at the same time exposing the elite. This threatening wave of truth can not only end the profits of the five information-controlling corporations, but reform and revolutionize society. Once the people fully recognize the potential of this tool to express their grievances, they will be an unstoppable force.

Day by day, more information is controlled by fewer hands – but because of technology, there are no longer any gatekeepers. We are able to get a rich abundance of perspectives and views online that help us grasp and understand important events in our history as they unfold. The Internet has become more effective than traditional media. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, it still makes a sound. With the help of the Internet, today a single isolated tree can make so much noise that the whole world will hear it.

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/the-dawn-of-a-new-age-of-muckraking/

Google to limit free news access

Newspaper publishers will now be able to set a limit on the number of free news articles people can read through Google, the company has announced.

The concession follows claims from some media companies that the search engine is profiting from online news pages.

Under the First Click Free programme, publishers can now prevent unrestricted access to subscription websites.

Users who click on more than five articles in a day may be routed to payment or registration pages.

“Previously, each click from a user would be treated as free,” Google senior business product manager Josh Cohen said in a blog post.

This may still be a significant moment in the battle between old and new media Rory Cellan-Jones, BBC technology correspondent Did Google just blink?

“Now, we’ve updated the programme so that publishers can limit users to no more than five pages per day without registering or subscribing.”

Google users may start seeing registration pages appear when they click for a sixth time on any given day at websites of publishers using the programme, according to Mr Cohen.

This will only affect websites that currently charge for content.

‘Significant move’

The announcement is seen as a reaction to concerns in the newspaper industry that Google is using newspaper content unfairly.

Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of Newscorp, has accused firms such as Google of profiting from journalism by generating advertising revenue by linking readers to newspaper articles.

Some readers have discovered they can avoid paying subscription fees to newspaper websites by calling up their pages via Google.

This is because Google searches frequently link directly to newspaper articles, bypassing some sites’ subscription systems.

Broadcasting and media consultant Steve Hewlett said that Google’s response was “a pretty significant move”.

“Rupert Murdoch is trying to build a consensus that paying for content online is right and that aggregators like Google that use newspaper content but don’t pay for it are doing something wrong,” he said.

Search for revenue

Newspapers are increasingly looking for new ways to make money from their online content amid a continuing decline in circulation figures and advertising revenues.

Earlier this week Johnston Press, the UK’s largest regional newspaper publisher, announced plans to to begin charging for access to six of its titles online.

The move follows a 42% slump in advertising revenues at the group over the last two years.

Earlier this year, the Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT) cut 1,000 jobs at its regional arm Northcliffe Media, which publishes more than 100 newspapers in England and Wales.

Newscorp, which owns the Times and the Sun newspapers in the UK, has also been affected by the downturn.

In June, it announced losses of $3.4bn (£2bn) for the previous 12 months, describing the year as “the most difficult in recent history”.

It has also revealed plans to begin charging for access to all its online content. The corporation currently charges for access to its US title the Wall Street Journal.

Link to Story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8389896.stm

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/