21st Century Censorship

Opinion by: Stewart Brennan

Topic today – Facebook censorship

I don't like Facebook because it is highly censored and will get even worse in the coming weeks and months. However, I still use facebook (Fakebook) in hopes that some truthful thing I’ve shared will resonate with others even through their heavy censorship...I hope to help build a better world for the next generation to come; therefore communication is a priority to making that world a reality...

Mass Communication

If a social media platform comes around that allows mass communication with their subscribers then that will be a real social media platform worthy of joining and an asset to investigative journalists and the truth seeking public...barring that, there is not one up and coming social media platform, that I know of, that will allow mass communication with all their subscribers as YouTube once did...so I’m stuck on Facebook until one comes along.

As far as other social networks go, the creators are not offering their subscribers mass communication either. These new and old platforms are in it for the money or to cast the illusion that you have an alternative...You don’t, at least no yet. I’m still waiting, but until that medium or platform arrives, I will continue to scream at the top of the mountain hoping my echo will catch ears…

As far as Facebook goes, news feeds, groups and mass communication died long ago...Facebook sided with the Orwellian deep state that is pushing the World into a corporate totalitarian governance that does not like its sociopathic authority questioned…I will not go silently into the night…and neither should you.

Here'a a Poem by the activist Poet that touches on Facebook's authoritarian program of censorship.

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Ever have a Facebook moment? See if this short poem rings true with you, and if it does, share it. ;)

Poem by ~ The Activist Poet ~

Facebook Row

Another Facebook time-out, they didn’t like what I said,

nor the posted pictures, of the terrorists who are dead.

I’m in political limbo, I’m not allowed to post,

Jailed by Facebook’s police, barred from coast to coast.

Caught by deep state censors, my words they say are bad,

I’m not allowed to use good terms for Putin or Assad.

My news feeds one-way traffic, visits are all blank,

Unless I bow to extortion, and pay them from my bank.  

Their advertisers hound me, I mark them all as Spam,

Greedy corporate pages of belligerent Uncle Sam.

Suggested friends make me shudder, who the F*** is that?

with pages blank and empty, another troll or rat.

I plan my re-emergence, Palestine posts are due,

I’m sure to piss off Zionists, facebook's other shoe.

So here I wait in penance, eager to do much more,

and celebrate my family, all activists to the core.

~ The Activist Poet ~

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About this Poem: Facebook is not a social network anymore, in fact it’s more of a US Intelligence program and corporate data mining tool / application that either penalizes users who do not fall in line with their politics, or data mines information while extorting small businesses for money.

Ask any activist who’s been isolated for their political posts or ask a musician who now has to pay out money for his page posts to reach those who already subscribed to their updates. After paying Facebook for putting posts on more of the bands subscriber news feeds, bands find themselves out of pocket with no real results, as its all just a numbers game and scam.

Now, Facebook has partnered with Fascist Dictatorship nations like Israel to censor what we can see or say. Together they become Orwell’s “Big Brother”…so being the Political Activist I am, here’s a middle finger; an F U Salute to Facebook and its censorship Regime and sponsors…

Link to Poem: Facebook Row 

LINK: Facebook Is Collaborating With the Israeli Government to Determine What Should Be Censored

Facebook Photo Source: Dr Rich Swier

Canadian police urge Parliament to pass domestic spying bill

 

(AFP Photo / Patrick Kovarik)

Source: Russia Today

http://rt.com/news/canada-police-spy-bill-c-30-455/

Police across Canada are urging Ottawa to resurrect a controversial Internet surveillance bill that would allow them to monitor Canadians' digital activities in real-time without a warrant.

­The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police has made a plea to on the federal government to pass Bill C-30, also known as the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act ahead of a gathering by the provincial and federal justice ministers next week.

The group is concerned that Parliament will be closed down before the legislation is passed.

“We have a fear that it will die on the order paper,” said Vancouver Police Chief Jim Chu, who is also the president of the association. “And if it does, then our investigators will be constrained and victims will suffer greater harm because of that,” the Canadian Press reports.

Deputy police chief Warren Lemcke agreed with Chu’s assessment, saying that “right now there are gangsters out there communicating about killing someone and we can't intercept that,” as cited by CBC news.

The legislature, introduced in the Canadian Parliament last February, demands that the country’s telecommunication industry provide law enforcement with the “authority to intercept communications and to require telecommunications service providers to provide subscriber and other information, without unreasonably impairing the privacy of individuals, the provision of telecommunications services to Canadians or the competitiveness of the Canadian telecommunications industry.”

If passed, the law would also give the police the power to make it a crime to use social media as a tool to injure, alarm or harass individuals. It would also grant access to the individual’s private data such as name, address, phone number and email without a warrant.

The law would ask the companies to place tracking bugs in their programs so that police, if needed, could spy on conversations if they got the necessary legal approvals.

Until now, C-30 has remained shelved by Parliament, and has not been debated after receiving mass criticism when it was originally released.

Critics claimed that the authorities would likely use the powers to harass peaceful protestors and activists.

A number of social media protests were organized, one of which circulated personal details from the divorce files of the bill’s sponsor of the bill-Public Safety Minister’s Vic Toews.

People also marched on the streets, demanding checks to the would-be unlimited police powers.

A public opinion poll conducted by Angus Reid after the bill’s introduction concluded that "the idea of surrendering subscriber data and identifiers without a warrant” is rejected by almost two thirds of Canadians.

 

US Congress approves extension of secret surveillance under FISA

 

U.S. Capitol.(AFP Photo / Win McNamee)

Source: Russia Today

http://rt.com/usa/news/congress-surveillance-act-fisa-980/

The House of Representatives voted Wednesday to extend the government’s power to warrantlessly wiretap Americans for another five years by reauthorizing the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Lawmakers in the House agreed from Washington, DC on Wednesday afternoon to reauthorize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA), a polarizing legislation that has been challenged by privacy advocates and civil liberties organizations alike around the country. The extension was approved by a vote of 301 to 118.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was first signed into law in 1978 by President Jimmy Carter, but amendments added two decades later under the George W Bush administration provide for the government to conduct widespread and blanketing snooping of emails and phone calls of Americans. The FISA Amendments added in 2008, specifically section 702, specify that the government can eavesdrop on emails and phone calls sent from US citizens to persons reasonably suspected to be located abroad without ever requiring intelligence officials to receive a court order.

If the US Senate echoes the House’s extension of the act, the FAA will carry through for another five years until 2017, ensuring the federal intelligence community that they will be able to conduct surveillance on the correspondence of the country’s own citizens well into the future. If no action is taken, the FAA is slated to expire at the end of 2012.

Earlier this year, a plea from two US senators to see how many times the FAA has been used was refused by the National Security Administration. Last month, San Francisco’s Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit against the US Justice Department for failing to adhere to Freedom of Information Act requests for documents pertaining to the program.

“The FISA Amendments Act (FAA) of 2008 gave the NSA expansive power to spy on Americans' international email and telephone calls,” the EFF explained in an official statement made after the suit was filed. “However, last month, in a letter to Senator Ron Wyden, a government official publicly disclosed that the NSA's surveillance had gone even further than what the law permits, with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) issuing at least one ruling calling the NSA's actions unconstitutional.”

Sen. Wyden, a Democratic lawmaker from Oregon who has also sit on the Senate intelligence committee for several years, originally asked for Senate to place a hold on the vote this past June. This week, Sen. Wyden tells Reuters, "My hold is on and it will stay on," although that plea does not apply to the House, however, where lawmakers appeared eager on Wednesday to power through the vote.

So determined were some lawmakers to proceed, in fact, that the rules of the debates preceding Wednesday’s vote called for no more than one hour of discussion before ballots were cast. Several congressmen, including lawmakers that planned to vote yes on the FAA extension regardless, proposed a two year extension as a compromise, but no new amendments were allowed to be tacked on before Wednesday’s vote.

Despite opposition on and off the Hill, the FAA has received praise from some of Washington’s most elite members of the government, including Attorney General Eric Holder and long-standing lawmaker Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), the sponsor of the FAA renewal who also infamously urged Congress to approve the since-defeated Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, a broad and dangerous Internet legislation that threatened to reshape the Web as we know it.

In his address at Northwestern University School of Law this past March, Mr. Holder said section 702 of the FAA “ensures that the government has the flexibility and agility it needs to identify and to respond to terrorist and other foreign threats to our security,” but emphasized the fact that only persons thought to be outside the US — not Americans — can be targeted. When Sens. Wyden and Udall asked to know how often that snooping involved Americans at all, however, they were told by the NSA’s Inspector General that a “review of the sort suggested would itself violate the privacy of US persons.”

On his part, Sen. Wyden has written, “that if no one has even estimated how many Americans have had their communications collected under the FISA Amendments Act . . . Then it is possible that this number could be quite large.”

“Since all of the communications collected by the government under section 702 are collected without individual warrants, I believe that there should be clear rules prohibiting the government from searching through these communications in an effort to find the phone calls or emails of a particular American, unless the government has obtained a warrant or emergency authorization permitting surveillance of that American,” the lawmaker wrote in an official press release earlier this year.

Rep. Smith, the sponsor of both this bill and SOPA, has said, “We have a duty to ensure the intelligence community can gather the intelligence they need to protect our country.”

On Thursday, Rep. Smith claimed, “Foreign nations continue to spy on America to plot cyber-attacks and attempt to steal sensitive information from our military and private sector industries,” and that Congress has “a solemn responsibility to ensure that the intelligence community can gather the information” necessary to hinder these attempts.

Rep. Dan Lungren (R-California) added on Wednesday from the Hill that reauthorizing the FAA is “critical to the protection of the American people,” claiming that the United States, “as a nation had not done enough to connect the dots to warn us sufficiently to protect” against another terrorist attack on par with the ones that devastated America on September 11, 2001.

Rep. Trey Gowdy, a Republican congressman from South Carolina, also used the attack on the Twin Towers to justify the necessity of extending the FAA.

“If we could come together to remember 9/11, surely we can come together to prevent another one,”

said Rep. Gowdy.

Opponents of the act, however, say that the attempts to do as such come at a cost too great for civil liberties.

“We’ve been told that we can’t even tell how many people are being subjected to this process located in the United States, and that we don’t know and they can’t tell us,” Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan ) pleaded earlier this year in opposition to the act. “I think we can get a little bit closer. There can be some reasonableness. It’s this kind of vagueness that creates in those of us in the Congress, suspicions that are negative rather than suspicions that are positive.”

“Why can't we know how many people are affected by FISA amendment act in the US?” Rep Conyers asked. “This kind of vagueness creates suspicions.”

Former Democratic presidential hopeful Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) said on his own part that those suspicions are even more validated since the Justice Department has declined to adhere to a Freedom of Information Act request for information on the FAA, explaining on Wednesday, “Everyone becomes suspect when big brother is listening.”

Rep Hank Johnson (D-GA) also threw his weight behind efforts to reject the act on Wednesday, saying it the FISA amendments allow for “illegal surveillance of an untold number of American citizens” with absolutely no oversight.

“Not even the NSA knows the extent to which FISA amendment acts have potentially been approved,” Rep Earl Blumenhauser (D-Oregon) added from the House floor before the vote.

The American Civil Liberties Union reports that, every day, the NSA intercepts and stores around 1.7 billion emails, phone calls, text and other electronic communications thanks to laws like FISA. To put it into perspective, they add, “that’s equivalent to 138 million books, every 24 hours.”

“After four years, you’d hope that some basic information or parameters of such a massive spying program would be divulged to the public, or at least your rank-and-file member of Congress, but they haven’t,” says Michelle Richardson, a counsel at the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office. “Only a small handful of members have either personally attended classified briefings or have staff with high enough clearances to attend for them.Sen. Ron Wyden — who has been on the Senate Intelligence Committee for years—has even been stonewalled by the Obama administration for a year and a half in his attempts to learn basic information about the program, such as the number of Americans who have had their communications intercepted under the FAA.”

“Can you believe that 435 members of Congress who have sworn to uphold the Constitution are about to vote on a sweeping intelligence gathering law without this basic information?” she asks.

'Black Out, Speak Out:' Canadian internet campaign targets 'undemocratic' bill

Source: Russia Today
http://www.rt.com/news/canada-internet-black-out-418/

A sweeping omnibus bill introduced last month to the Canadian parliament has been harshly condemned as “undemocratic.” Over 13,000 websites across Canada are planning to protest with a June 4 blackout to highlight their cause.

Bill C-38 – otherwise known as the “Jobs, Growth and Long-Term Prosperity Act” – is a 425-page document that has been described by critics as “a statutory juggernaut.”

What was submitted as a budget bill to the Canadian House of Commons will introduce, amend or repeal nearly 70 federal laws.

With the ruling Conservative Party calling the shots, critics have accused the legislation of tightening the screws on organized labor by way of a provision that would require unions to publicly list all recipients of contracts valued at $5,000 or more.

A line buried deep in the document also ominously states, "The Fair Wages and Hours of Labour Act is repealed."

The change would eliminate a 1985 law forcing companies bidding on federal contracts to pay “fair wages and overtime.”

Opposition New Democratic Party MP Pat Martin called the proposal a “solution without a problem.”

“The only conclusion I can come up with is that it's a war on labor and the left. It's what the Americans did with the right-to-work states and the end result is $8 or $9 an hour is now the average wage in places like North Carolina," the Canadian Press cites him as saying.

The bill will also overhaul the country’s immigration rules, its temporary foreign workers program and its employment insurance system. In a further blow to the middle class, provisions in the legislation would effectively raise the country’s retirement age from 65 to 67 in a decade's time.

'Bill C-38 undoes decades of environmental law’

Environmentalists are also up in arms as the bill would repeal the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act. It would also jettison red tape for major resource development projects, shorten the list of protected species, and overhaul the country’s Fisheries Act so that the federal government would only regulate the country’s major waterways.

The Green Party of Canada warned that if the bill passed in its current form, it would “undo decades of environmental law," and “profoundly degrade the Canadian government’s ability to defend our environment.”

As the battle of the mega-bill is just getting started, some 13,000 websites across Canada will go “black” next Monday to rally the public against it.

Campaign organizers have called potential supporters to join “a committed group of organizations representing millions of Canadians” as they darken their websites “in defense of nature and society.”

While many websites will go offline, campaign organizers have asked volunteers unable shut down entirely to at least feature a splash page explaining why their site appears black.

‘Rise of tyrannical policies’

The bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Quebec, Dennis Drainville, was anything but diplomatic in his condemnation of the bill.

Drainville accused the Harper government of “using every tyrannical tool they can find to ensure that their corporate agenda and ideological policies become the law of the land.”

“In the last 12months I have seen clearly the rise of tyrannical policies and the application of such mind and state control that the people of Canada, unless they soon react, will find themselves not only slaves to a corporate and political domination they never chose but they will experience the extinguishing of any of the hopes and dreams that they once had for a nation firmly based upon the foundations of compassion, justice and peace.”

“For God’s sake, for all of our sakes, wake up Canada,” the letter concluded.

Writing for the National Post, conservative columnist Mat Gurney called the federal government’s decision to insert a slew of unrelated laws and regulations into a so-called budget bill as “sneaky,” “undemocratic” and unnecessary “for a majority government.”

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has claimed the Tory government is not bypassing public oversight by cramming such broad legislative changes into a budget bill. But critics warn that omnibus bills are designed to keep specific changes from being studied at the relevant parliamentary committees.

Growing opposition to the new bill comes on the heels of another controversial act passed earlier this month, which has many in the Canadian province of Quebec up in arms.

Bill 78, an emergency law that lays down strict government regulations for demonstrations numbering more than 50 people, has been condemned as a draconian law that restricts the right of free assembly. The law followed mass protests in Quebec that have been raging for over 100 days, with 2,500 arrests made so far. Students originally took to the streets to protest a massive 75 per cent tuition fee hike, though students are also taking to the streets to challenge the emergency law.

Student activists in the province of Ontario are also planning a June 5 protest in solidarity with their peers in Quebec. A recently formed Student Solidarity Network in Ontario claims that tuition fees in the province have risen by as much as 71 per cent since 2006.

And a controversial “Internet spying bill” proposed by the current administration has further increased fears the government is trying to chip away at civil liberties.

While Prime Minister Stephen Harper has attempted to rebrand the bill as an anti-child pornography act, civil liberties groups say the expensive domestic spying program would allow the Canadian government to monitor its citizens’ online activities.

FBI secretly creates Internet police

Source: Russia Today
http://rt.com/usa/news/fbi-communications-dcac-surveillance-250/

The FBI was rather public with its recent demands for backdoor access to websites and Internet services across the board, but as the agency awaits those secret surveillance powers, they're working on their own end to have those e-spy capabilities.

Not much has been revealed about one of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s newest projects, the Domestic Communications Assistance Center, and the FBI will probably try to keep it that way. Despite attempting to keep the DCAC largely under wraps, an investigation spearheaded by Cnet’s Declan McCullagh is quickly collecting details about the agency’s latest endeavor.

Governmental agencies have been searching seemingly without end for ways to pry into the personal communications of computer users in America. Congressional approval and cooperation from Internet companies could be an eternity away, of course, but the FBI might be able to bypass that entirely by taking the matter into their own hands. At the Quantico, Virginia headquarters of the DCAC, federal workers are believed to be already hard at work on projects that will put FBI spies into the Internet, snooping on unsuspecting American’s Skype calls, instant messages and everything else carried out with a mouse and keyboard.

As McCullagh reports, the DCAC doesn’t have a website, let alone press releases detailing their plans. The sparse information that is available, however, paints a scary picture of what the FBI has in mind — and what they aim to accomplish with an $8 million handout from Congress.

In the US Drug Enforcement Agency’s budget request with the Department of Justice for the next fiscal year, the report’s authors write that “the recently established Department-wide Domestic Communications Assistance Center (DCAC)” is being “led by the FBI to address the growing technological gap between law enforcement’s electronic surveillance capabilities and the number and variety of communications devices available to the public.”

In other words, the FBI is pissed that wiretapping isn’t as easy as it used to be.

“The foremost challenge confronting US law enforcement is the diminishing ability to conduct lawful electronic intercepts on current and emerging communications technologies as communications providers continue to offer new and improved services and features to customers,” continues the report. “Addressing this issue is critical to maintain law enforcement’s ability to conduct lawful criminal intercepts.”

One year earlier, the Department of Justice revealed that they were looking to establish the DCAC to “facilitate the sharing of technology between law enforcement agencies” and “build more effective relations with the communications industry.”

In a testimony before Congress last year, then general counsel of the FBI, Valerie Caproni, told lawmakers, “In order to enforce the law and protect our citizens from threats to public safety, it is critically important that we have the ability to intercept electronic communications with court approval.”

“We confront, with increasing frequency, service providers who do not fully comply with court orders in a timely and efficient manner. Some providers cannot comply with court orders right away but are able to do so after considerable effort and expense by the provider and the government,” added Caproni.

On USAjobs.gov, the government-run website that advertises federal job openings, it is revealed that the FBI has recently been looking to staff two DCAC positions that pay upwards of $136,000 annually and calls for, among other requirements, “Experience in conducting and/or managing electronic surveillance operations.” The list of duties for the agency’s new hires includes interacting “effectively with LE personnel, management, co-workers and the communications industry to ensure that work performed correlates to defined objectives.” In a separate statement from the FBI, the agency says they are bringing a dozen staffers on board.

Following McCullagh’s expose, the FBI reached out to the reporter and, in not as few words, all but confirmed his fears.

“[T]he NDCAC will have the functionality to leverage the research and development efforts of federal, state, and local law enforcement with respect to electronic surveillance capabilities and facilitate the sharing of technology among law enforcement agencies. Technical personnel from other federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies will be able to obtain advice and guidance if they have difficulty in attempting to implement lawful electronic surveillance court orders,” reads the FBI’s statement.

In an attempt to sugarcoat the DCAC, the spokesperson pleads with McCullogh, "It is important to point out that the NDCAC will not be responsible for the actual execution of any electronic surveillance court orders and will not have any direct operational or investigative role in investigations. It will provide the technical knowledge and referrals in response to law enforcement's requests for technical assistance.”

The FBI, they say, won’t pull the trigger themselves. They claim they’ll just build the gun and the bullets and set their sights on the World Wide Web.

A similar legislation north of the border, the C-30 surveillance bill, will allow Canadian authorities similar powers, if passed.

CISPA passes House in unexpected last-minute vote

AFP Photo / Paul J. Richards

Source: Russia Today
http://rt.com/news/house-cispa-vote-thursday-083/

The House of Representatives has approved Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act with a vote count of 248-168. The bill is now headed for the Senate. President Barack Obama will be able to sign or cancel it pending Senate approval.

Initially slated to vote on the bill Friday, the House of Representatives decided to pass Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) Thursday after approving a number of amendments.

Apart from cyber and national security purposes, the bill would now allow the government to use private information obtained through CISPA for the investigation and prosecution of “cybersecurity crime,” protection of individuals and the protection of children. The new clauses define “cybersecurity crime” as any crime involving network disruption or hacking.

“Basically this means CISPA can no longer be called a cyber security bill at all. The government would be able to search information it collects under CISPA for the purposes of investigating American citizens with complete immunity from all privacy protections as long as they can claim someone committed a 'cybersecurity crime.' Basically it says the Fourth Amendment does not apply online, at all,” Techdirt's Leigh Beadon said.

Declan McCullagh, correspondent from CNET News, says CISPA will cause more trouble than is immediately apparent.

“The most controversial section of CISPA is the language – that notwithstanding any other portion the of law, companies can share what they want as long as it’s for what they call a ‘cyber security purpose,'" he told RT.

The CISPA battleground in numbers

CISPA was introduced in the House last November. Critics chided the bill, saying its broad wording could allow the government to spy on individual Internet users and block websites that publish vaguely defined ‘sensitive’ data.

"[CISPA] doesn’t really have any protections against cyber threats, all it does is make people share their information. But that’s not going to solve the problem. What’s going to solve the problem is actual security measures, protecting the service in the first place, not spying on people after the fact," Internet activist Aaron Swartz told RT.

The White House issued a statement Wednesday saying President Barack Obama would be advised to veto the bill if he receives it. The Obama administration denounces the proposed law for potentially giving the government cyber-sleuthing powers that would allow both federal authorities and private businesses to sneak into inboxes and online activities in the name of combating Internet terrorism tactics.

We asked our Twitter followers what they think of CISPA's possible adoption into law – and they don't seem happy.


Earlier, the House of Representatives and Senate also considered adopting the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA). These bills sought to entitle the US government to curb access to “rogue websites” that illegally hosted intellectual property. The bills could effectively force search engines to remove these websites from search results, an action many private companies considered intrusive.

PIPA and SOPA were opposed by many Internet giants including Google, Mozilla, Facebook, Yahoo!, Wikipedia and Reddit. Google organized a petition against the legislation, while Wikipedia held a 24-hour blackout to protest the bill in January. As a result, SOPA was recalled while PIPA was postponed indefinitely.

However, CISPA was actually backed by Facebook, despite its opposition to SOPA and PIPA. In a blog post on April 13, Joel Kaplan, Vice President of US Public Policy at Facebook, argued that if enacted into law, the bill would “give companies like ours the tools we need to protect our systems and the security of our users’ information, while also providing those users confidence that adequate privacy safeguards are in place.”

A number of big companies, including AT&T, Microsoft, Boeing, Verizon and Oracle have also supported CISPA

CISPA: Patriot Act for the web’ – Internet activist

AFP Photo / David Gannon

Source: Russia Today
http://rt.com/usa/news/cispa-patriot-web-swartz-081/

With the House of Representatives' approval of the controversial CISPA bill, Internet users are worried about possible consequences. RT spoke to Internet activist Aaron Swartz, who said CISPA could be used to spy on people.

RT: Can you explain the difference between this legislation and the previous controversial bills aimed at combating piracy?

Aaron Swartz: The previous bills were about giving the government the power to censor the Internet. And this is more like a Patriot Act for the Internet. It sort of lets the government run roughshod over privacy protections and share personal data about you, take it from Facebook and Internet providers and use it without the normal privacy protections that are in the law.

RT: So as far as individuals are concerned, is it worse than the previous ones?

AS: Yes, it’s worse because it does allow the government to shut down websites for ‘national security' reasons. It does have all the censorship problems the previous bill did. But it also goes much further and allows them to spy on people using the Internet, to get their personal data and e-mails. It’s an incredibly broad and dangerous bill.

RT: It’s not popular amongst Internet users, but it is popular with big companies like Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft – they’re backing CISPA. How can protesters compete with major corporations and companies like that?

AS: Well, it’s true. Big corporations are supporting the bill, especially big corporations that make money off of violating people's privacy. So it’s not a big surprise they’re in favor. But we’re seeing that the same way grassroots efforts were able to stop SOPA – despite millions of dollars of Hollywood lobbyists behind it – are now also being able to stop this bill. I mean everyone said, this is just a consensus in Washington, you couldn’t do anything. And now, even the White House is coming out against this bill with strong language, much stronger than they used against SOPA.

RT: The Obama administration is planning to veto the bill despite the fact that over two hundred in Congress are supporting it. Is this more about political point-scoring or preserving online privacy?

AS: I think the White House is obviously interested in repairing its reputation. But I think there are some people in the White House who really do care about privacy. The fact is, when they looked at this bill and investigated it, they saw how incredibly bad it was and that forced them to speak out.

RT: This bill, though, at the end of the day is meant to enforce cyber security and prevent threats. If these are real threats, then surely the US does need something to safeguard against them. What’s your alternative?

AS: Well the thing about this bill is it doesn’t really have any protections against cyber threats, all it does is make people share their information. But that’s not going to solve the problem. What’s going to solve the problem is actual security measures, protecting the service in the first place, not spying on people after the fact. So what I’d like to see is what a bunch of security experts have proposed – a bill that really does secure computer systems, makes them harder to attack, rather than one that involves more spying and watching people.

RT: Across Europe, we’ve seen thousands come out to protest the planned global Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA. But depending on Friday’s vote in Congress, do you expect the same kind of response in the US over CISPA?

AS: We’ve already seen quite an outcry. I don’t think it’s going to be on the level we’ve seen in other countries. Almost a million people have signed a petition on the Internet. Many representatives have spoken out against it. This is a tougher fight, no question, because it’s harder to go up against this notion of cyber terrorism that they’re using. But I think we’re making a lot of progress and I think we’ll see the bill eventually defeated.

CISPA was introduced in the House of Representatives last November by Mike Rogers (R-MI) and has since been amended on a number of occasions. Numerous critics, including World Wide Web founder Tim Bernars-Lee and Representative Ron Paul, continue to criticize its overly broad wording, which would permit private companies to submit personal user data to the government.

Congress had previously failed to approve SOPA and PIPA, which sought to bar access to websites containing illegally published copyrighted information. The bills were shelved in January, after a day of protests by major Internet companies, during which Wikipedia and Reddit among others remained inaccessible for 24 hours.

An international equivalent of SOPA and PIPA, ACTA was signed by eight countries plus the EU and all of its members. However, the agreement was met with a bevy of protests throughout Europe and has so far not been ratified by any country

Even worse than SOPA: New CISPA cybersecurity bill will censor the Web

Source: Russia Today
http://rt.com/usa/news/cispa-bill-sopa-internet-175/

An onrush of condemnation and criticism kept the SOPA and PIPA acts from passing earlier this year, but US lawmakers have already authored another authoritarian bill that could give them free reign to creep the Web in the name of cybersecurity.

As congressmen in Washington consider how to handle the ongoing issue of cyberattacks, some legislators have lent their support to a new act that, if passed, would let the government pry into the personal correspondence of anyone of their choosing.

H.R. 3523, a piece of legislation dubbed the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (or CISPA for short), has been created under the guise of being a necessary implement in America’s war against cyberattacks. But the vague verbiage contained within the pages of the paper could allow Congress to circumvent existing exemptions to online privacy laws and essentially monitor, censor and stop any online communication that it considers disruptive to the government or private parties. Critics have already come after CISPA for the capabilities that it will give to seemingly any federal entity that claims it is threatened by online interactions, but unlike the Stop Online Privacy Act and the Protect IP Acts that were discarded on the Capitol Building floor after incredibly successful online campaigns to crush them, widespread recognition of what the latest would-be law will do has yet to surface to the same degree.

Kendall Burman of the Center for Democracy and Technology tells RT that Congress is currently considering a number of cybersecurity bills that could eventually be voted into law, but for the group that largely advocates an open Internet, she warns that provisions within CISPA are reason to worry over what the realities could be if it ends up on the desk of President Barack Obama. So far CISPA has been introduced, referred and reported by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and expects to go before a vote in the first half of Congress within the coming weeks.

“We have a number of concerns with something like this bill that creates sort of a vast hole in the privacy law to allow government to receive these kinds of information,” explains Burman, who acknowledges that the bill, as written, allows the US government to involve itself into any online correspondence, current exemptions notwithstanding, if it believes there is reason to suspect cyber crime. As with other authoritarian attempts at censorship that have come through Congress in recent times, of course, the wording within the CISPA allows for the government to interpret the law in such a number of degrees that any online communication or interaction could be suspect and thus unknowingly monitored.

In a press release penned last month by the CDT, the group warned then that CISPA allows Internet Service Providers to “funnel private communications and related information back to the government without adequate privacy protections and controls.

The bill does not specify which agencies ISPs could disclose customer data to, but the structure and incentives in the bill raise a very real possibility that the National Security Agency or the DOD’s Cybercommand would be the primary recipient,” reads the warning.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, another online advocacy group, has also sharply condemned CISPA for what it means for the future of the Internet. “It effectively creates a ‘cybersecurity'’ exemption to all existing laws,” explains the EFF, who add in a statement of their own that “There are almost no restrictions on what can be collected and how it can be used, provided a company can claim it was motivated by ‘cybersecurity purposes.’”

What does that mean? Both the EFF and CDT say an awfully lot. Some of the biggest corporations in the country, including service providers such as Google, Facebook, Twitter or AT&T, could copy confidential information and send them off to the Pentagon if pressured, as long as the government believes they have reason to suspect wrongdoing. In a summation of their own, the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan arm of the Library of Congress, explains that “efforts to degrade, disrupt or destroy” either “a system or network of a government or private entity” is reason enough for Washington to reach in and read any online communiqué of their choice.

The authors of CISPA say the bill has been made “To provide for the sharing of certain cyber threat intelligence and cyber threat information between the intelligence community and cybersecurity entities,” but not before noting that the legislation could be used “and for other purposes,” as well — which, of course, are not defined.

“Cyber security, when done right and done narrowly, could benefit everyone,” Burman tells RT. “But it needs to be done in an incremental way with an arrow approach, and the heavy hand that lawmakers are taking with these current bills . . . it brings real serious concerns.”

So far CISPA has garnered support from over 100 representatives in the House who are favoring this cybersecurity legislation without taking into considerations what it could do to the everyday user of the Internet. And while the backlash created by opponents of SOPA and PIPA has not materialized to the same degree yet, Burman warns Congress that it could be only a matter of time before concerned Americans step up to have their say.

“One of the lessons we learned in the reaction to SOPA and PIPA is that when Congress tries to legislate on things that are going to affect Internet users’ experience, the Internet users are going to pay attention,” says Burman. H.R. 3523, she cautions, “Definitely could affect in a very serious way the internet experience.” Luckily, adds Burman, “People are starting to notice.” Given the speed that the latest censorship bill could sneak through Congress, however, anyone concerned over the future of the Internet should be on the lookout for CISPA as it continues to be considered on Capitol Hill.

Internet providers to start policing the web July 12

Source: Russia Today
http://rt.com/usa/news/internet-providers-year-sherman-661/

Some of the biggest Internet service providers in America plan to adopt policies that will punish customers for copyright infringement, and one of the top trade groups in the music biz announced this week that it could begin as soon as this summer.

The chief executive officer of the Recording Industry Association of America told an audience of publishers on Wednesday that a plan carved out last year to help thwart piracy is expected to prevail and be put in place by this summer. RIAA CEO Cary Sherman was one of the guest speakers among a New York panel this week and he confirmed that, at this rate, some of the most powerful Internet providers in America should have their new policies on the books by July 12, 2012.

Last year, Time Warner, Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Cablevision Systems and other Internet service providers proposed best practice recommendations that they suggested would help curb copyright crimes on the Web. The end result largely settled on consisted of a “graduate response” approach, a plan that would mean culprits could be issued a series of warnings for illegally downloading suspect material which, after a certain number of offenses, would lead to “mitigation measures,” connection speed throttling and termination of service.

"We anticipate that very few subscribers, after having received multiple alerts, will persist (or allow others to persist) in the content theft,” the Center for Copyright Information said in an official statement last summer as plans were first publicized. Now nearly a year after developments made by the big ISPs were first discussed, the RIAA’s Sherman says that online censorship sanctioned by corporate conglomerates such as Time Warner and Verizon are practically set in stone.

Discussing the road to realizing how to implement the policies, Sherman briefly touched on the technical aspects of the plan this week during the panel. "Each ISP has to develop their infrastructure for automating the system," Sherman said. They need this "for establishing the database so they can keep track of repeat infringers, so they know that this is the first notice or the third notice. Every ISP has to do it differently depending on the architecture of its particular network. Some are nearing completion and others are a little further from completion."

So what does this mean for you? If you’re an Internet user in America, almost certainly something significant. Between Time Warner, Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and Cablevision, those ISPs alone accounted for around 51 percent of the market in America back in 2008. Figures from June 2010 collected by the United Nation’s ITU division suggests that there are around 240 million Internet users now in the US, which means more than three-fourths of the country’s total population. With those big ISPs only thriving since their last figures were disclosed, 51 percent coverage of the market today would mean that around 120 million users can expect to fall under the umbrella of a massive campaign that could soon see half of the country at risk of having their Internet shut off.

As RT reported last year, a flip of the kill-switch is indeed an option that ISPs can take if they decide they find their customers at fault. That doesn’t mean it’s the be-all-end-all response, though. Under the “six-strike” policy discussed last year, each alleged instance of copyright infringement would prompt the ISP to reach out to its customer in question and inform them that they have detected a violation of US law. Strikes one through four would constitute email warnings of increasing severity, but five through six can come with legal action and end with the termination of service and potentially time behind bars. Although cooperating ISPs said last year that they would suspend service after a certain number of infringements, today they are hesitant to announce permanently cancelling any accounts — but merely putting them on hold while users respond to their legal requests.

The explanation for a change of heart, of course, comes down to money. Earlier this year Cary Sherman penned a ranting diatribe in the New York Times attacking opponents of the failed Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act — or SOPA and PIPA, respectively — two anti-Internet legislations that had the hefty support of the RIAA.

“There's no question that all the companies that are providing access to music are benefiting in some way, legal companies, and that's entirely appropriate,” Sherman wrote earlier this year. “ISPs have done very well by the availability of music online, because it has created greater demand for broadband access, and as a result they have now penetrated to the 66-67 percent level of US households, because they want access to the content that the entertainment industry offers.”

With the big ISPs having more than 100 million users at their mercy, limiting connection speed could easily convince a good number of people to remediate the alleged violations they are accused of, but actually terminating service for good could be a grave mistake for the industry. National Cable & Telecommunications Association President James Assey said last year that, by implementing the plan,“We are confident that, once informed that content theft is taking place on their accounts, the great majority of broadband subscribers will take steps to stop it.”

Some companies have already taken similar steps, but have been met with their fair share of roadblocks along the way. Verizon has previously sent warning letters to users alleged to be in violation, but those warnings have in some cases proved to be bothersome. In one 2010 episode, for instance, a 53-year-old grandmother was threatened with having her Internet shut-down for sharing copyrighted material — specifically clips from the television show South Park — to which she was completely unaware of. In that case it was an instance of mistaken identity where the woman’s WiFi signal had been hijacked. In their own report, CNet reporters acknowledged that Verizon never bothered to investigate into the legitimacy of their own claims until after a third-party became involved in the mediation.

This isn’t to say, of course, that we are telling you that the RIAA and certain Internet service providers are the bad guys here. After the SOPA legislation threatened to terminate a good chunk of online services, many websites waged a protest earlier this year by taking themselves offline for 24-hours. Cary Sherman then took to the press to turn the fight around and make it seem like it was the entertainment industry that was suffering, not sites like Wikipedia, a champion of the protest; Cary called them out in his op-ed for aiding in a “digital tsunami” that, along with Google, “manufactured controversy by unfairly equating SOPA with censorship.”

“The hyperbolic mistruths, presented on the home pages of some of the world’s most popular Web sites, amounted to an abuse of trust and a misuse of power,” added Sherman. “When Wikipedia and Google purport to be neutral sources of information, but then exploit their stature to present information that is not only not neutral but affirmatively incomplete and misleading, they are duping their users into accepting as truth what are merely self-serving political declarations.”

Cary went on to say that the last minutue decision to drop SOPA was a questionable one prompted by the mass creation of “misinformation” and suggested it wasn’t the work of democracy, but rather demagoguery. Of course, when the RIAA attacked Megaupload for copyright infringement — which eventually led to US authorities seizing and shutting down the file-sharing site — the response from hacktivists aligned with the Anonymous collective was a massive distributed denial-of-service attack on the websites for the RIAA and a handful of other music and movie biz sites.

With SOPA and PIPA out of the way for now, American users of the Web must look ahead before declaring victory in a war against online censorship. Recently the US fought and won for the extradition of a 23-year-old UK man who operated a website that American authorities decided was in violation of US law. If they are willing to ship a college student abroad to bring him to trial for posting a few links, will they think twice before turning off your Internet for sharing your own copies of South Park? That’s an episode you’ll have to stay tuned for to find out.

Google, NSA alliance posing security threats to users

Source: PressTV
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=119516§ionid=3510203


A deal between Internet giant Google and the US National Security Agency on cyber-attacks may pose serious threats to other countries' national security and Internet users.

Analysts worry the collaboration would allow Google's data to flow to the spy agency. Journalists and experts have announced their concern over the deal, as the National Security Agency (NSA) is known for intercepting private data.

During the Cold War, NSA worked with companies like Western Union to intercept and read millions of telegrams.

During the so-called US war on terror, the NSA has teamed up with telecommunications companies to eavesdrop on phone calls and Internet traffic.

Google, founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998, has become the world's largest Internet search engine.

It runs more than 1 million servers in data centers around the world, processes more than 1 billion search requests and 20 petabytes of user-generated data every day.

US senators urge action on Iran Internet

Source: PressTV
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=116700§ionid=3510203


Five US Senators publically urged Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to expedite aid flow to fight Internet restrictions in Iran, amid accusations that Washington interferes in Iran's internal affairs.

In a letter made public on Wednesday, the senators urged Clinton to swiftly spend $45 million that has been earmarked over the last two years to fight Internet restrictions in countries like Iran, the New York Times reported.

In July 2009, the US Senate ratified a plan to curb what it called "censorship" in the Islamic Republic.

A bill dubbed the Victims of Iranian Censorship (VOICE) Act is aimed at funding measures "to counter Iranian government efforts to jam radio, satellite, and Internet-based transmissions."

It also allocates $30 million for the US government to expand activities of Radio Free Europe's Persian-language radio broadcasts into Iran.

Washington will also take measures to counter Tehran's "efforts to block, censor, or monitor the Internet in Iran" with another $20 million, the ratification said.

Republican Senator John McCain, one of the sponsors of the bill, said the VOICE Act would help to open up the Iranian society "by providing assistance for broadcasting and new Internet and communications technologies."

The move comes amid an assertion by Iranian officials that Washington has not changed its approach toward Tehran, and it continues to meddle in the country's internal affairs.

The End of Free Speech in America

By: Stewart Brennan

A battle is going on right now to kill off all media and mediums that hold different opinions than the Corporate Media Executives and their financial backers.

There is a bigger picture here that needs to be considered before you just write this matter off. When you add all forms of communication surveillance, and Internet control, to Radio, Newspaper, and Television you have a totalitarian media tool for a Fascist Government. Things are getting seriously twisted and the free peoples voice must not be silenced! The same thing happened in 1930’s Germany. Dictatorship wasn’t achieved all at once, but by little bits of freedom lost here and there until absolute control was achieved.

If the lackeys in the FCC go ahead with the plan on removing restrictions on Media ownership, they will remove the average American’s voice and all freedoms experienced in opinion and press. There will be nothing to stop a Complete Imperial Fascist State.

Every time a court ruling is made in favour of the American people, these same twisted corporate politicians and lawyers strike back with a counter. Such is the case with the illegal wiretapping and secret surveillance of everyone and everything. Bush and corporate communications companies got away with that one and BOTH parties sold you the American people out!

Something needs to be done…When was the last time you heard a President even use the words, “World War Three”…as Bush did yesterday?

The laughable President who seems incapable of fluid thought is no longer a puppet to joke about! It appears that the ONLY reason that he appears to stumble with his words is because he is hiding behind the real objectives. The way I see it, Truth will roll out of the mouth easier than a series of lies within lies. George does a lot of stumbling but more now than at the beginning of his term. When a liar gets caught or trips up, his immediate reaction is to get angry with those posing questions to him…I saw Bush scold a number of reporters yesterday just for asking serious questions, and he was really smug and threatening with his answers.

George Bush is a satanic, evil, lying, Warmonger, whose worship of power and corruption showers him in wealth…and he’s laughing at you! Who will call him out?

It is my considered opinion that the American people should stand up and remove every trace of power from these monsters in Washington! When President Kennedy said, “Ask not what can your country do for you, but what can you do for your Country?” he did not mean for you to sit by and support a wealthy elite few ruin your free nation and have it ruled by a tyrant.

It is not just the lives of the Iraqi people that are at stake here, but also the lives of everyone on the planet including the American people!!

The voice of reason must prevail! Stand up America, and take your country back! Show the World why it is great to be an American because you are not doing that now. Sever all Government ties with corporate influence, run for election yourselves, don’t rely on the imagined two party system of Democrat verses Republican anymore. These two parties are owned by corporate America and serve only their ever-gracious money masters.

Truth and Honesty will win out in the end, but if that is going to happen, people need to make a stand and stick together. The Bush Autocracy and the executive members of the CFR (Council on Foreign Relations) have declared a state of WAR on the American people. Their well-placed puppets at various points in Government chip away at your freedoms every day, while the Senate and Congress pass the laws that erode your freedoms and constitution.

Its time to wake up America! Once control of the media and medium has been achieved by these sick greedy bastards they will simply cut off all those that do not bend to their wishes…i.e.: Americans that do not agree with the government will be considered revolutionaries and terrorists and therefore silenced…don’t let that happen!

Response to the Articles “Senate & Bush Agree on Terms of Spying Bill” from the Washington Post and to “Plan Would Ease FCC Restriction on Media Owners” from the “New York Times”

Washington Post Article
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/17/AR2007101702438_Comments.html

New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/business/media/18broadcast.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

We are fast approaching the time when self-survival will be a reality, and this electro/mechanic/fossil fuel world will be a moment in history.