Enlightening and educational posters:

The net-neutrality ending deal with Verizon is just the beginning of Google’s plans to kill the open and free Internet as part of their takeover agenda to completely control the world wide web and force independent media websites, radio and TV shows out of existence for good.

Google’s agreement with Verizon to speed certain Internet content to users opens the door to the complete sterilization of the world wide web as a force for political change. Under Google’s takeover plan, the Internet will closely resemble cable TV, independent voices will be silenced and the entire Internet will be bought up by transnational media giants.

People who want to run a simple blog will be priced out of existence, online TV and radio shows will cease to exist as the Internet is swallowed up by the corporate borg.

True net neutrality means that independent news outlets who attract an audience by telling the truth can compete on an even keel with corporate giants like ABC, CBS and CNN. The Google-Verizon pact will end that level playing field and in turn eliminate everything that is outside of the mainstream.

“A non-neutral Internet means that companies like AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and Google can turn the Net into cable TV and pick winners and losers online,” writes Josh Silver. “A problem just for Internet geeks? You wish. All video, radio, phone and other services will soon be delivered through an Internet connection. Ending Net Neutrality would end the revolutionary potential that any website can act as a television or radio network. It would spell the end of our opportunity to wrest access and distribution of media content away from the handful of massive media corporations that currently control the television and radio dial.”
The deal will also split the Internet into a two-tier system, a cyber toll road, where satisfactory speeds and service will only be obtainable by those willing to pay substantial fees.
 
The pact also gives Google and huge ISPs the leeway to block certain websites on wireless networks, meaning Prison Planet and Infowars will ‘go dark’ for millions of people.
Once Google’s fiercest critics have been silenced for good the company can then set about implementing its CIA-backed total information awareness program, which will scour Twitter accounts, blogs and websites for all sorts of information left by individual users, aiming to use this data to “predict the future” and completely direct and control people’s lives and behavior.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has announced that Google, in conjunction with the CIA, is set to become the ultimate Big Brother entity that “will know so much about its users that the search engine will be able to help them plan their lives” by constantly tracking their location via smart phones and telling them where to go and what to do.

We have previously reported on Google’s intimate and long standing connections to government spy networks.

There is also no doubt that Google is one of the corporations at the forefront of the government’s drive to use cybersecurity as a pretext for killing the free Internet, having previously worked with the NSA and the CIA.

The recent scandal involving the company’s street view roaming vehicles accessing the wi-fi details of internet users and mapping their online activities has also raised serious questions over intelligence links and abuse of privacy laws.

Watch this important new video in which Alex Jones breaks down Google’s plan to kill the web and explains why it’s the end of the Internet as we know it unless we stand up now and say no.

Billion dollar cybersecurity industry at the forefront of ‘Top Secret America’ complex

Steve Watson
prisonplanet.com

An increasing clamour to restrict and control the internet on behalf of the government, the Pentagon, the intelligence community and their private corporate arms, could result in a staged cyber attack being used as justification.

Over recent months we have seen a great increase in media coverageof inflated fears over a possible
“electronic Pearl Harbor” event, with reports claiming that the U.S. could be “felled within 15 minutes”.

Vastly over-hyped (and in some cases completely asinine) claims that the power grids and other key infrastructure such as rail networks and water sources are wired up to the public internet
have permeated such coverage.

Threats against computer networks in the United States are grossly exaggerated. Dire reports issued by the Defense Science Board and the Center for Strategic and International Studies “are usually richer in vivid metaphor — with fears of ‘digital Pearl Harbors’ and ‘cyber-Katrinas’ — than in factual foundation,”
writes Evgeny Morozov, a respected researcher and blogger who writes on the political effects
of the internet.

Morozov notes that much of the data on the supposed cyber threat “are gathered by ultra-secretive
government agencies — which need to justify their own existence — and cyber-security companies
— which derive commercial benefits from popular anxiety.”

When the Cybersecurity Act was introduced by Senator John Rockefeller last year, he made similar claims about the threat of cyber attacks, adding “Would it have been better if we’d have never invented the Internet?”.

Rockefeller’s legislation gives the president the ability to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” and shut down or limit Internet traffic in any “critical” information network “in the interest of national security.” The bill does not define a critical information network or a cybersecurity emergency. That definition would be left to the president, according to a Mother Jones report.

Provisions in the bill would allow the federal government, via the DHS and the NSA, to tap into any digital aspect of every citizen’s information without a warrant. Banking, business and medical records would be wide open to inspection, as well as personal instant message and e mail communications – all in the name of heading off cyber attacks on the nation.

Enhancements of such provisions are contained in the more recent “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act”, which is being pushed hard by Senator Joe Lieberman. The bill would hand absolute power to the federal government to close down networks, and block incoming Internet traffic from certain countries under a declared national emergency.

An accompanying cybersecurity control grid would only create greater risk according to experts who note that it would essentially “establish a path for the bad guys to skip down.” Other countries, such as Australia and the UK are following suit.

The program dovetails with the Pentagon’s newly created Cyber Command, headed by Keith B Alexander, the acting head of the NSA and the man behind the massive program of illegal dragnet surveillance of domestic communications since at least 2001.

During the Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing, Alexander said the Pentagon’s Cyber Command would enjoy “significant synergy” with the NSA. “We have to show what we’re doing to ensure that we comport, comply with the laws,” said Alexander, perversely claiming the agency is respecting and protecting the privacy of the American people.

The Pentagon considers cyberspace a warfighting domain equal to land, sea, air and space. In 2003, the Pentagon classified the internet as an enemy “weapons system” requiring a “robust offensive suite of capabilities to include full-range electronic and computer network attack.” It has spent Billions of dollars building a super secret “National Cyber Range” in order to prepare for “Dominant Cyber Offensive Engagement”, which translates as control over “any and all” computers. The program has been dubbed “The Electronic Manhattan Project”.

The enemy is never specifically named, it is merely whoever uses the net, because the enemy IS the net. The enemy is the freedom the net provides to billions around the globe and the threat to militaristic dominance of information and the ultimate power that affords.

These initiatives represent a continuation of the so called “Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative”, created via a secret presidential order in 2008 under the Bush administration. former National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell announced that the NSA’s warrantless wiretaps would “be a walk in the park compared to this,”.

“This is going to be a goat rope on the Hill” McConnell said. My prediction is that we’re going to screw around with this until something horrendous happens.”

As we have previously reported, large corporations such as Google, AT&T, Facebook and Yahoo to name but a few are intimately involved in the overarching program. Those corporations have specific government arms that are supplying the software, hardware and tech support to US intelligence agencies in the process of creating a vast closed source database for global spy networks to share information.

Clearly the implications of this program for the open and free internet, and for liberty in general are very worrying, this has been reflected in the resistance and criticism from groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

In light of this, there is a real danger of a hyped or completely staged cyber attack being propagated in order to bring the issue to public attention and counter the critics who have exposed it as a part of the agenda to restrict the Internet.

In 2008 Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig detailed such ongoing government plans for overhaul and restriction.

Lessig told attendees of a high profile Tech conference that “There’s going to be an i-9/11 event” which will act as a catalyst for a radical reworking of the law pertaining to the internet.

Lessig said that he came to that conclusion following a conversation with former government Counter Terrorism Czar Richard Clarke, who informed him that there is already in existence a cyber equivalent of the Patriot Act, an “i-Patriot Act” if you will, and that the Justice Department is just waiting for a cyber terrorism event in order to implement its provisions.

Lessig is the founder of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. He is founding board member of Creative Commons and is a board member of the Software Freedom Law Center. He is best known as a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications.

These are clearly not the ravings of some paranoid cyber geek.

Though Richard Clarke advocates an enhancement of cyber security, even he has stated that it would be a terrible idea to allow the government to regulate and filter the internet.

We have also recently seen multiple mock attacks conducted by the government, via private outsourcing, on it’s own infrastructure systems. On such exercise, called “We Were Warned: Cyber Shockwave”, involved Former Department of Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff and former CIA deputy director John McLaughlin taking the roles of government leaders. CNN broadcast the entire simulation on prime time television.

Alex Jones recently discussed this issue on Russia Today news programming:

Journalist Webster Tarpley also lays out the hyping of cyber threats as a pretext to takedown the internet:

Kurt Nimmo
infowars.com

Once again, the Obama administration has violated the Bill of Rights. Earlier this month, the feds took down a free Wordpress blogging platform and disabled more than 73,000 blogs. The action was completely ignored by the corporate media. The site, Blogetery.com, was told by its hosting service that the government had issued orders to shut down the site due to a “a history of abuse” related to copyrighted material.

In late June, Joe Biden and Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinel said the government would move to take down sites offering unauthorized movies and music. “Criminal copyright infringement occurs on a massive scale over the Internet, reportedly resulting in billions of dollars in losses to the U.S. economy,” said Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Bharara’s office and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement launched “Operation In Our Sites” and executed seizure warrants against nine domain names.

Blogetery.com claimed the shut down of 73,000 blogs “was not a typical case, in which suspension and notification would be the norm. This was a critical matter brought to our attention by law enforcement officials. We had to immediately remove the server.”

“That seems odd,” notes Techdirt, a website that covers government policy, technology and legal issues. “If there was problematic content from some users, why not just take down that content or suspend those users. Taking down all 73,000 blogs seems… excessive.”

The DMCA’s takedown actions are a direct violation of the First Amendment under prior restraint. However, explains law professor Wendy Seltzer, because “DMCA takedowns are privately administered through ISPs… they have not received… constitutional scrutiny, despite their high risk of error.” Seltzer adds that “because DMCA takedown costs less to copyright claimants than a federal complaint and exposes claimants to few risks, it invites more frequent abuse or error than standard copyright law.”

TorrentFreak worries that the Blogetery.com case has set a precedent. “Fears remain… that this action is only the beginning, and that more sites will be targeted as the months roll on. Indeed, TorrentFreak has already received information that other sites, so far unnamed in the media, are being monitored by the authorities on copyright grounds,” writes a blogger on the site.

“They say it’s because of copyright infringement, but is it really?… it would seem that only sites/blogs which were streaming movies and TV shows were shut down initially, but upon further perusal, it seems like the Feds just arbitrarily shut down a server with several tens of thousands of bloggers on it without due process as is usual with this administration,” writes Smash Mouth Politics. “How soon before they find some reason to shut down other servers or networks? What’s probably infuriating to the bloggers who were shut down is that they have no recourse. They have no idea why the server was shut down. And the Feds are mum about it. Also, if the bloggers can even get a hold of the server admin, they’re refused any explanation of why.”

In October, 2004, more than 20 Independent Media Center websites and other internet services were taken offline, not in response to alleged copyright infringement but for political reasons. The disappearance of the Indymedia servers was shrouded in secrecy and the ISP and government would not provide an explanation. On October 20, 2004, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit in Texas and argued that “the public and the press have a clear and compelling interest in discovering under what authority the government was able to unilaterally prevent Internet publishers from exercising their First Amendment rights.”

It was later discovered that the ISP had shut down IndyMedia’s websites after they were contacted by the FBI. The FBI said a particular article on the website nantes.indymedia.org contained personal information and threats regarding two Swiss undercover police officers. It was later determined that the article contained neither threats nor names or address information and contained instead photographs of police agents provocateurs masquerading as anti-globalization protesters.

The Obama administration — in step with he Bush administration before it — does not have a problem ordering the government to violate the First, Fifth, and Tenth Amendments. In its declared effort to prevent online piracy of copyrighted material, the government has trashed the Bill of Rights. It has used the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to intimidate ISPs to shut down web sites.

In June, a Senate committee approved a dictatorial cybersecurity bill that would allow Obama to shut down the internet. The bill, known as the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, would grant Obama the authority to carry out emergency actions to protect critical parts of the internet, including ordering owners of critical infrastructure to implement emergency response plans, during a government declared cyber-emergency. Obama would supposedly need congressional approval to extend a national cyber-emergency beyond 120 days under an amendment to the legislation approved by the committee.

ACTA: Flagship of the growing internet censorship armada

Steve Watson
infowars.net

Over 90 academics, practitioners and public interest organizations from six continents have collectively warned that a secretive global treaty, currently being negotiated by governments of the world's largest economies would see tight controls placed on the internet and would threaten other fundamental rights and freedoms.

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has received fleeting public attention, yet it has been quietly evolving for a number of years.

On it's face ACTA is described as a countermeasure directed at the rise of counterfeit goods, medicines and pirated copyright protected material, including "piracy over the Internet".

If officially ratified, however, ACTA would mark the formation of a major new global legal infrastructure with relation to standards on intellectual property rights enforcement.

It would also see the formation of an international governing body to oversee implementation of the agreement. That body would operate beyond the jurisdiction of national governments and even beyond that of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) or the United Nations.

ACTA would effectively challenge already defined national court precedents regarding consumer rights and "fair use" laws and could fundamentally alter or remove limitations altogether on the application of intellectual property laws.

The US, along with all the countries of the European Union as well as Japan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and a handful of other countries, have been involved in the ACTA negotiations since 2006.

Leaked drafts of the agreement in 2008, 2009 and most recently in April 2010 have raised concern over the legal scope of the proposed treaty. The secrecy surrounding the negotiations has also prompted further worry over the draconian provisions within the agreement. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, along with other notable watchdog organisations, have called for more transparency on ACTA.

A group of international experts was convened last month by the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property at The American University Washington College of Law to debate the proposed treaty. The group later released a communique that makes worrying reading.

"ACTA is the predictably deficient product of a deeply flawed process." The statement reads. "What started as a relatively simple proposal to coordinate customs enforcement has transformed into a sweeping and complex new international intellectual property and internet regulation with grave consequences for the global economy and governments' ability to promote and protect the public interest."

The communique bullet points the following four key conclusions:

• Negotiators claim ACTA will not interfere with citizens' fundamental rights and liberties; it will.
• They claim ACTA is consistent with the WTO Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS); it is not.
• They claim ACTA will not increase border searches or interfere with cross-border transit of legitimate generic medicines; it will.
• And they claim that ACTA does not require "graduated response" disconnections of people from the internet; however, the agreement strongly encourages such policies.

Those who endorsed the statement include professors from leading universities across the globe and several European members of parliament who have formed a working group on ACTA.

The group identified at least seven critical areas of global public policy in which ACTA is hostile to the public interest. They define these as:

"fundamental rights and freedoms; internet governance; access to medicines; scope and nature of intellectual property law; international trade; international law and institutions; and democratic process."

With specific reference to internet governance, the group says ACTA would:

• Encourage internet service providers to police the activities of internet users by holding internet providers responsible for the actions of subscribers, conditioning safe harbors on adopting policing policies, and by requiring parties to encourage cooperation between service providers and rights holders;
• Encourage this surveillance, and the potential for punitive disconnections by private actors, without adequate court oversight or due process;
• Globalize 'anti-circumvention' provisions which threaten innovation, competition, free (freedom-respecting) software, open access business models, interoperability, the enjoyment of user rights, and user choice;

"The provisions would pave the way for a globalized three-strikes and you’re out system," referring to a proposal within the treaty to have internet service providers cut off service - without access to a trial or counsel - to anyone accused at least three times of illegally sharing copyrighted material.

Geist has also noted that "offenders" could even be imprisoned for sharing copyrighted material.

The three strikes policy mirrors that contained within the recently passed Digital Economy Bill in the UK, with similar provisions also outlined in Australian legislation, indicating that ACTA negotiations may also be driving national government policy on internet regulation proposals.

"The US government appears to be pushing for Three Strikes to be part of the new global IP enforcement regime which ACTA is intended to create..." Gwen Hinze at the Electronic Frontier Foundation has previously noted. "...despite the fact that it has been categorically rejected by the European Parliament and by national policymakers in several ACTA negotiating countries, and has never been proposed by US legislators,".

The agreement would also force internet service providers to crack down on sites that offer file sharing and peer to peer software, even though those sites may be entirely legitimate. ACTA could even see popular Web sites like YouTube and Flickr shut down because of a provision in the treaty that would force them to monitor everything uploaded to the site for copyright violations.

The upshot is that all current and future innovations that allow knowledge and information to be distributed on a mass scale are directly threatened by ACTA simply because it presumes such technology will be used by a minority to distribute material that is deemed copyrighted.

ACTA represents another huge warship in an armada directing it's guns at the free internet. We have previously highlighted countless similar legislative programs that have either been enacted or are working their way into law in the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Britain, and many other European countries.

In addition, ACTA is so much more than an internet censorship bill, it covers physical goods and even medicines, while systematically re-writing previously established laws on trade and intellectual property.