Back to Basics

When you get a chance, type “www.communists.com” into your browser and see where it re-directs.

Then do the same thing with “www.socialists.com.”

It’s probably the least surprising thing you’ll see all day.

Update: Funny — somebody must have noticed, because communists.com now directs to a non Obama-related page. However, at this time, socialists.com is still pointing to BarackObama.com.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) died in Congress, but the Administration of President Barack Obama is showing it doesn’t need the legitimacy of law in its effort to take over the world. Now, through the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice, any Internet domain is subject to seizure at any time.

Case in point: The Canadian-owned online sports gaming site Bodog.com.

Bodog.com was registered with the Vancouver-based DomainClip. It has no ties to the United States. Yet, Maryland State prosecutors were able to obtain a warrant ordering Verisign, the company that ultimately manages all the dot-com, dot-net and dot-org domain names in the world, to redirect the website to a warning page advising that it had been seized by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The U.S. government has a history of going after online gaming operations, whether they are located within the United States or offshore. But stepping into another country’s jurisdiction steps it up a notch.

Online gambling has nothing to do with Homeland Security. There are two reasons the Administration is doing this: Control of Internet content and money. Piracy is just the cover story the Administration uses.

Is there anything that Google won’t know about people? Linking what is in your emails to what is in your internet searches and purchases leaves almost nothing that they don’t know. From the Washington Post:

Google said Tuesday it will require users to allow the company to follow their activities across e-mail, search, YouTube and other services, a radical shift in strategy that is expected to invite greater scrutiny of its privacy and competitive practices.

The information will enable Google to develop a fuller picture of how people use its growing empire of Web sites. Consumers will have no choice but to accept the changes.

The policy will take effect March 1 and will also impact Android mobile phone users, who are required to log in to Google accounts when they activate their phones. . . .

A user of Gmail, for instance, may send messages about a private meeting with a colleague and may not want the location of that meeting to be thrown into Google’s massive cauldron of data or used for Google’s maps application. . . .

Google has also faced greater scrutiny that it is using its dominance in online search to favor its other applications. Google’s decision to blend Google+ data into search results has been included into a broad FTC antitrust investigation, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is private.

Engineers from Twitter, Facebook and MySpace responded by launching a Web tool that they say shows Google is moving away from its stated mission to be a neutral Web directory.

On the Web site for the plug-in, the engineers wrote that searches for generic terms such as “movies” or “music” prioritize Google+ results over more relevant content.

Here is a nice summary of what Google knows about you. Not only does Google know about what movies you like and what you buy, it also knows this type of information:

You agreed to let Google know about your contacts and mails when you started using Gmail.
You agreed to let Google know about your photos when you started using Picasa.
You agreed to let Google know where you are when you started using Latitude.
You agreed to let Google know what people you interact with and what you are interested in when you started using Google+.
You agreed to let Google store your documents for you when you started using Docs. . . .

“This is our world now… the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud.” For people who grew up at a certain time with a thick glowing monitor casting light on their faces these were the closing words of their own Declaration of Independence. For those people the internet was not a layout of graphics and flash videos blaring from every website, but amalgams of text. The internet before the internet was an elitist place, like Linux, it was part puzzle and part love of taking intangible things apart and putting them back together again.

Like most revolutionaries they were doomed to be made irrelevant by the consequences of the forces that they had set in motion. The curiosity that was their code of honor has been overtaken by the world that they helped open up. And that world is an amazing place.

Freedom of information is no longer an idealistic slogan, it’s a commonplace reality. So commonplace that it’s hardly worth mentioning. People once fought and died to protect libraries. Now you can take every single library within a hundred miles of where you live, whether it’s a metropolis or a small town, and dangle it from the end of your keychain as a flash drive. Books, articles, vast troves of information, even classified diplomatic cables. Everything is available.

While the back ends of the system have become more complex, the end user experience has become trivially simple. With the iPad and the Kindle Fire, and Android and Windows 8 spreading the experience across generic tablets, the user experience comes down to touching the screen of a locked down system which is actually a disguised storefront to sell the user content through a carefully controlled, but fun to use environment. That is an overstatement, but it’s also the trend. It has been a long journey, but we finally have the technology that movies told us to expect wrapped in a simple package without any of the depth or complexity. Without most of the freedom that was at the core of how the technology got started.

The economics of the internet are based around it as a vehicle for the delivery of goods and services. That transformation is slowly destroying American retail, it is doing so at a snail’s place as big box retailers struggle to adapt, but the shopping mall and the big box store are still dinosaurs and their day is swiftly coming. Retailers who sold anything that can be digitized and delivered over the internet are already gone. Music stories, video rental places and now bookstores are vanishing into the past. An era when we get many of our goods out of CAD/CAM printers is not entirely inconceivable.

Virgin, Blockbuster and Borders have been sucked into the vortex as the middlemen in the marketplace that the marketplace no longer needed. The megacorporations which actually produce the songs, movies and books have been making their last stand since the nineties and their last stand invariably involves lawyers and lobbyists, rather than intelligently adapting to the marketplace. It is hard to feel sorry for these massive behemoths stomping and roaring about, bellowing about thievery everywhere.

One of the lessons one learns in military basic training is “situational awareness”, a term that reflects the importance of watchfulness in combat. It can mean the difference between life and death. Police practice this as well, looking for people who seem out of place in a neighborhood.

The average citizen blithely ignores this when shopping or just going about their life, though many purchase private monitoring services to protect their homes against fire or theft or put up video surveillance systems to protect their businesses. I doubt there is any public place that does not have television cameras watching.

When it comes to protecting the nation, situational awareness is an essential element to spot a potential individual or group that might pose a danger. There is, of course, the potential for misuse or abuse, but that applies to everything government does.

The upside of such monitoring is contained in a short item from the Heritage Foundation’s January 12 Morning Line dispatch. “His plan was to rip apart nightclubs with explosives, unleash a wave of destruction on bridges, and open fire on police officers—all in sunny Florida. This was the murderous intent of Sami Osmakac, 25, an American citizen from the former Yugoslavia who was determined to spill blood, foment destruction, and bring terror to the United States all in the name of Allah. Fortunately, undercover FBI agents thwarted his efforts, making this the 44th foiled terrorist plot against America.”

I am a regular contributor to Harold Wylie’s excellent website, BorderfireReport.net. On a daily basis he gathers news about the effects of illegal immigration and related topics. He recently wrote to say that “my website has been placed on a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) National Operations Center Media Monitoring Initiative.” He learned about this during a visit to World Net Daily.com.

Is this a good or bad thing? Candidly, I thought it was a good thing because it suggests that someone at DHS recognized what an excellent “open source” of information Wylie’s site provides.

A government agency that’s “snooping” on Americans is not likely to issue such a notice and the sites listed represent, in government-speak, the opportunity “to collect information used in providing situational awareness and establishing a common operating picture.”

When one considers the billions the government spends on covert intelligence gathering, this is a far cry from “Big Brother.” Simply stated, DHS thinks that Wylie’s his site is performing a valuable service for their own Immigration, Customs, and Enforcement operation.

The cliché is that “being paranoid does not mean someone is not watching you.” There are so many sources of information available to individuals and groups regarding everything about your life that it bodes well to conduct oneself in conformance with common sense and the law. Meanwhile, your credit rating and other data are easily accessible.

Like millions of others I am on Facebook and DHS monitors both it and Spacebook. The occasional nutcase uses these social networks to announce to the world that he or she has bad intentions.

How would the world look differently today if Newt hadn’t been there to stop many attempts to regulate technology? From Politico:

. . . Twenty years ago, Gingrich’s appreciation of technology was more novel among Republicans, showing that there was a conservative libertarian interest in preserving the burgeoning Internet from efforts to regulate it. The 1995 Wired magazine cover interview was headlined “Friend and Foe.” At the time, Gingrich talked up the transformative power of the Internet and a world where schools and hospitals would be wired.
Media in his home state dubbed him “Newt Skywalker.”
As House speaker, Gingrich marshaled forces on issues such as data scrambling technologies, freedom of speech on the Internet and securities litigation reform. He helped launch Thomas, the Library of Congress website that provides information about bills. He started the High Technology Working Group, now the Technology Working Group, composed of Republican leaders involved in a wide swath of tech issues.
Gingrich is “sensitive to innovation, to job creation, to startups and not having the government doing — but getting out of the away,” said McNealy, who is now chairman of social media startup Wayin. Gingrich “is a spectacular idea guy.”
Some of the early, libertarian-leaning views that won him fans in Silicon Valley were potential time bombs with the GOP faithful, but he stood his ground. In 1996, Gingrich — then the speaker of the House — resisted an attempt to fight porn on the Internet.
When the Senate began to push for the Communications Decency Act of 1996, Gingrich put up a road block that helped to undermine the act, which was later struck down by the Supreme Court. The act, introduced by then-Sen. Jim Exon (D-Neb.), would have made indecent materials on the Internet illegal and made intermediaries — such as Internet service providers — responsible for policing content on the Web. . . .

PHOTOS.COM Two bills in Congress aim to give the government power to shut down websites: the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) in the House and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate.

The fascists in both political parties have lost control of their messaging. The wealth of freely exchanged information on the Internet has divested them of their primary means of propaganda: the corporate media. They are working very hard to regain control.

That’s what’s behind two bills in Congress: the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) in the House and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate. Congress, of course, couches the bills as efforts to stop online piracy or to protect consumers from so-called rogue foreign pharmacies. It’s also what was behind last year’s failed efforts to pass an Internet kill switch bill.

According to an article in The Hill: “The bill would empower the Justice Department and copyright holders to demand that search engines, Internet providers and payment processors cut ties with websites ‘dedicated’ to copyright infringement.”

Laurence Tribe, a Constitutional law expert at Harvard Law School, sent a memo to Congress last week describing how the SOPA violates the 1^st Amendment because it suppresses speech without a judicial hearing and the bill’s definition of a rogue website is unConstitutionally vague. He says that an entire website containing tens of thousands of pages could be targeted if only a single page were accused of infringement.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said the bill would break the Internet.

“By criminalizing links, what these bills do is they force you to take content off the Internet,” Schmidt told The Hill, calling it a form of censorship. He compared the proposal to the Web censorship practiced by repressive foreign governments like China and doubled down on that comparison when speaking with reporters after his remarks at the Economic Club of Washington.

The bill would create problems for sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube that allow user-generated content by being repositories for videos, photos and other materials. It would also lead to the potential to shut down sites like Personal Liberty Digest™, which allows the posting of links to other sites.

It’s no coincidence that this bill could target social media and information-sharing sites. It was social media, after all, that was used to encourage and organize the protests in the Mideast that became known as Arab Spring. China is notorious for shutting down the Internet in certain areas when protests begin. U.S. lawmakers have made it clear they see China as their model. And information-sharing sites like YouTube and Personal Liberty are the means used by many people to educate the masses on the growing tyranny in America and around the globe.

Last year, Senator Joe Lieberman told CNN’s Candy Crowley, “Right now China — the government — can disconnect parts of its Internet in a case of war. We need to have the ability to do that, too.” And Senator Jay Rockefeller is on a YouTube video saying he wished the Internet had never been invented and people still communicated with paper and pencil.

We are now faced with a number of firms offering to store our personal and professional information in the cloud – a fancy term for remote computer-based storage.

Some vendors offer free services, possibly with limits, in exchange for your acceptance of advertising. Some vendors make introductory offers with graduated rates in the future.

No matter what the offer, you must consider the following issues:

One, who is it that you are really doing business with? Are you doing business with a major firm or a startup? Are they financially stable now or are they in a growth mode? Are they funded by venture capitalists looking to cash out in an IPO (initial public offering) or run by executives with their own personal exist strategy.

Two, are they accepting responsibility for your data with the financial liability for lost, corrupted or unavailable data or are you being asked to sign a unilateral one-sided agreement that absolves them of all responsibility or limits their damages to the amount you have paid for services for the year? Are you susceptible to multiple unilateral contractual obligations for each of the vendor’s products that you use? Are you required to monitor the vendor’s website for unilateral changes in agreements, terms of service, or end user licensing agreements?

Three, is your data transmission to and from the cloud from any and all devices encrypted with industrial strength security? Some vendors rely on the device’s hardware features or software which can be less secure than security normally found in desktop-level software and hardware.

Four, does your data reside in secure data centers? Are these data centers within the continental United States under the legal jurisdiction of U.S. regulatory and law enforcement agencies? Or is your data stored in an off-shore foreign data center whose legal system is beyond the reach of the U.S. legal authorities>

Five, is your data encrypted while stored on remote machines – including, but not limited to, in-memory transfers?

Six, who holds the encryption keys? Is the data from one or more customers encrypted with a single encryption key held by the vendor?

Seven, is your data securely backed-up or replicated to insure that it is reasonably safe from hardware and software mishaps?

Eight, does the vendor allow you to encrypt your own data with your own encryption keys or do they specify that the information must reside in an unencrypted format or an encrypted format that is accessible to them for data mining – ostensibly to provide you with more targeted advertisement? Will the vendor, acting on their own behalf or on behalf of a third party, scan your data for potential copyright infringement or legally prohibited files?

Nine, will your vendor provide you with sufficient notice of a law enforcement subpoena, administrative summons or a court-ordered examination of your data in sufficient time to argue against the release of the information? What controls will be placed on the data that is provided – considering that portions of your data are beyond the scope of inquiry or may contain legally protected information such as communications with your lawyer?

On Sunday June 12 the New York Times ran an exclusive story about a new State Department funded “Stealth Internet” to aid dissidents living under oppressive regimes. Since that release the coverage has exploded and sent the State Department into damage control mode. Due to the heightened media interest in the program the State Department did something that I have never seen them do; they held a press conference in which the officials speaking on behalf of the Department were not to be named. Journalists were told they could not identify the representatives and to refer to them as “State Department Official One” and “State Department Official Two” (Full transcript here)

Rather than blow over smoothly the Times piece, as well as other stories, caused an immediate uproar. In our follow up investigation (Government Stealth Internet Part 1) it was revealed that TOR was previously created by the Naval Research Laboratory and its security failed writ large; regimes were able to exploit the security holes to round up dissidents. Hence the hasty efforts by the State Department to replace it. Plus we know better. In this instance we saw ahead of the New York Times piece; earlier this month the Navy once again was looking to fill “cyber executive fellowships”.

Taking questions over the phone State Department Official One immediately rejects the notion that this new project is about “cloak and dagger” or “James Bond”. The Times did not make such a claim, nor did our follow up investigation. As a matter of fact our narrative strictly focused on the failure of their previous attempts and drew the conclusion that a new effort was obviously needed. As State Dept Official One confirms “we are watching the need for this kind of support play out in real time as we look across the Middle East.” But they had TOR. It was promoted by the State Department and affiliate programs. So if something more is needed now then obviously TOR was was not sufficient. This proves our claim from part one.

But when asked about issuing grants for developing these circumvention technologies a member of the press asks what type of vetting is done in order to make sure the right group(s) get the proper funding. “You don’t want terrorists.”, states the journalist, “So you’d have to draw the line somewhere, I suppose.” In which State Department Official One responds “By law we can’t-obviously by law we are restricted in our funding and we do have to make sure that its not a terrorist” However, their previous technology (TOR) was used to detain, torture, and murder (in some cases) dissidents.

“Terrorists”, as defined by the US Government were not the perpetraitors in these instances but rather regime officials. State Department Official One goes on to explain that they do have a “negative screen” of sorts for these programs but “no positive screen”. In other words, any group that defines itself in positive terms can be a recipient of this technology.

On Monday we learned about the Obama Administration’s latest project to create a “stealth” internet via the New York Times. Missing from their piece was the  previous government created stealth internet and the horrible repercussions. Also missing was who exactly are the people overseeing the creation of the new “internet in a suitcase”.  So who is in charge of creating this new “stealth internet” and just how dangerous are they?

It should come as no surprise, given the Times reputation for bias, that this project is being overseen by the same progressives who previously supported and guided these revolutions from inside the State Department. In the Times article it is mentioned in passing that the New America Foundation will be central to the creation of this new tool.

The Washington Post reports that Dr. Anne-Marie Slaughter has returned to the New America Foundation. Slaughter spent the past two years as the Director of Policy Planning at the State Department. During her time at the State Department she was fairly busy. Recently revealed was an odd video message she recorded for a youth group meeting at the US Embassy in New Zealand. The motivational talk given by Slaughter,  speaks of the redemptive qualities of Mohammed Atta and the similar community organizing skills that he and the youth groups posses. Given just weeks before the Egyptian uprising we also learned later that the State Department was not just aware of the coming uprising but they helped facilitate it.

The uprising was planned at the State Department sponsored Alliance for Youth Movements (AYM) in December 2008. Shortly after, with the revolution planned, Slaughter was pretty busy. The effort to push a global revolution using social media was in full swing. In January 2010 a conference entitled “Connection Technologies and Diplomacy” was held by the State Department (with Slaughter). Some notable people on the panel were from AYM and the Open Society Institute (Soros). The power of social media has the ability to move the world towards the globalist view by leaps and bounds. If it didn’t then not a single conference would exist on the topic.

To date these centralized, top-down, pro-democracy efforts seemed to have backfired. In Egypt Christian churches are now being burned and The Muslim Brotherhood, if elected to office, have promised to end the peace treaty with Israel. The same push to go big with social media styled community organizing was attempted by the same group in Iraq. It backfired and radicals seized upon the opportunity to throw the country into chaos; just like Egypt. And also just like as in Egypt the marching orders from the radicals were to “sweep the occupation into the dustbin of history”; in other words our troops.

So Dr. Slaughter aided, supported, and partially guided global revolutions from a position of power at the State Department. Now she has left, at the perfect time,and is back with the organization that will be responsible for creating the center-piece of global revolution; A new “stealth internet”.