Internet

the Internet is the "samizdat" for 21st century America - Russian for "self publishing" underground media during the Soviet era
Soviet dissidents had mimeograph machines, we have internet and cd-burners

The War on the Web

 

"The unavoidable fact is that the Internet is incompatible with a totalitarian system of government. .... hope for the best, and enjoy the Internet while you can"
Kiss Your Internet Good-bye, by Servando González www.intelinet.org/kiss_internet.html

 

The Internet continues to be a minefield of disinfo and deception, completely untrustworthy, with good people going bad and vice versa as the monster grows and gets richer. There's a lack of deep critique of the operators of the net -- the service providers, the sysadmins, the overseers, the experts, the watchdogs, the longtime sources of trustworthy information who have been brought into the well-rewarded circle of beneficiaries.
Internet security and privacy is a global fraud, with the witting manipulating the unwitting. The leaders of NSA, the telecoms, Microsoft and Google are hardly working alone -- without technicians spying couldn't happen.
www.cryptome.org
October 24, 2007


http://london.indymedia.org.uk/articles/203

Indymedia and the Enclosure of the Internet
Published: Sunday 09 November 2008 16:54 by Yossarian

Activists who would never consider eating meat or crossing a picket line think nothing of putting their entire communications infrastructure into the hands of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Rupert Murdoch. There are enormous practical problems with respect to communications security, data ownership, privacy, censorship of content, and data mining by both corporations and law enforcement agencies. From what I can see everyone from the left-liberal NGOs and environmentalists, to the unions, and over into the extraparliamentary anarchist and communist groups all have the same attitude: there is no problem. Move along. Shut up about it, you're being a geek.

We need to be explaining these issues to people in a consistent and effective way. Perhaps explaining that it's like holding all your political meetings at McDonalds, and ensuring that the police come and film you while you do so, would be one approach to take.

Education alone will not solve the problem, though. We need to provide self-managed alternatives.


www.cryptome.org/1984update.htm

House and Senate bills, H. R. 1955 and S. 1959

[110th CONGRESS House Bills]
[From the U.S. Government Printing Office via GPO Access]
[DOCID: h1955rfs.txt]
[Referred in Senate]
110th CONGRESS
1st Session
H. R. 1955

IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES

October 24, 2007

Received; read twice and referred to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs

AN ACT
To prevent homegrown terrorism, and for other purposes.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as the "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007''.

The Congress finds the following: ...
(3) The Internet has aided in facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process in the United States by providing access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda to United States citizens.


www.mapcruzin.com/scruztri/docs/news09161.htm

From: ABC (Australian Broadcasting Company) News,
http://www.abc.net.au/news/98/09/02/980902_45.htm

Internet a threat to industry, forum told Wed, 2 Sep 1998

Australia's Plastics and Chemicals Industries Association has been warned growth in the use of the Internet poses a threat to industry profits in a climate of growing environmental activism.

United States Chamber of Commerce vice-president William Kovacs was commenting at the association's convention in Port Douglas.

Mr Kovacs told delegates the biggest threat to plastics and chemicals, and perhaps all industry, is the ability for anyone to disseminate incorrect information cheaply to the entire world.

He says the use of the Internet by extreme environmentalists and greater amounts of public disclosure law will create fear and allow the sabotage of industries.

Mr Kovacs warns that when the tide changes against industry, industrialised nations will act like countries dominated by religious fundamentalists.

© 1998 Australian Broadcasting Corporation

 


http://deconsumption.typepad.com/deconsumption/2006/02/the_hate_us_for.html

February 17, 2006
They Hate Us for Our Freedoms (of the Press)


from www.cryptome.org

The Internet is a spying machine and no use of it free of surveillance is possible due to the system's design to allow continuous monitoring by service providers, website operators, security peddlers and government communications regulators across and up and down the transmission stream. Hazards planted in users' boxes are the least threat compared to the Internet's inherent capability of siphoning and archiving data at multiples points without users' knowledge or control. Any website privacy policy which promises protection is a lie, same for any communications or government medium.
Google's search archive and commercial data-grabbers are no different than the Wayback Machine and they are no different than the vast archives of the telecomms and worldwide spy agencies which have forever had access to all forms of communications long before the Internet was invented as a new means to lure users into the spy web with promised rewards of empowement, pleasure and novelty.
Information on how NSA users contractors to surveil the net through points of telecomm access is only one example. System administrators know this but do not fully disclose to the public, covering up the truth due to professional self-interest, secrecy agreements, rules of confidentiality and power-mongering to have access to data few others do -- perfect behavior of spies long practiced by the world's communications octopus.
If you want privacy in digital communications don't use the Internet or any part of the electromagnetic spectrum. In any type of communications, don't communicate with a traceable identity. National, domestic and personal security bandits, heeding the profits of religious and educational terror-mongers, always claim unending threats to sell surefire protection and smear competitors.
To repeat Cryptome's mantra: This is not a trustworthy opinion or website, nor is democracy ruled by the people.

 

August 5, 2008

A asks: What is Cryptome's privacy policy, is user data collected?
Answer: No user data is collected by Cryptome. Logs are deleted several times a day. But read on.

This is not to promise there is nobody else doing the collecting. We periodically warn that covert snooping by ISPs, by network system operators, by spies public and private, by the host of predators of the vast Web, is rampant.

Log retention is endemic, on grounds it needed for system administration. Hah, just like the feds and the corps claim that is why they need to watch citizens and employees.

As you know there are many, many ways to snoop on traffic, so much that Cryptome asserts there is no trustworthy privacy policy, not for Cryptome, not for anybody else.

To be sure, if privacy policy means just enough privacy to keep users coming into the spider's web, then okay, that is the policy used by government's to assure the citizenry it acts in the public interest. As employers act in the interest of their employees, as corporations act in the interest of their stockholders, as religious and educational institutions and professionals act in the interest of their dutiful fee-payers.

Those who promise the most protection are out to skin you alive, those who promise the most privacy are selling your most private possessions.

Cryptome is not trustworthy, and lies. It's a free site, what else could it be but up to no good?


www.washtimes.com/national/20060418-110124-3694r.htm

CIA mines 'rich' content from blogs
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
April 19, 2006


www.sundayherald.com/54975

02 April 2006

America's war on the web

While the US remains committed to hunting down al-Qaeda operatives, it is now taking the battle to new fronts. Deep within the Pentagon, technologies are being deployed to wage the war on terror on the internet, in newspapers and even through mobile phones. Investigations editor Neil Mackay reports

IMAGINE a world where wars are fought over the internet; where TV broadcasts and newspaper reports are designed by the military to confuse the population; and where a foreign armed power can shut down your computer, phone, radio or TV at will.
In 2006, we are just about to enter such a world. This is the age of information warfare, and details of how this new military doctrine will affect everyone on the planet are contained in a report, entitled The Information Operations Roadmap, commissioned and approved by US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld and seen by the Sunday Herald.


www.fas.org/cp/swett.html

Strategic Assessment:
The Internet
Prepared by Mr. Charles Swett
Assistant for Strategic Assessment
Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and
Low-Intensity Conflict
(Policy Planning)
17 July 1995


www.computerbytesman.com/privacy/usenix2003/index.htm

The Internet as the Ultimate Surveillance Network
Richard M. Smith
Privacy and Security Consultant
Brookline, MA

Presented at the 12th USENIX Security Symposium
Washington, DC -- August 7, 2003

 

Goooooogle ogles your data

www.eff.org/news/archives/2006_02.php

February 09, 2006
Google Copies Your Hard Drive - Government Smiles in Anticipation
Consumers Should Not Use New Google Desktop


www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/13901327.htm

Posted on Fri, Feb. 17, 2006
Google rips Bush administration's search request
By Elise Ackerman
Mercury News
Google called the Bush administration's request for data on Web searches as ``so uninformed as to be nonsensical'' in papers filed in San Jose federal court Friday, arguing that turning over the information would expose its trade secrets and violate the privacy of its users.


Google-Watch

www.google-watch.org


Google and the CIA

www.gcn.com/vol1_no1/daily-updates/24358-1.html 12/05/03
Intelligence networks go for Google
By Wilson P. Dizard III
Government Computing News

The Intelink Management Office, which oversees top-secret, secret and sensitive but unclassified intranets for the CIA and other intelligence organizations, has adopted the Google Search Appliance from Google of Mountain View, Calif.
IMO director John Brantley said during an interview this morning at CIA headquarters in McLean, Va., that the office has purchased two Google Search Appliances, one for its secret networks and one for its top-secret networks.
IMO provides centralized services for several intelligence networks, including e-mail directories and network connections, Web-crawling services, security oversight and collaboration applications. Brantley reports to Alan Wade, CIO for the intelligence community and also the CIA’s CIO. The deputy director for central intelligence for community management oversees and provides funding for IMO; that deputy director position is currently vacant.
"This joint venture allows our organization to be supported by all the support structure of the agency, but the funds remain protected for community use only, not redirected for any internal CIA items," Brantley said.
The devices use proprietary algorithms running on a Linux PC platform, a Google spokesman said. IMO this summer paid an amount in the “high six figures” for each of the two devices, Brantley said.
IMO officials are “putting the devices through our security accreditation,” Brantley said. “If everything goes well, we will be able to place them in the operational phase in about a month. We have a number of search engines. We have been using AltaVista for a long time.” Overture Services Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif. , operates the AltaVista service.
Brantley praised the Google system highly, saying, “If you go on the Internet today, you use Google. It does date- and time-stamping of the information source, so the most recent [items] will come to the top of the stack.”
He added, “It also uses some interesting proprietary algorithms to get more valuable information…AltaVista might return 60,000 items.”
Google makes three models of the appliance. The basic unit uses one PC, and the larger units have either five or eight PCs linked by a load-balancing device. Google supplied IMO with high-end models under a custom contract, a CIA spokeswoman said. She said Google normally sells the devices as part of a service, but the IMO could not work under that method because its networks are classified.
A Google spokesman said the company also has provided the appliances to the Army, the Energy Department and other agencies that he declined to name.


Anti-war slogan coined, repurposed and Googlewashed... in 42 days
www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/30087.html
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Posted: 03/04/2003 at 12:12 GMT

This year marks the 100th anniversary of George Orwell's birth, and the writer who best explained the power of language on politics would be amazed what can be done with the Internet.
On February 17 a front page news analysis in the New York Times bylined by Patrick Tyler described the global anti-war protests as the emergence of "the second superpower".
Tyler wrote: "...the huge anti-war demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion."
This potent phrase spread rapidly.
Anti-war campaigners, peace groups and NGOs took to describing the global popular protest as "the second superpower" [Greenpeace release]. And in less than a month, the phrase was being used by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. [Financial Times - reg req'd].
And a week ago, a Google search for the phrase would have shown the vigorous propagation of this 'meme'.
Rub out the word
Then came this. Entitled The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head, by James F Moore, it was accompanied by a brand new blog.
The details need not detain us for very long, because the consequences of this piece are much more important than its anodyne contents.
It's a plea for net users to organize themselves as a "superpower", and represents a class of techno-utopian literature that John Perry Barlow has been promoting - the same sappy stuff, but not as well written - for the past ten years.
Only note how this example is sprinkled with trigger words for progressives, liberals and NPR listeners. It concludes - if you can find your way through this mound of feel-good styrofoam peanuts - "we do not have to create a world where differences are resolved by war. It is not our destiny to live in a world of destruction, tedium, and tragedy. We will create a world of peace".
In common with the genre, there's no social or political context, although the author offers a single specific instruction that is very jarring in the surrounding blandness: we must co-operate with The World Bank. Huh?
It's politics with the politics taken out: in short, it's "revolution lite".
Now here's the important bit. Look what the phrase "Second Superpower" produces on Google now. Try it!. Moore's essay is right there at the top. And not just first, but it already occupies all but three of the first thirty spots.
The bashful Moore writes: "It was nice of Dave Winer [weblog tools vendor] and Doc Searls [advertising consultant] to pick up on it, even if it's not really ready for much exposure." No matter, Moore is an overnight A-list blogging superstar, at his very first attempt.
Although it took millions of people around the world to compel the Gray Lady to describe the anti-war movement as a "Second Superpower", it took only a handful of webloggers to spin the alternative meaning to manufacture sufficient PageRank™ to flood Google with Moore's alternative, neutered definition.
Indeed, if you were wearing your Google-goggles, and the search engine was your primary view of the world, you would have a hard time believing that the phrase "Second Superpower" ever meant anything else.
To all intents and purposes, the original meaning has been erased. Obliterated, in just seven weeks.
You're especially susceptible to this if you subscribe to the view that Google's PageRank™ is "inherently democratic," which is how Google, Inc. describes it.
And this Googlewash took just 42 days.
You are in a twisty maze of weblogs, all alike
All a strange coincidence, no doubt, but the picture darkens when you look at a parallel conversation taking place elsewhere, whose hyperlinks contributed to the redefinition, and help explain how this semantic ethnic-cleansing took place so quickly.
Moore's subversion of the meaning of "Secondary Superpower" - his high PageRank™ from derives from followers of 'A-list' tech bloggers linking from an eerily similar "Emergent Democracy" discussion list, which in turn takes its name from a similarly essay posted by Joi Ito [Lunch - Lunch - Lunch - Segway - Lunch - Lunch - Fawning Parody] who is a colossus of authority in these circles, hence lots of PageRank™-boosting hyperlinks, and who like Moore, appeared from nowhere as a figure of authority.
Lunchin' Ito's essay is uncannily similar to Moore's - both are vague and elusive and fail to describe how the "emergent" democracy might form a legal framework, a currency, a definition of property or - most important this, when you're being hit with a stick by a bastard - an armed resistance (which in polite circles today, we call a "military").
As with Moore, academic and historical research in this field is vapored away, as if by magic.
However, we have an idea of how this utopian "democracy" might look, if we follow the participants of Lunchbox's mailing list. These participants are quite clear about how they define democracy:
"Democracy can function perfectly well without people painting their faces and blocking streets," writes one contributor.
42 Days
Orwell would be amused, indeed.
"Words define action," sums up Alan Black. Black helps organise San Francisco's annual LitQuake event and is holding a festival to commemorate Orwell's centenary in the city in June.
"Newspeak was one of the planks of the totalitarian regime. Big Brother was constantly redefining history and redefining words - he knew people respond to key words," he says. "It's interesting that they've identified that the only way to oppose the one superpower comes from the people, and sought to redefine that."
But the real marvel is that they did it with so few people. Pew Research Center's latest research says the number of Internet users who look at blogs is " so small that it is not possible to draw statistically meaningful conclusions about who uses blogs." They peg it at about four per cent. But we're looking at a small sub-genre of blogdom, the tech blogs, and specifically, we're looking at an 'A list' of that sub- sub-genre.
Which means that Google is being "gamed" - and the language perverted - by what in statistical terms in an extremely small fraction indeed.
That was enough to make a "meaning" disappear.
Googlewash
Writing about Google's collusion with the People's Republic of China to block access to mainland users, censorship researcher Seth Finkelsetein observed:
"Contrary to earlier utopian theories of the Internet, it takes very little effort for governments to cause certain information simply to vanish for a huge number of people."
Rub out the word 'government', and replace it with 'weblog A-list'. In this case a commons resource, this very potent and quite viral phrase, was created by millions of people. But it was poisoned by a very select number of 'bloggers'. Possibly a dozen, but no more than 30, we'd guess.
Who is poisoning the well?
The phrase "greenwash" will be familiar to many of you: it's where a spot of judicious marketing paint is applied to something decidedly rotten, transforming it into something that looks as if it's wholesome and radical new, but which is essentially unchanged.
This is the first Googlewash we've encountered. 42 days, too.
What else is coming down the pipe? ®

 

America On Line / Time-Warner / CNN

anagram:
AMERICA ONLINE
INANE OR MALICE

America On-Line is probably the WORST possible choice for an internet service provider. Part of media mogul Time-Warner / CNN, they take your money to promote lies. Oilempire is hosted on a unionized, locally owned ISP and urges everyone to boycott AOL, MSN and similar large internet companies that are acquiescent to Big Brother's snoopers.

AOL's mail system is also inherently deficient. It keeps your email on their computer, and basic service requires you to be on-line to read your email (which is especially obnoxious for those who use their main phone line for their computer). It is much easier to use a real email program (there are numerous programs to choose from) that automatically downloads your email from your ISP to your computer and pre-sorts your e-mail into folders (if you subscribe to mailing lists this is mandatory for coping with e-mail overload).


Rolling Stone (Posted Apr 07, 2005)
The Crusaders
Christian evangelicals are plotting to remake America in their own image
By BOB MOSER

.... While the dominionists rely on grass-roots activists to fight their battles, they are backed by some of America's richest entrepreneurs. Amway founder Rich DeVos, a Kennedy ally who's the leading Republican contender for governor of Michigan, has tossed more than $5 million into the collection plate. Jean Case, wife of former AOL chief Steve Case -- whose fortune was made largely on sex-chat rooms -- has donated $8 million. And Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino's Pizza, is a major source of cash for Focus on the Family, a megaministry working with Kennedy to eliminate all public schools.


www.counterpunch.org/springmann03292004.html
March 29, 2004
Email Spying and Attorney Client Privilege
US Government Reads All About It
By J. MICHAEL SPRINGMANN, Esq.

Once upon a time in a country very different from today's, sending an E-mail was like making a telephone call or mailing a first-class letter: the sender had a reasonable expectation of privacy in his message. Today, with terrorists under every bed and a government vowing to search them out and destroy them, no matter the consequences, E-mail users have no expectation of privacy whatsoever. Under the so-called USA Patriot Act, passed but not read by a corrupt, incompetent, and illegitimate Congress, the federal government can and does read all about E-mail messages, including their authors, their contents, and their addressees.
I know this for a certainty. In April 2003, the U.S. Justice Department seized and read the contents of my personal and professional E-mail accounts at America On Line (AOL).
Using the pretext of searching for an alleged Al-Qa'ida gun moll (with three children under the age of 5 years), the Justice Department clandestinely seized and blocked the use of these AOL accounts. The Assistant U.S. Attorneys who did this had no real knowledge of the woman's activities, whereabouts, or connection, if any, with Al-Qa'ida. The Justice Department had no knowledge of, or interest in the welfare and whereabouts of her three children. Indeed, the U.S. Attorneys involved had no reason to believe that I had any contact with her or her children. Yet, on "national security" grounds (which seemed to focus on harassing my client), the Justice Department officials secretly went to a tame magistrate and got a warrant under the inaptly-named Patriot Act to seize and read my E-mail messages. In keeping with the new way of doing things in Washington, the Justice Department never informed me of what it had done.
Suspecting that something was amiss when AOL blocked access to my accounts, I repeatedly called that company, headquartered in CIA-subservient Fairfax County, Virginia. After a month, one of the many voices on the telephone slipped up and told me that a "security override" had been placed on my accounts. Calls to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) brought about a confrontation with one of the Muslim-hating Assistant U.S. Attorneys involved. Under questioning, he told a member of the NACDL's Attorney Strike Force, in very general terms, of what had been done.
What does this mean to me, you ask? Beyond the violation of attorney-client privilege and the invasion of my privacy and that of my correspondents, I no longer have access to my E-mail addresses, since AOL kept them on its computer. And so I cannot inform my contacts that I have a new E-mail provider. I have no idea whether the Justice Department is still reading the E-mail messages sent and received by my correspondents, whose addressees turned up in the seizure of my accounts. Indeed, I continue to have problems sending and receiving messages to my friends and clients around the world with my new provider (which causes me to wonder if the process is not still continuing). And I must explain to clients and potential clients rightly concerned about confidentiality that the U.S. government has read and may still read E-mails to and from them.
Can this be reversed? No. A U.S. District Court judge told me that if I didn't accept the situation, I could file a civil rights law suit. As a solo practitioner, this would not be practical. Can I get help? No. The American Civil Liberties Union has told me that it would be unrealistic to sue the federal government. It also stated that AOL, because of its terms-of-service contract, is judgment-proof.
In Nazi Germany and the old Soviet Union, both run by a better class of people than we now have in public service in the U.S. of A. today, people disappeared; they mysteriously failed to advance; and they suffered from guilt by association. They were informed on by their neighbors; their property was seized without compensation. But, and it is a big "But", this was regarded as wrong, both by the citizens spied upon and by the spies themselves.
Is my situation, that of my client, and that of the alleged gun moll really any different? Yes! In this condition, no one sees a violation of either the letter or the spirit of the federal Constitution. They, and the "they" are generally well-educated, well-traveled, and white, admire the new security processes and procedures. It makes them feel safer, they say.
However, I don't feel safer. I particularly don't feel safer after a well-connected journalist with expertise in national security matters, told me that he suspected the alleged Al-Qa'ida operative and her children are most likely in U.S. government hands but that the feds who have her aren't telling the rest of the alphabet soup of agencies that she and her children are in their custody. After all, this is the government that ran a program, with Osama bin Laden's extensive help, to recruit terrorists in Saudi Arabia, bring them to the United States for training, and then send them on to Afghanistan to murder Soviet soldiers.
You don't have to be crazy to work for Uncle Sam, but it helps.
J. Michael Springmann is a DC-area attorney. He previously spent 20 years in the Foreign Service.