Source: Tulsi Gabbard
Tulsi Gabbard delivers a brilliant speech regarding the Weaponization of the Federal Government during a House Subcommittee meeting.
Source: rutherford.org | by John & Nisha Whitehead
“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable.”—H. L. Mencken
The American kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) continues to suck the American people down a rabbit hole into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry is powerless to defend itself against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.
Think about it.
Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government.
Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race. Surveillance. The drug wars. Domestic extremism. The COVID-19 pandemic.
In almost every instance, the U.S. government (often spearheaded by the FBI) has in its typical Machiavellian fashion sown the seeds of terror domestically and internationally in order to expand its own totalitarian powers.
Who is the biggest black market buyer and stockpiler of cyberweapons (weaponized malware that can be used to hack into computer systems, spy on citizens, and destabilize vast computer networks)? The U.S. government.
Who is the largest weapons manufacturer and exporter in the world, such that they are literally arming the world? The U.S. government.
Which country has a history of secretly testing out dangerous weapons and technologies on its own citizens? The U.S. government.
Which country has conducted secret experiments on an unsuspecting populace—citizens and noncitizens alike—making healthy people sick by spraying them with chemicals, injecting them with infectious diseases and exposing them to airborne toxins? The U.S. government.
What country has a pattern and practice of entrapment that involves targeting vulnerable individuals, feeding them with the propaganda, know-how and weapons intended to turn them into terrorists, and then arresting them as part of an elaborately orchestrated counterterrorism sting? The U.S. government.
Are you getting the picture yet?
The U.S. government isn’t protecting us from terrorism.
The U.S. government is creating the terror. It is, in fact, the source of the terror.
Consider that this very same government has taken every bit of technology sold to us as being in our best interests—GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, etc.—and used it against us, to track, control and trap us.
So why is the government doing this? Money, power and total domination.
We’re not dealing with a government that exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness. Rather, these are the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.
Case in point: the FBI.
The government’s henchmen have become the embodiment of how power, once acquired, can be so easily corrupted and abused. Indeed, far from being tough on crime, FBI agents are also among the nation’s most notorious lawbreakers.
Whether the FBI is planting undercover agents in churches, synagogues and mosques; issuing fake emergency letters to gain access to Americans’ phone records; using intimidation tactics to silence Americans who are critical of the government, or persuading impressionable individuals to plot acts of terror and then entrapping them, the overall impression of the nation’s secret police force is that of a well-dressed thug, flexing its muscles and doing the boss’ dirty work.
It’s a diabolical plot with far-reaching consequences for every segment of the population, no matter what one’s political leanings.
As Rozina Ali writes for The New York Times Magazine, “The government’s approach to counterterrorism erodes constitutional protections for everyone, by blurring the lines between speech and action and by broadening the scope of who is classified as a threat.”
This is not an agency that appears to understand, let alone respect, the limits of the Constitution.
For instance, the FBI has been secretly carrying out an entrapment scheme in which it used a front company, ANOM, to sell purportedly hack-proof phones to organized crime syndicates and then used those phones to spy on them as they planned illegal drug shipments, plotted robberies and put out contracts for killings using those boobytrapped phones.
All told, the FBI intercepted 27 million messages over the course of 18 months.
What this means is that the FBI was also illegally spying on individuals using those encrypted phones who may not have been involved in any criminal activity whatsoever.
Even reading a newspaper article is now enough to get you flagged for surveillance by the FBI. The agency served a subpoena on USA Today / Gannett to provide the internet addresses and mobile phone information for everyone who read a news story online on a particular day and time about the deadly shooting of FBI agents.
This is the danger of allowing the government to carry out widespread surveillance, sting and entrapment operations using dubious tactics that sidestep the rule of law: “we the people” become suspects and potential criminals, while government agents, empowered to fight crime using all means at their disposal, become indistinguishable from the corrupt forces they seek to vanquish.
To go after terrorists, they become terrorists. To go after drug smugglers, they become drug smugglers. To go after thieves, they become thieves.
It’s hard to say whether we’re dealing with a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves), a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens), or if we’ve gone straight to an idiocracy.
This certainly isn’t a constitutional republic, however.
Some days, it feels like the government is running its own crime syndicate complete with mob rule and mafia-style justice.
In addition to creating certain crimes in order to then “solve” them, the FBI—the government’s law enforcement agency—also gives certain informants permission to break the law, “including everything from buying and selling illegal drugs to bribing government officials and plotting robberies,” in exchange for their cooperation on other fronts.
USA Today estimates that government agents have authorized criminals to engage in as many as 15 crimes a day (5600 crimes a year). Some of these informants are getting paid astronomical sums: one particularly unsavory fellow, later arrested for attempting to run over a police officer, was actually paid $85,000 for his help laying the trap for an entrapment scheme.
In addition to procedural misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and damaging private property, the FBI’s laundry list of crimes against the American people includes surveillance, disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, intimidation tactics, and harassment.
For example, the Associated Press lodged a complaint with the Dept. of Justice after learning that FBI agents created a fake AP news story and emailed it, along with a clickable link, to a bomb threat suspect in order to implant tracking technology onto his computer and identify his location. Lambasting the agency, AP attorney Karen Kaiser railed, “The FBI may have intended this false story as a trap for only one person. However, the individual could easily have reposted this story to social networks, distributing to thousands of people, under our name, what was essentially a piece of government disinformation.”
Then again, to those familiar with COINTELPRO, an FBI program created to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and neutralize” groups and individuals the government considers politically objectionable, it should come as no surprise that the agency has mastered the art of government disinformation.
The FBI has been particularly criticized in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks for targeting vulnerable individuals and not only luring them into fake terror plots but actually equipping them with the organization, money, weapons and motivation to carry out the plots—entrapment—and then jailing them for their so-called terrorist plotting. This is what the FBI characterizes as “forward leaning—preventative—prosecutions.”
Another fallout from 9/11, National Security Letters, one of the many illicit powers authorized by the USA Patriot Act, allows the FBI to secretly demand that banks, phone companies, and other businesses provide them with customer information and not disclose the demands. An internal audit of the agency found that the FBI practice of issuing tens of thousands of NSLs every year for sensitive information such as phone and financial records, often in non-emergency cases, is riddled with widespread violations.
The FBI’s surveillance capabilities, on a par with the National Security Agency, boast a nasty collection of spy tools ranging from Stingray devices that can track the location of cell phones to Triggerfish devices which allow agents to eavesdrop on phone calls.
In one case, the FBI actually managed to remotely reprogram a “suspect’s” wireless internet card so that it would send “real-time cell-site location data to Verizon, which forwarded the data to the FBI.”
The FBI has also repeatedly sought to expand its invasive hacking powers to allow agents to hack into any computer, anywhere in the world.
Indeed, for years now, the U.S. government has been creating what one intelligence insider referred to as a cyber-army capable of offensive attacks. As part of this cyberweapons programs, government agencies such as the NSA have been stockpiling all kinds of nasty malware, viruses and hacking tools that can “steal financial account passwords, turn an iPhone into a listening device, or, in the case of Stuxnet, sabotage a nuclear facility.”
In fact, the NSA was responsible for the threat posed by the “WannaCry” or “Wanna Decryptor” malware worm which—as a result of hackers accessing the government’s arsenal—hijacked more than 57,000 computers and crippled health care, communications infrastructure, logistics, and government entities in more than 70 countries.
Mind you, the government was repeatedly warned about the dangers of using criminal tactics to wage its own cyberwars. It was warned about the consequences of blowback should its cyberweapons get into the wrong hands.
The government chose to ignore the warnings.
That’s exactly how the 9/11 attacks unfolded.
First, the government helped to create the menace that was al-Qaida and then, when bin Laden had left the nation reeling in shock (despite countless warnings that fell on tone-deaf ears), it demanded—and was given—immense new powers in the form of the USA Patriot Act in order to fight the very danger it had created.
This has become the shadow government’s modus operandi regardless of which party controls the White House: the government creates a menace—knowing full well the ramifications such a danger might pose to the public—then without ever owning up to the part it played in unleashing that particular menace on an unsuspecting populace, it demands additional powers in order to protect “we the people” from the threat.
Yet the powers-that-be don’t really want us to feel safe.
They want us cowering and afraid and willing to relinquish every last one of our freedoms in exchange for their phantom promises of security.
As a result, it’s the American people who pay the price for the government’s insatiable greed and quest for power.
Suffice it to say that when and if a true history of the United States is ever written, it will not only track the rise of the American police state but it will also chart the decline of freedom in America: how a nation that once abided by the rule of law and held the government accountable for its actions has steadily devolved into a police state where justice is one-sided, a corporate elite runs the show, representative government is a mockery, police are extensions of the military, surveillance is rampant, privacy is extinct, and the law is little more than a tool for the government to browbeat the people into compliance.
Somewhere over the course of the past 240-plus years, democracy has given way to kleptocracy, and representative government has been rejected in favor of rule by career politicians, corporations and thieves—individuals and entities with little regard for the rights of American citizens.
This dissolution of that sacred covenant between the citizenry and the government—establishing “we the people” as the masters and the government as the servant—didn’t happen overnight. It didn’t happen because of one particular incident or one particular president. It is a process, one that began long ago and continues in the present day, aided and abetted by politicians who have mastered the polarizing art of how to “divide and conquer.”
As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, our freedoms have become casualties in an all-out war on the American people.
WC: 2130
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. Please contact staff@rutherford.org to obtain reprint permission.
You try to use your credit card, but it doesn’t work. In fact, no one’s credit card works. You try to go to some news sites to find out why, but you can’t access any of those, either. Neither can anyone else. Panic-buying ensues. People empty ATMs of cash.
This kind of catastrophic pan-internet meltdown is more likely than most people realize.
I direct the Internet Atlas Project at the University of California, Berkeley. Our goal is to shine a light on long-term risks to the internet. We produce indicators of weak points and bottlenecks that threaten the internet’s stability.
For example, where are points of fragility in the global connectivity of cables? Physical cables under the sea deliver 95% of the internet’s voice and data traffic. But some countries, like Tonga, connect to only one other country, making them vulnerable to cable-clipping attacks.
Another example is content delivery networks, which websites use to make their content readily available to large numbers of internet users. An outage at the content delivery network Fastly on June 8, 2021, briefly severed access to the websites of Amazon, CNN, PayPal, Reddit, Spotify, The New York Times, and the U.K. government.
We take measurements at various layers of the internet’s technological stack, from cables to content delivery networks. With those measurements, we identify weak points in the global internet. And from those weak points, we build theories that help us understand what parts of the internet are at risk of disruption, whom those disruptions will affect, and how severely, and predict what would make the internet more resilient.
Currently, the internet is facing twin dangers. On one side, there’s the threat of total consolidation. Power over the internet has been increasingly concentrated primarily in the hands of a few, U.S.-based organizations. On the other side, there’s fragmentation. Attempts to challenge the status quo, particularly by Russia and China, threaten to destabilize the internet globally.
While there’s no single best path for the internet, our indicators can help policymakers, nongovernmental organizations, businesses, activists, and others understand if their interventions are having their intended effect. For whom is the internet becoming more reliable, and for whom is it becoming more unstable? These are the critical questions. About 3.4 billion people are just now getting online in countries including Fiji, Tonga, and Vanuatu. What kind of internet will they inherit?
Since at least 2015, the core services that power the internet have become increasingly centralized in the hands of U.S. corporations. We estimate that U.S. corporations, nonprofits, and government agencies could block a cumulative 96% of content on the global internet in some capacity.
The U.S. Department of Justice has long used court orders aimed at tech providers to block global access to content that’s illegal in the U.S., such as copyright infringements. But lately, the U.S. federal government has been leveraging its jurisdiction more aggressively. In June, the DOJ used a court order to briefly seize an Iranian news site because the department said it was spreading disinformation.
Due to interlocking dependencies on the web, such as content delivery networks, one misstep in applying this technique could take down a key piece of the internet infrastructure, making a widespread outage more likely.
Meanwhile, U.S.-based technology companies also risk wreaking havoc. Consider Australia’s recent spat with Facebook overpaying news outlets for their content. At one point, Facebook blocked all news on its platform in Australia. One consequence was that many people in Fiji, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Tonga, and Vanuatu temporarily lost a key news source because they rely on prepaid cellphone plans that feature discounted access to Facebook. As these skirmishes increase in frequency, countries worldwide are likely to suffer disruptions to their internet access.
Naturally, not everyone is happy with this U.S.-led internet. Russia throttles Twitter traffic. China blocks access to Google.
These domestic maneuvers certainly threaten localized meltdowns. India now regularly shuts down the internet regionally during civil unrest. But, in aggregate, they present a more global threat: internet fragmentation. A fragmented internet threatens speech, trade, and global cooperation in science.
It also increases the risk of cyberattacks on core internet infrastructure. In a global internet, attacks on infrastructure hurt everyone, but walled-off national internets would change that calculus. For example, Russia has the capacity to disconnect itself from the rest of the world’s internet while maintaining service domestically. With that capacity, it could attack core global internet infrastructure with less risk of upsetting its domestic population. A sophisticated attack against a U.S. company could trigger a large-scale internet outage.
For much of its history, the internet has been imperfectly, but largely, open. Content could be accessed anywhere, across borders. Perhaps this openness is because, rather than in spite, of the U.S.‘s dominance over the internet.
Whether or not that theory holds, the U.S.’s dominance over the internet is unlikely to persist. The status quo faces challenges from the U.S.’s adversaries, its historical allies, and its own domestic tech companies. Absent action, the world will be left with some mixture of unchecked U.S. power and ad-hoc, decentralized skirmishes.
In this environment, building a stable and transnational internet for future generations is a challenge. It requires delicacy and precision. That’s where work like ours comes into play. To make the internet more stable globally, people need measurements to understand its chokepoints and vulnerabilities. Just as central banks watch measures of inflation and employment when they decide how to set rates, internet governance, too, should rely on indicators, however imperfect.
[Understand new developments in science, health, and technology, each week. Subscribe to The Conversation’s science newsletter.]
Nick Merrill, Research Fellow, University of California, Berkeley
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
B.N. Frank | Waking Times
The New Yorker published an article yesterday – “The Terrifying Potential of the 5G Network.”
In 2018, Robert Spalding’s job as senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council included studying ways to insure that 5G can be made secure from cyberattacks. He seemed more than qualified for the job. In his interview with The New Yorker, he provides intricate details of why we should all be freaking out over 5G regardless of who installs it. His warnings also go beyond cybersecurity risks:
“What is existential to democracy is allowing totalitarian regimes—or any government—full knowledge of everything you do at all times,” he said. “Because the tendency is always going to be to want to regulate how you think, how you act, what you do.”
More from Spalding:
“I wasn’t looking at this from a policy perspective,” he said. “It was about the physics, about what was possible.”
Even before the introduction of 5G networks, hackers have breached the control center of a municipal dam system, stopped an Internet-connected car as it travelled down an interstate, and sabotaged home appliances. Ransomware, malware, crypto-jacking, identity theft, and data breaches have become so common that more Americans are afraid of cybercrime than they are of becoming a victim of violent crime.
Uh-huh. This has been reported many times before by many sources.
Adding more devices to the online universe is destined to create more opportunities for disruption. “5G is not just for refrigerators,” Spalding said. “It’s farm implements, it’s airplanes, it’s all kinds of different things that can actually kill people or that allow someone to reach into the network and direct those things to do what they want them to do. It’s a completely different threat that we’ve never experienced before.”
So the “Race for 5G” is for “all kinds of different things that can actually kill people” and Spalding isn’t the only one to say so. Fabulous.
“It was meant to be a nationwide network,” Spalding told me, not a nationalized one. “They could build this network and then sell bandwidth to their retail customers. That was one idea, but it was never that the government would own the network. It was always about, How do we get industry to actually secure the system?”
Many other articles and at least one book have been written about how the American government and telecom regulators seem to have no right to ask the Telecom Industry to do much of anything. Telecom expert, Bruce Kushnick has written A LOT about that.
Even before Spalding began working on his report, the telecom companies were rolling out what they were calling their new 5G services in test markets around the country.
Activist Post has reported about 5G “rollouts” before. Many Americans have been fighting this in their communities. (See also 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)
Last summer, New Yorkers reported becoming sick after 5G was installed. Their pets were sick too. Some were putting their homes up for sale. Last year, the first 5G court case was won in England but not after it had been installed, people became sick, and some women delivered stillborn babies.
As the Clemson University professor Thomas Hazlett told me, “This is just the transitional part. You have various experiments, you do trial in the market, and various deployments take place that lay a pathway to something that will be truly distinguishable from the old systems.”
It sounds like Professor Hazlett is saying that telecom companies are allowed to perform various experiments on the American people – regardless of the risks. Unfortunately, experiments on the American people aren’t new and the apologies always seem to be too little, too late.
In the meantime, the carriers jockeyed for position. A lawsuit brought by Sprint and T-Mobile, which was settled on Monday, claimed that A.T. & T.’s 5GE service, where “E” stands for “evolution,” was just 4G by another name.
Just part of the experiment…
Spalding describes more greed-driven behavior by the Telecom Industry and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Ajit Pai, which seems to have led to Spalding being canned from his job. The “Race for 5G” then continued without his interference.
Huawei, a Chinese manufacturer, is currently the global leader in 5G technology and has been accused by many sources of being a conduit to Chinese intelligence.
In an op-ed in the Washington Post, the Republican senators Tom Cotton, of Arkansas, and John Cornyn, of Texas, characterized the company, which is funded with subsidies from the Chinese government, as a Trojan horse that could “give China effective control of the digital commanding heights.”
The Times of London reported that the C.I.A. has evidence that Huawei has taken money from the P.L.A., as well as from branches of the Chinese intelligence service. Australia, Japan, and New Zealand have joined with the United States in banning Huawei hardware from their networks. So far, though, the Trump Administration’s campaign to shut out Huawei is finding limited traction.
Freaking out yet?
Huawei equipment is cheaper than its Western rivals and, in the estimation of researchers at the Defensive Innovation Board (DIB), which advises the Secretary of Defense on new technologies, in many cases, it is superior.
I feel sick. Regardless, banning Huawei won’t secure the networks anyway.
Even in the absence of Huawei equipment, systems still may rely on software developed in China, and software can be reprogrammed remotely by malicious actors. And every device connected to the fifth-generation Internet will likely remain susceptible to hacking.
Image Credit: Zero Hedge
Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge
The government has never met a novel idea or consumer friendly product that they didn’t want to tax.
The latest case in point? Legislators are now trying to tax Netflix and any other type of content that can be downloaded or streamed. The idea is being pushed forward in Georgia, where lawmakers are proposing a tax on digital video, books, music and video games, according to a new piece in the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
Lawmakers are reportedly being coaxed by “dozens of lobbyists” working on behalf of major communication corporations. To the layperson, this means that the cost of services like Netflix, Hulu and Spotify would all go up.
Streaming content has become a customer-centric and cost efficient service that allows the consumer to cut prices on their entertainment by selecting only what they need. Legislators and internet providers see it as a giant pool of untapped cash that could be used to help build infrastructure in economically depressed areas of Georgia.
Those who are already connected to the Internet would wind up bearing the cost of a 4% tax that would go to benefit residents who don’t have high-speed access to online products yet. Georgia is just the latest state to consider this tax and similar proposals have been introduced in legislatures across the country.
The proposal pits customers against communication companies, like AT&T, who stand to profit as the tax would replace existing higher taxes on cable TV, phones and broadband equipment. About 66% of people in Georgia oppose the idea of taxing internet, TV and phone to raise money for rural internet. For a Netflix customer that pays $12.99 a month, a 4% tax would cost 52 cents per month, or $6.24 per year.
By Jessica Corbett | Common Dreams
Fight for the Future announced Wednesday that on Nov. 29, supporters of restoring nationwide net neutrality rules—which the Republican-controlled Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rolled back last year—are planning “an epic, final protest to pressure lawmakers before a crucial deadline to save the internet.”
📣 NEW: The web is coming together Thursday, Nov 29th for a final push to save the Internet. Join the protest and help pressure Congress to sign the CRA before their deadline to overturn the FCC’s #NetNeutrality repeal: https://t.co/uZ7oGAwSEu pic.twitter.com/fcyLuFuELe
— @team@fightforthefuture.org on Mastodon (@fightfortheftr) November 21, 2018
Supporters of the Obama-era net neutrality protections, which blocked internet service providers (ISPs) from prioritizing or throttling access to certain online content, are urging Americans to contacts their members of Congress to fight for a vote before the winter holidays on a Senate-approved Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution that would reverse the repeal.
The measure still lacks the support it needs in the House to advance to President Donald Trump’s desk before this congressional session ends.
“We’ll need a simple majority of sign on to a ‘discharge petition’ in order to force a vote past leadership to the floor. That means we’ll need to convince all the Democrats and about 25 Republicans to support the CRA,” explains Battle for the Net, a coalition backing the resolution. “The clock is ticking—if the CRA resolution doesn’t get a vote this year, it dies when the new Congress comes into session in January 2019.”
Although the majority of Democrats support restoring the rules and will take control of the House in January, Republicans gained two Senate seats in the midterm elections earlier this month and the race in Mississippi has advanced to a runoff.
Speak up to overturn the FCC’s #NetNeutrality repeal! Our best chance to save #NetNeutrality is by filing the CRA before December 10th. Call your reps by heading to https://t.co/xSJHbLq2Wn or dial 202-759-7766
— @team@fightforthefuture.org on Mastodon (@fightfortheftr) November 16, 2018
Advocacy groups have launched a scoreboard to track where lawmakers stand on the CRA resolution to help constituents determine whether they need to put pressure on their representatives. According to the real-time tracker, only one House Republican—Rep. Mike Coffman of Colorado—has announced his support for the resolution.
However, some Democrats also would need to be convinced by constituents to vote in favor of the resolution for it to pass. Fight for the Future, on Twitter, highlighted the 16 House Democrats who still oppose it:
Only 16 Democrats in Congress oppose #NetNeutrality:
➡️@RepBrady
➡️@GKButterfield
➡️@RepCartwright
➡️@RepJimCosta
➡️@RepCuellar
➡️@RepGonzalez
➡️@RepJoshG
➡️@RepGeneGreen
➡️@RepOHalleran
➡️@RepSchneider
➡️@repdavidscott
➡️@RepSinema
➡️@RepFilemonVela
➡️@RepVisclosky
➡️@RepWilson pic.twitter.com/6LBRiFhl50— @team@fightforthefuture.org on Mastodon (@fightfortheftr) November 20, 2018
Democratic supporters, meanwhile, continue to proclaim their dedication to restoring net neutrality:
The open internet has helped to accelerate job growth in Michigan and helped to create new educational opportunities for millions of Americans. Without #NetNeutrality, this would not be possible. pic.twitter.com/szMvNMVXsr
— Rep. Dan Kildee (@RepDanKildee) November 17, 2018
We must continue the fight to restore #NetNeutrality and prevent corporate interests from stacking the deck against regular Nevadans who want a level playing field online. pic.twitter.com/aflpO9tSLE
— Senator Jacky Rosen (@SenJackyRosen) November 19, 2018
The open internet has created access to countless job opportunities, as well as important education and healthcare services for millions of people. None of this would be possible without #NetNeutrality.#CA34 wants #NetNeutrality restored. And we won’t back down until we get it! pic.twitter.com/iqYHPwZoli
— Rep. Jimmy Gomez (@RepJimmyGomez) November 15, 2018
To push members of the House to pass the resolution before this congressional session ends, net neutrality advocates are relying on three key tactics:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
A new report from Freedom House found that global digital freedom has continued to decline for the eighth consecutive year. (Photo: Free Press/Flickr/cc)
By Jessica Corbett | Common Dreams
Countries across the globe are following in the footsteps of the Chinese government, adopting authoritarian digital practices that pose serious threats to democracy, according to a new Freedom House report released Thursday.
For Freedom on the Net 2018 (pdf), more than 70 researchers comprehensively reviewed internet freedom in 65 countries that represent 87 percent of the world’s internet users. They documented declines in 26 countries—including the United States under the Trump administration as well as Egypt, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Kenya, Nigeria, the Philippines, and Venezuela—and improvements in only 19 nations.
They found that “disinformation and propaganda disseminated online have poisoned the public sphere. The unbridled collection of personal data has broken down traditional notions of privacy. And a cohort of countries is moving toward digital authoritarianism by embracing the Chinese model of extensive censorship and automated surveillance systems. As a result of these trends, global internet freedom declined for the eighth consecutive year in 2018.”
NEW REPORT: The rise of digital authoritarianism leads to a decline in internet freedom for the 8th consecutive year. #FreedomOnTheNet https://t.co/4ZwvGk7RQn pic.twitter.com/isV9Cc6YXH
— Freedom House (@freedomhouse) November 1, 2018
Researchers found that as “internet controls within China reached new extremes in 2018 with the implementation of the sweeping Cybersecurity Law and upgrades to surveillance technology,” Chinese officials also “have held trainings and seminars on new media or information management with representatives from 36 out of the 65 countries.”
Our latest annual report by @freedomonthenet is online! This is mandatory reading about digital authoritarianism, the China model spreading & losing the battle for data privacy #FreedomOnTheNet https://t.co/AdxNVBWCmy pic.twitter.com/O53qsYN0VJ
— Zselyke Csaky (@zecsaky) November 1, 2018
As Freedom House president Michael Abramowitz told AFP, this pattern of countries shifting toward China’s model “poses a threat to the open internet and endangers prospects for greater democracy worldwide.”
Writing for the Washington Post‘s opinion page on Thursday, Abramowitz and Freedom House chairman Michael Chertoff expanded on the dangers of China exporting its digital authoritarianism. While calling on Congress to reintroduce and pass the Global Online Freedom Act, which would increase pressure on countries that engage in repressive digital practices to change their ways, they argued that:
…the best way for democracies to stem the rise of digital authoritarianism is to prove that there is a better model for managing the internet. We will have to tackle social media manipulation and misuse of data in a manner that respects human rights, while also preserving an internet that is global, free, and secure.
Policymakers should undertake serious efforts to protect critical infrastructure and citizens’ personal data from misuse by governments, companies and criminals. Tech companies should dramatically scale up their work with civil-society experts to maximize their own transparency and ensure that their platforms are not being misused to spread disinformation. As the 2016 elections in the United States showed, more-responsible management of social media and stronger privacy rights are needed to prevent malicious actors from exploiting open societies to undermine democracy.
In addition to calling out China for fueling a global decline in internet freedom the new report also details contributions from the United States and the Trump administration. Bolstering findings from Reporters Sans Frontières published earlier this year, Freedom House found that authoritarian governments the world over have co-opted President Donald Trump’s favored phrase “fake news” to justify crackdowns on dissent and digital rights.
“In the past year, at least 17 countries approved or proposed laws that would restrict online media in the name of fighting ‘fake news’ and online manipulation,” the report states.
Meanwhile, in the United States, the government has also taken steps over the past year to enable surveillance and limit the open internet. The GOP-controlled Congress reauthorized the FISA Amendments Act, including Section 702, and the Federal Communications Commission repealed net neutrality protections that required internet service providers to treat all content equally.
The report includes a series of recommendations…
For policymakers:
For the private sector:
For civil society:
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Image Credit: Activist Post
By Aaron Kesel | Activist Post
Another Google document has found its way into the public domain, this time through Breitbart. The news publication reports that an 85-page briefing entitled “The Good Censor,” advises tech companies to “police tone instead of content” and to not “take sides” when censoring users.
This must be why Activist Post remains censored on YouTube and the wrongful suspension still hasn’t been removed, along with other accounts that were removed, or further why Iran has had 39 YouTube channels deleted. It must be Google’s “new position as ‘moderators in chief.’” (page 70)
The document, which can be read in full at Breitbart, admits in writing that big Silicon Valley companies including Google have shifted toward censoring users, moving away from their original values. Moreover, the mission to “create an unmediated ‘marketplace of ideas’” has become a plan by tech companies to “create well-ordered spaces for safety and civility.” (page 67)
As former Google PR rep Jessica Powell expressed, this is “creating serious problems in disguise of bettering the world.”
“We go about saying that we’re building these amazing things and doing great things for the world but we’re also causing a lot of serious problems,” Powell said.
Once again an internal leak within Google gives a rare glimpse into the company and its mindset.
Responding to the Breitbart leak, a Google source said the document should be considered “internal research, and not an official company position.”
The scary thing is that the document does not recommend a return to the original principles of “don’t be evil” (a phrase Google killed). Instead, the briefing file leaves the question open, suggesting Google may “shift with the times.”
However, the document recommends increased transparency to smooth over the process from free speech to censorship (or liberty to tyranny, one could say), according to the report. So anyone who has heard of George Orwell knows where our future is headed.
Google might continue to shift with the times – changing its stance on how much or how little it censors (due to public, governmental or commercial pressures). If it does, acknowledgment of what this shift in position means for users and for Google is essential. Shifting blindly or silently in one direction or another rightly incites users’ fury.
The Google “internal research” even quotes outside experts like George Soros who express justification of censorship in non-U.S. markets, noting that Google should police “tone instead of content” and “censor everyone equally,” as Breitbart put it.
It’s worth noting that George Soros was also involved in funding the “bullshit detector” a fact-checking engine backed by the Full Fact foundation, as Activist Post reported in 2017.
The document also proposes “behavior guidelines for users.” This is reminiscent of a leaked 2016 video to The Verge earlier this year, entitled “The Selfish Ledger” from within Google X that exposed an internal Google dialogue to create a dystopia run by the big social giant. The revelation showcased the other big problem the company faces — questions about harvesting its users’ data.
With that leak, the company’s dystopian future it seeks to achieve is exposed. The 9-minute video goes on to describe how Google could keep a ledger of all human behavior and then use it to manipulate your decisions and those of future generations. All with the ultimate goal of pushing the company’s values, offering services and products, and basically dictating the behavior of entire populations.
That video was dismissed as just a concept “meant to provoke discussion,” as well or in other words, “internal research.”
Then there is the most recent leak involving plans to implement a censored version of its search engine inside China, code-named “Dragonfly,” and suppressing the internal memo about it. Further, if that’s not enough, the company wants phone numbers linked to the searches.
Finally, in May, Activist Post reported that Google had removed multiple references to its old catchphrase “Don’t be evil” from its Code of Conduct. Employees expressed outrage over the company’s decision to work with the Pentagon’s Project Maven, including signing a petition, with some even quitting.
This caused Google to walk back the plans, denouncing support for Maven by stating that the company would not be renewing the military contract and would stop in 2019.
However, as Activist Post reported, the agreement was already signed, so the company is locked in for another year until the contract runs out in March 2019. Google can then legally stop assisting the government with the advancement of artificial intelligence for use with its drones, a nightmarish scenario that brings glimpses of the movie The Terminator to mind.
These leaks offer a rare glimpse into the types of conversations and the views the company might be having, as well as aligning with many of Google’s existing products that use AI; for example, suggesting routes in Google Maps, organizing albums in Google Photos, and even composing automated emails in Gmail.
You can read the full shocking “Good Censor” document on Scribd here.
Image Credit: Activist Post
By Kurt Nimmo | Activist Post
Both the Free Thought Project and The Anti-Media lost their social media accounts in a coordinated attack today by Facebook and Twitter.
Facebook alone removed 559 pages and 251 accounts.
Facebook has unpublished our page
After 5 years of building fans Facebook has officially unpublished our page (3.1 million fans) so we can’t post on it anymore. This is truly an outrage and we are devastated. We will do everything we can to recover our page and fight back. pic.twitter.com/H3AmHTT8Qo
— Free Thought Project (@TFTPROJECT) October 11, 2018
Dan Dicks is another victim.
“The Press For Truth FaceBook Page with 350k followers has just been memory holed form the internet! 350k followers gone in the blink of an eye as we are right before our eyes witnessing the results of what happens when these big tech companies appoint themselves as the gatekeepers of political thought and opinion,” a headline story at Press For Truth reports today.
The midterm election is being used as an excuse to purge social media accounts and thus reduce traffic to websites on the target list.
First it was alt-right figures like Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich who had their accounts pulled for behavior that is an everyday occurrence by others on social media.
Then Alex Jones was taken down. This was a landmark event that served notice on other websites diverging from the establishment narrative and spreading dangerous “alternative facts.”
Now the effort has moved on the the next level of targets, those with moderate to high social media traffic and successful websites with growing viewership. Not millions like Jones, but a couple hundred thousand all the way down to tens of thousands.
Numbers are way down for sites banished from the corporate social media kingdom. Traffic is drying up and thus support.
This is precisely what the establishment and its political class have in mind. It has nothing to do with “inauthentic” content as they claim. It is a concerted effort to wipe out for good entire segments of the alternative media.
If Democrats take control of Congress next month, watch out. They will make it impossible for another Donald Trump to get elected with the help of social media.
They leveraged the patently absurd and widely discredited Russian influence scam. The accusation Trump somehow colluded with the Russians has been used to tarnish his supporters, conservatives in general, and other groups not part of the establishment engineered political arrangement.
Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others are building an algorithmic filter. It will not permit entire segments of the population to weigh in on political issues during federal elections.
That model, most recently tested in Brazil, will be used. If successful in November, it will be further implemented after the election.
The European model (not based on constitutional liberties) will be adopted. This is a collectivist arrangement where certain groups are protected by the government while individual Germans and Swedes are singled out and prosecuted for criticizing the arrangement on social media.
Finally, I believe somewhere down the line many of us will barred access to the Internet if were appear on a government list similar to the malfunctioning no-fly list. This will be easy to implement. Pass a law forbidding ISPs from selling service to Americans espousing political ideas considered racist, homophobic, misogynistic, transphobic, etc., by the government.
In the current political climate, it’s easy to fall into one of these categories. Others will be memory holed simply due to their political philosophy, most notably conservatives and libertarians, but also nonviolent radical leftists and progressives opposed to the military-industrial-surveillance complex and neoliberal globalism.
Kurt Nimmo is the editor of Another Day in the Empire, where this article first appeared. He is the former lead editor and writer of Infowars.com. Donate to ADE Here.
By Cory Doctorow | Boing Boing
Lobbyists for “creators” threw their lot in with the giant entertainment companies and the newspaper proprietors and managed to pass the new EU Copyright Directive by a hair’s-breadth this morning, in an act of colossal malpractice to harm to working artists will only be exceeded by the harm to everyone who uses the internet for everything else.
Here’s what the EU voted in favour of this morning
Here’s what they voted against:
Having passed the EU Parliament, this will now be revised in secret, closed-door meetings with national governments (“the trilogues”) and then voted again next spring, and then go to the national governments for implementation in law before 2021. These all represent chances to revise the law, but they will be much harder than this fight was. We can also expect lawsuits in the European high courts over these rules: spying on everyone just isn’t legal under European law, even if you’re doing it to “defend copyright.”
In the meantime, what a disaster for creators. Not only will be we liable to having our independently produced materials arbitrarily censored by overactive filters, but we won’t be able to get them unstuck without the help of big entertainment companies. These companies will not be gentle in wielding their new coercive power over us (entertainment revenues are up, but the share going to creators is down: if you think this is unrelated to the fact that there are only four or five major companies in each entertainment sector, you understand nothing about economics).
But of course, only an infinitesimal fraction of the material on the platforms is entertainment related. Your birthday wishes and funeral announcements, little league pictures and political arguments, wedding videos and online educational materials are also going to be filtered by these black-box algorithms, and you’re going to have to get in line with all the other suckers for attention from a human moderator at one of the platforms to plead your case.
The entertainment industry figures who said that universal surveillance and algorithmic censorship were necessary for the continuation of copyright have done more to discredit copyright than all the pirate sites on the internet combined. People like their TV, but they use their internet for so much more.
“We did it. We passed the strongest net neutrality standards in the nation,” Democratic state Senator Scott Wiener, the primary author of SB 822, said in a statement. (Photo: Fight for the Future)
By Jake Johnson, staff writer | Common Dreams
In a major victory for the open internet that could have ripple effects throughout the United States, the California Senate on Friday thwarted aggressive lobbying by the telecom industry and passed the strongest, most comprehensive net neutrality bill in the nation.
“The passage of SB 822 in California has huge implications for our fight to restore neutrality nationwide,” declared the advocacy group Fight for the Future (FFTF) following Friday’s vote. “We also need to harness the momentum from this huge victory to put pressure on our elected officials in Congress.”
“Finally,” FFTF added, “y’all should be really proud of yourselves. Giant telcos like AT&T and Comcast spent enormous amounts of money lobbying to kill SB 822. They almost succeeded more than once, but we fought back. We drove phone calls, tweets, crowdfunded billboards, attended meetings.”\
ttt fightfortheftr
Having cleared both houses of California’s legislature, SB 822 will now head to Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk for a signature.
Brown, who has 30 days to sign the measure, is already facing pressure from the telecom industry to veto the bill, so open internet advocates are warning Californians to remain vigilant and keep up the pressure.
If SB 822 is ultimately signed into law, it would restore the net neutrality protections repealed by the Republican-controlled FCC last December and implement even stronger rules by establishing “an outright ban on zero-rating—the practice of offering free data, potentially to the advantage of some companies over others—of specific apps.”
ttt mediajustice
“We did it,” Democratic state Senator Scott Wiener, the primary author of SB 822, said in a statement. “We passed the strongest net neutrality standards in the nation. The internet is at the heart of 21st century life—our economy, our public safety and health systems, and our democracy. So when Donald Trump’s FCC decided to take a wrecking ball to net neutrality protections, we knew that California had to step in to ensure our residents have access to a free and open internet.”
As the fight for strong net neutrality protections gains steam at the state level, open internet advocates are hoping the resulting energy and momentum will translate into action in Congress, where the House is working to assemble enough votes to pass a Congressional Review Act resolution to undo the FCC’s deeply unpopular repeal.
Evan Greer, deputy director of Fight for the Future, argued that lawmakers who don’t support net neutrality will feel the wrath of voters in the upcoming midterm elections and beyond.
“Internet users are still royally pissed off about the FCC’s repeal,” Greer said in a statement following Friday’s vote. “They’re still paying attention. And they’re not going to let their elected officials get away with it if they sell out their constituents by siding with big telecom companies.”
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
Image Credit: Activist Post
By Terrence Newton | Activist Post
For more than a decade now, activists and truth-seekers have been watching the growing influence of the Internet on society and politics, pointing out that when millions of people become informed to truth, it would drastically change the political landscape in America and around the world.
And it has.
At the same time, we’ve been warned that when mass, virtually free information sharing by the general public became a genuine threat to the establishment and status quo, that an ‘Internet kill switch’ was ready behind the scenes to shut it all down.
And it is.
But while ten years ago, this prospect conjured up images of an actual switch in a DARPA facility somewhere in the Rocky Mountains that would literally power down the infrastructure and backbone of the World Wide Web, we are seeing today what the ‘kill switch’ really looks like. It really is more of a corporate/government affair that targets unwanted information.
This is the true form of the Internet kill switch as it appears in 2018.
1.) “Violation of Community Guidelines” (The Outright Ban) – First and foremost is the now ubiquitous, blanket statement that users of corporate media platforms get when their pages, channels, accounts are shut down. It never points to anything specific, or offers an opportunity to right the transgression. It is legalese for ‘f$#k off, you’re not wanted around here.”
2.) Shadow Banning – This is the act of allowing a persona non grata to continue to use a corporate media platform, but not allowing their posts or content to actually be seen by anyone.
3.) Throttling of Reach – Businesses and media organizations across the board have been seeing a steady and dramatic decline in their ability to reach their audience. The number of page likes really means absolutely nothing, and while these people have signed up to receive content from you, the social media platforms make sure that only a tiny fraction of your audience actually gets what they signed up.
4.) Blacklisting Domains – Platforms like Facebook have demonstrated the ability to prevent a specific domain from getting any reach.
5.) Deleting Posts and Content – If a particular post or piece of content is unwanted on a platform, for whatever reason, it can be deleted.
6.) Flagging Content as ‘Fake News’ – This one is particularly insidious because social media platforms are using corporate news organizations like ABC and discredited private companies like Snopes to supposedly fact check independent content. These labels are often erroneous and can sometimes be appealed, but the flag itself damages the content providers’ reputation and reach.
7.) Downranking and Search Indexing – Google is using their algorithms to target and hide information from search results.
8.) Timeouts for ‘Bad Behavior’ – Twitter, Facebook and others will often timeout a page or page admin for violating some hidden policy. Admins will be locked out of their pages for set periods or have their functionality reduced, thereby preventing them from posting content and reaching or communicating with their audiences.
9.) Shutting Down Websites and Confiscation of Content – WordPress.com is now shutting down sites hosted with its hosting services, again for the ambiguous ‘violation of community guidelines.’ Page owners are locked out without warning and are prohibited from accessing their content or backups of their sites, effectively stealing intellectual property from people.
10.) Shutting Down Business Services – Services such as MailChimp, Spotify, Disqus and a variety of ad networks are now demonstrating the willingness to cease doing business with organizations for political reasons. This one is the most insidious one, because it goes beyond content censorship and aims to shut people out of their legal right to conduct business.
The crisis of Internet censorship in the West is unfolding now and just now coming into view. It appears that government agencies are heavily influencing these policies, along with monolithic tech companies who are now demonstrating the willingness to allow the political beliefs of executives to influence the business services they provide. Given that these are businesses, it stands to reason that it won’t be long before these companies suffer substantial backlash for crossing the line into censorship and thought control.
Read more articles from Terence Newton.
Terence Newton is a staff writer for WakingTimes.com, interested primarily with issues related to science, the human mind, and human consciousness.
This article (A Snapshot of the Internet Kill Switch in 2018) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Terence Newton and WakingTimes.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this copyright statement.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before a joint hearing of the Commerce and Judiciary Committees on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, April 10, 2018, about the use of Facebook data to target American voters in the 2016 election. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
By MARY CLARE JALONICK, BARBARA ORTUTAY and DAVID HAMILTON | Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — Under fire for the worst privacy debacle in his company’s history, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg batted away often-aggressive questioning Tuesday from lawmakers who accused him of failing to protect the personal information of millions of Americans from Russians intent on upsetting the U.S. election.
During some five hours of Senate questioning, Zuckerberg apologized several times for Facebook failures, disclosed that his company was “working with” special counsel Robert Mueller in the federal probe of Russian election interference and said it was working hard to change its own operations after the harvesting of users’ private data by a data-mining company affiliated with Donald Trump’s campaign.
Seemingly unimpressed, Republican Sen. John Thune of South Dakota said Zuckerberg’s company had a 14-year history of apologizing for “ill-advised decisions” related to user privacy. “How is today’s apology different?” Thune asked.
“We have made a lot of mistakes in running the company,” Zuckerberg conceded, and Facebook must work harder at ensuring the tools it creates are used in “good and healthy” ways.
The controversy has brought a flood of bad publicity and sent the company’s stock value plunging, but Zuckerberg seemed to achieve a measure of success in countering that: Facebook shares surged 4.5 percent for the day, the biggest gain in two years.
In all, he skated largely unharmed through his first day of congressional testimony. He’ll face House questioners Wednesday.
The 33-year-old founder of the world’s best-known social media giant appeared in a suit and tie, a departure from the T-shirt he’s famous for wearing in public as well as in private. Even so, his youth cast a sharp contrast with his often-elderly, gray-haired Senate inquisitors. And the enormous complexity of the social network he created at times defeated the attempts of legislators to hammer him on Facebook’s specific failures and how to fix them.
The struggle to preserve net neutrality is the “free speech fight of our generation,” argues Evan Greer, campaign director of Fight for the Future. (Photo: Free Press/Flickr/cc
By Jake Johnson | Common Dreams
In the face of attempts by the Trump administration to roll back recent net neutrality gainsand hand the web over to large telecommunications companies, Open Internet advocates, civil rights groups, and thousands of websites are joining forces on Wednesday to participate in a national day of action to highlight the importance of preserving net neutrality.
The efforts of activists—highlighted on the Battle for the Net Campaign’s official website, which outlines the various ways in which organizations plan to participate—have already drawn significant attention to an issue that too often remains on the outskirts of public debate.
“The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) docket for public comments on the existing net neutrality rules has already surpassed all records, with more than 5.6 million comments from individuals, organizations, companies and other interested parties—and many more to come as a result of Wednesday’s day of action,” noted Free Press, an Open Internet advocacy group, in a statement on Tuesday.
The Battle for the Net Campaign, Free Press notes, is just one part of a long-term effort to “save the internet from Trump and his cronies.”
Recent moves by the Trump administration have only served to intensify opposition efforts. Specifically, President Donald Trump’s decision to renominate FCC Chairman Ajit Pai—who, as Vicenotes, “wants to abolish the 2015 FCC decision to regulate internet providers as utilities”—has alarmed supporters of net neutrality who have witnessed the Republican-controlled FCC move quickly to scale back regulations.
“The rules…generally require telecommunications companies that provide online access, such as AT&T Inc. and Comcast Corp., to treat all internet traffic the same and not slow or block some sites,” the Wall Street Journal explains.
Candace Clement, action fund campaign director for Free Press, argues that eliminating these regulations would effectively allow Comcast and other telecommunications giants to dominate the Internet for financial gain while limiting the freedom and privacy of consumers.
“The existing net neutrality protections put Internet users in the driver’s seat and keep big cable and phone companies from controlling what you see and do online,” Clement said in a statement. “That’s why millions of people support Title II: It prevents these companies from charging us pricey tolls to access the online content we want—and from throttling, blocking or discriminating against the apps, websites and services of our choosing.”
“The polling shows that voters from across the political spectrum overwhelmingly agree we don’t want our cable companies to be able to censor us, charge us extra fees, or essentially be the editors-in-chief of the Internet.”
—Evan Greer, Fight for the Future
In an interview with Democracy Now!, Evan Greer, campaign director of Fight for the Future, called net neutrality “the First Amendment of the Internet” and argued that the struggle to preserve it is “the free speech fight of our generation.”
“The polling shows that voters from across the political spectrum—Democrats, independents, Republicans, doesn’t matter—overwhelmingly agree we don’t want our cable companies to be able to censor us, charge us extra fees, or essentially be the editors-in-chief of the Internet,” Greer concluded. “So, this is why it’s so important that people use these tools, speak out, show up at their member of Congress’s offices and make this an issue that they know they will be burned by if they burn their constituents.”
Watch Greer’s interview:
“The FCC wants to destroy net neutrality and give big cable companies control over what we see and do online,” warns the coalition behind the day of action. “If they get their way, they’ll allow widespread throttling, blocking, censorship, and extra fees. On July 12th, the Internet will come together to stop them.” (Image: Fight for the Future)
Source: Common Dreams
In order to confront what they consider a frontal attack on the Internet by the Republican Party and the powerful telecommunications industry, defenders of net neutrality joined with some of the web’s most influential companies on Tuesday in announcing a new campaign and global day of action designed to defend rules enshrined by the Federal Communications Commission just two years ago.
“The FCC’s plan to dismantle net neutrality will unfairly pad the bottom lines of Comcast and the rest of Big Cable, while undermining the public’s ability to freely communicate, organize, and innovate.”
—Mark Stanley, Demand ProgressUnder President Donald Trump, and his FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai, the hard won victory to classify the Internet as a public utility and the establishment of rules to protect net neutrality—which stipulate that all web traffic must be treated equally by internet service providers (ISPs)—have come under renewed threat in recent months.
But with the announcement of the “Battle for the Net” campaign—spearheaded by Fight for the Future, the Free Press Action Fund, and Demand Progress—a large and growing coalition of concerned citizens, public interest organizations, online advocacy groups, and businesses are declaring jointly that the open internet and the concept of net neutrality will be fiercely defended from those seeking to wall off innovation, undermine privacy, and exert hegemonic control of the web in the name of profits.
“The FCC wants to destroy net neutrality and give big cable companies control over what we see and do online,” reads the call to action on the coalition’s website. “If they get their way, they’ll allow widespread throttling, blocking, censorship, and extra fees.”
Announcing the day of action—which will take place on July 12—the group urged people to “come together” to protect the Internet from the FCC’s attack. In order to do so, the coalition explained, the groups involved will mobilize their members and major web platforms will provide special online tools while urging their users to contact members of Congress and the FCC.
“The Internet has given more people a voice than ever before, and we’re not going to let the FCC take that power away from us,” said Evan Greer, Fight for the Future’s executive director. “Massive online mobilization got us the strong net neutrality protections that we have now, and we intend to fight tooth and nail to defend them. Politicians in Washington, D.C. need to learn that net neutrality is not a partisan issue and Internet users will not tolerate these attacks on our basic rights—we will come together to protect the web as an open platform for free expression and exchange of ideas.”
Alongside the numerous progressive advocacy groups and civil libertarians, web-based companies—including Amazon, Vimeo, Kickstarter, and Mozilla—argue that without net neutrality, the Internet as people have come to know it will cease to exist.
What do @Amazon @Etsy & @Kickstarter have in common? They know the open web drives innovation & choice. Defend it: https://t.co/Db0IwvOyRe pic.twitter.com/y0vbcbSdHK
— @fight@fightforthefuture.org on Mastodon (@fightfortheftr) June 6, 2017
“Net neutrality is vital to a healthy Internet,” declared Denelle Dixon, Mozilla’s chief legal and business officer, in a statement. “It protects free speech, competition and innovation online. It’s also something a majority of Americans support—76%, according to a recent Mozilla-Ipsos poll. By reverting to a Title I classification for ISPs, the FCC is endangering Americans’ access to a free and open web. The FCC is creating an Internet that benefits ISPs, not users.”
And Mark Stanley, communications director of Demand Progress, added: “The FCC’s plan to dismantle net neutrality will unfairly pad the bottom lines of Comcast and the rest of Big Cable, while undermining the public’s ability to freely communicate, organize, and innovate. Every few years, a threat so severe confronts the open internet that people, organizations, and companies from across the political spectrum—including some of the largest online platforms—must band together in common cause to fight back. The FCC’s ongoing effort to roll back net neutrality protections represents just such a threat—and on the July 12th day of action, we’ll once again use the transformative power of the internet to defend the internet itself.”