The Cabal Took The Bait!?

inteldinarchron

If you are wondering about the Julian Assange October Surprise Fail, Think Again! It now appears to have been a TRAP set for the Cabal and they took the bait!

Clearly the good guys are still rooting out the bad Cabal Actors, those who are trying to stop this event from taking place. They have just been revealed. This is a multi-faceted event that all played out perfectly as I see it. Let’s look at all the moving parts to see that nothing went wrong for us after all.

The First Step To Protect The Internet

We will need to have uninterrupted Internet service for important upcoming information and announcements. For this reason, the Internet was transferred out of the hands of the U.S. into international control which I think made it safer from disruption. But there are still some weak points in the internet system. They needed to have a “Test” or should I say “TRAP” to find those who would still interrupt the service.

The TRAP was set with Julian Assange as the BAIT

Did you see how much notice was given about the “October Surprise” and that Julian Assange would be releasing damaging information on the Cabal? They made sure that everyone knew it was coming. Also did you notice that all this would happen just after the Internet was handed over to international control? Next, it was arranged that the announcement would happen early in the morning when most Americans would be sleeping. Finally the biggest clue of all, nothing was announced.

What Does This All Add Up To?

They scared the Cabal so badly, that they shut down internet service all over the U.S. at the time that the Julian Assange October Surprise announcement was going to be made. I am sure that most Americans had no idea that the internet went dead during that time because they were sleeping. They tricked the Cabal into revealing their hand, and making them do their dirty deeds of cutting off the internet. Now we know who they are and where they are.

This is a picture of all the places that the Internet “Just Happened” to go out at the same time the announcement was to be made. Coincidence? I Think NOT!

Read More About The Internet Outage Here:

http://allnewspipeline.com/Assange_Exposes_Much_Bigger_Bombshell.php

The Plan (TRAP) Was Perfect

They arranged the announcement at a time when the most people in the U.S. would not be on the internet because they knew the Cabal would be shutting it down. They gave plenty of notice and made sure the email dump scared the Cabal so bad that they would act. And finally nothing was revealed because it was only a TEST, a TRAP for the Cabal. Sure enough, they jumped and shut down the internet all over the U.S. and now the good guys know who and where they are. They can now be picked up and arrested at the least. It was a perfect trap, at a perfect time, and with the perfect bait.

Think About It

If there were really going to be a big release to the American Public why would it be in the middle of the night? It would instead be at a time when the most people would be on line to get the information. Also they certainly wouldn’t give so much notice to the Cabal giving them time to stop them. This was clearly a set up (TRAP) to see where the internet would be shut down and who would shut it down.

This reminds me of the many times we thought the RV was going to go and it didn’t, just to find out later, it was a TRAP to catch the Cabal trying to stop it and to catch the high frequency traders who were trying to take advantage of the situation.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that everything is working out perfectly. Don’t you think that the good guys have thought of EVERYTHING? After all, they have the most powerful technology, resources, and assistance (Think Above) to help this change take place. It is necessary to fake us out, in order to fake out the remaining Cabal bad actors. That’s O.K. The only thing that is important is that they get them all and that the World change goes over without a hitch. Just remember, that no matter how it looks, it is all working out just as planned for our greater good.

May You Get Everything You Want and Live The Life Of Your Dreams

Signed: One Who Believes

Why Tim Berners-Lee is no friend of Facebook

TheGuardian

If there were a Nobel prize for hypocrisy, then its first recipient ought to be Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook boss. On 23 August, all his 1.7 billion users were greeted by this message: “Celebrating 25 years of connecting people. The web opened up to the world 25 years ago today! We thank Sir Tim Berners-Lee and other internet pioneers for making the world more open and connected.”

Aw, isn’t that nice? From one “pioneer” to another. What a pity, then, that it is a combination of bullshit and hypocrisy. In relation to the former, the guy who invented the web, Tim Berners-Lee, is as mystified by this “anniversary” as everyone else. “Who on earth made up 23 August?” he asked on Twitter. Good question. In fact, as the Guardian pointed out: “If Facebook had asked Berners-Lee, he’d probably have told them what he’s been telling people for years: the web’s 25th birthday already happened, two years ago.”

“In 1989, I delivered a proposal to Cern for the system that went on to become the worldwide web,” he wrote in 2014. It was that year, not this one, that he said we should celebrate as the web’s 25th birthday.

It’s not the inaccuracy that grates, however, but the hypocrisy. Zuckerberg thanks Berners-Lee for “making the world more open and connected”. So do I. What Zuck conveniently omits to mention, though, is that he is embarked upon a commercial project whose sole aim is to make the world more “connected” but less open. Facebook is what we used to call a “walled garden” and now call a silo: a controlled space in which people are allowed to do things that will amuse them while enabling Facebook to monetise their data trails. One network to rule them all. If you wanted a vision of the opposite of the open web, then Facebook is it.

The thing that makes the web distinctive is also what made the internet special, namely that it was designed as an open platform. It was designed to facilitate “permissionless innovation”. If you had a good idea that could be realised using data packets, and possessed the programming skills to write the necessary software, then the internet – and the web – would do it for you, no questions asked. And you didn’t need much in the way of financial resources – or to ask anyone for permission – in order to realise your dream.

An open platform is one on which anyone can build whatever they like. It’s what enabled a young Harvard sophomore, name of Zuckerberg, to take an idea lifted from two nice-but-dim oarsmen, translate it into computer code and launch it on an unsuspecting world. And in the process create an empire of 1.7 billion subjects with apparently limitless revenues. That’s what permissionless innovation is like.

The open web enabled Zuckerberg to do this. But – guess what? – the Facebook founder has no intention of allowing anyone to build anything on his platform that does not have his express approval. Having profited mightily from the openness of the web, in other words, he has kicked away the ladder that elevated him to his current eminence. And the whole thrust of his company’s strategy is to persuade billions of future users that Facebook is the only bit of the internet they really need.

Ironically, Zuckerberg’s cynical tribute to Tim Berners-Lee came a day after Nick Denton published his obituary of Gawker, the pioneering and raucous news website that he created 13 years ago. Gawker was bankrupted – and ultimately shuttered – by a privacy action that had been funded by Peter Thiel, a billionaire Silicon Valley eccentric (and Trump supporter) who had been infuriated by a Gawker article that called for Thiel to be recognised as the world’s most successful gay venture capitalist.

As that uber-blogger Dave Winer observed: “Gawker is gone because Peter Thiel financed its murder-by-lawyer. It’s legal to do this in the US, but until now as far as I know, no one has crossed this line. Now that the line has been crossed, it’s fair to assume it will become standard practice for billionaires like Thiel to finance lawsuits until the publication loses and has to sell itself to pay the judgment.”

I wasn’t ever a great admirer of Gawker, but Dave Winer is right: Thiel’s strategy demonstrates how tech money not only talks, but can now also suppress freedom of expression, even in the land of the first amendment. Interestingly, Thiel is also a member of Facebook’s board of directors. So will Zuckerberg’s commitment to an “open and connected world” extend to firing him? You only have to ask the question to know the answer. Hypocrisy rules OK.

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Could The Internet Be Set To Be Shut Down On The Eve of Jubilee, October 1st?

TDV

Ever since we caught on to the Shemitah timetable that Jonathan Cahn had discovered, we’ve discovered clue after important clue about the potential timetable being followed by the globalists towards creating a New World Order.

Christine Lagarde, with her “magic number 7” numerology speech caught our interest.  Then, William White of the IMF talking about how a debt jubilee was coming which will wipe out most paper assets also got our attention.

And, we discovered that the Jubilee Year, also called the Super Shemitah, ends on October 2nd of this year.

Because of that we’ve been watching those dates carefully.  Probably the most significant event we’ve seen yet is that the Chinese Yuan will be put into the IMF’s SDR currency basket on October 1st.  This, alone, could set off shockwaves in the markets.

But, now, another major event has just been announced to occur on October 1st.

The United Nations could take over control of the Internet on October 1, when the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) passes from US administration to the control of a multilateral body, most likely the United Nations International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

While the administration and its defenders have denied that the UN will have authority over ICANN, the Wall Street Journal‘s L. Gordon Crovitz points out that ICANN will need to be run by a state agency in order to retain its antitrust exemption, which makes it almost certainly that the UN will step in to take control.

Given that we consider the Jubilee Year to be the year when the final pieces are put into place for a global one-world government, having the US give up control of the internet to the UN on October 1st, the day before the end of the Jubilee Year and on the same day that a new global monetary order will be positioned is cause for serious scrutiny.

The globalists have hated the internet since they began to figure out it was causing them big problems in controlling the world and its people.  John Kerry in 2013, said, “this little thing called the Internet … makes it much harder to govern.”

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Dr Mahathir regrets Internet freedom 

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He’s right, of course.  The internet has made it so billions of people can actually get access to real information… not the propaganda put out by governments and the mainstream media.

The word government means “govern”, or to control, and “ment” which means mind.  It is, in fact, a form of mind control.  And in order for it to succeed to the point that the entire Earth is governed by a tyrannical, one world government, people need to be kept from the truth.

For this reason, the term “internet kill switch” has been used regularly by the US government.  It’s often put into bills, including the Proposed Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010 as a way to “protect” people from cybercrime.  Of course, like all things the government does, it is not to protect the people, it is to protect the government.

Even the two frontrunners for Commander in Crime of the US, Trump and Clinton, both want to shutdown parts of the internet, “Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton Plan to Close Parts of the Internet: Censorship in America?”

And, since anarcho-capitalists created bitcoin to fight the central banks, the globalists have stepped up all their efforts to shut down the internet as much as possible.

The internet makes it hard to keep people controlled and confused… and bitcoin makes it hard to control the money system.  That 1-2 punch, alone, has them running very, very scared.

And so, when it was just recently announced that on October 1st, the day before the end of the Jubilee Year, that control of the internet will be turned over to the UN… one has to be very, very suspicious.

Would they declare a new monetary system based on the SDR and its inclusion of the Chinese Yuan on October 1st, which is a Saturday, leading to bank closures worldwide AND then turn off the internet to keep most from even knowing what is going on?

You have to consider it a possibility.  The globalists/banksters have no problem killing hundreds of millions of people as they did in the 20th century with all the bank manufactured wars, which included both World Wars.  They had no problem doing 9/11 to scare the world into accepting their War of Terror and a lockdown on any last remaining freedoms.

Will they do it?  Only time will tell.

But we’ve been suggesting to people all year to get prepared for something as big and catastrophic as the internet being shut down… so hopefully many have made plans to prepare for the worst already.

If you still haven’t, we’d suggest getting out of the financial system (especially the banks) as much as possible.  Even if they don’t pull the switch on October 1st, we are nearing the very end of this current financial system.

And, many of the things we’ve suggested people move into have done very well.  Gold and silver have already gone up dramatically this year, bitcoin is up 200% since last summer and many of our other recommendations, such as Ethereum (up more than 500% since we mentioned it in January) and Monero (which we just mentioned two weeks ago to subscribers has since risen over 400%… in just two weeks!).

I expect September and October to include significant market volatility and  other kinds of potentially disastrous results. But the reverberations of Jubilee 2016 will continue well after its end date.

As we move into the last month of the Jubilee Year, we are bound to see catastrophic events occur – either ones that take place now or ones that promise a future, comprehensive disaster. We’ll be following these possibilities and predicting them as we have for the past two years.

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The world wide cage

Aeon

Technology promised to set us free. Instead it has trained us to withdraw from the world into distraction and dependency

It was a scene out of an Ambien nightmare: a jackal with the face of Mark Zuckerberg stood over a freshly killed zebra, gnawing at the animal’s innards. But I was not asleep. The vision arrived midday, triggered by the Facebook founder’s announcement – in spring 2011 – that ‘The only meat I’m eating is from animals I’ve killed myself.’ Zuckerberg had begun his new ‘personal challenge’, he told Fortune magazine, by boiling a lobster alive. Then he dispatched a chicken. Continuing up the food chain, he offed a pig and slit a goat’s throat. On a hunting expedition, he reportedly put a bullet in a bison. He was ‘learning a lot’, he said, ‘about sustainable living’.

I managed to delete the image of the jackal-man from my memory. What I couldn’t shake was a sense that in the young entrepreneur’s latest pastime lay a metaphor awaiting explication. If only I could bring it into focus, piece its parts together, I might gain what I had long sought: a deeper understanding of the strange times in which we live.

What did the predacious Zuckerberg represent? What meaning might the lobster’s reddened claw hold? And what of that bison, surely the most symbolically resonant of American fauna? I was on to something. At the least, I figured, I’d be able to squeeze a decent blog post out of the story.

The post never got written, but many others did. I’d taken up blogging early in 2005, just as it seemed everyone was talking about ‘the blogosphere’. I’d discovered, after a little digging on the domain registrar GoDaddy, that ‘roughtype.com’ was still available (an uncharacteristic oversight by pornographers), so I called my blog Rough Type. The name seemed to fit the provisional, serve-it-raw quality of online writing at the time.

Blogging has since been subsumed into journalism – it’s lost its personality – but back then it did feel like something new in the world, a literary frontier. The collectivist claptrap about ‘conversational media’ and ‘hive minds’ that came to surround the blogosphere missed the point. Blogs were crankily personal productions. They were diaries written in public, running commentaries on whatever the writer happened to be reading or watching or thinking about at the moment. As Andrew Sullivan, one of the form’s pioneers, put it: ‘You just say what the hell you want.’ The style suited the jitteriness of the web, that needy, oceanic churning. A blog was critical impressionism, or impressionistic criticism, and it had the immediacy of an argument in a bar. You hit the Publish button, and your post was out there on the world wide web, for everyone to see.

Or to ignore. Rough Type’s early readership was trifling, which, in retrospect, was a blessing. I started blogging without knowing what the hell I wanted to say. I was a mumbler in a loud bazaar. Then, in the summer of 2005, Web 2.0 arrived. The commercial internet, comatose since the dot-com crash of 2000, was up on its feet, wide-eyed and hungry. Sites such as MySpace, Flickr, LinkedIn and the recently launched Facebook were pulling money back into Silicon Valley. Nerds were getting rich again. But the fledgling social networks, together with the rapidly inflating blogosphere and the endlessly discussed Wikipedia, seemed to herald something bigger than another gold rush. They were, if you could trust the hype, the vanguard of a democratic revolution in media and communication – a revolution that would change society forever. A new age was dawning, with a sunrise worthy of the Hudson River School.

Rough Type had its subject.

The greatest of the United States’ homegrown religions – greater than Jehovah’s Witnesses, greater than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, greater even than Scientology – is the religion of technology. John Adolphus Etzler, a Pittsburgher, sounded the trumpet in his testament The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men (1833). By fulfilling its ‘mechanical purposes’, he wrote, the US would turn itself into a new Eden, a ‘state of superabundance’ where ‘there will be a continual feast, parties of pleasures, novelties, delights and instructive occupations’, not to mention ‘vegetables of infinite variety and appearance’.

Similar predictions proliferated throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and in their visions of ‘technological majesty’, as the critic and historian Perry Miller wrote, we find the true American sublime. We might blow kisses to agrarians such as Jefferson and tree-huggers such as Thoreau, but we put our faith in Edison and Ford, Gates and Zuckerberg. It is the technologists who shall lead us.

Cyberspace, with its disembodied voices and ethereal avatars, seemed mystical from the start, its unearthly vastness a receptacle for the spiritual yearnings and tropes of the US. ‘What better way,’ wrote the philosopher Michael Heim in ‘The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace’ (1991), ‘to emulate God’s knowledge than to generate a virtual world constituted by bits of information?’ In 1999, the year Google moved from a Menlo Park garage to a Palo Alto office, the Yale computer scientist David Gelernter wrote a manifesto predicting ‘the second coming of the computer’, replete with gauzy images of ‘cyberbodies drift[ing] in the computational cosmos’ and ‘beautifully laid-out collections of information, like immaculate giant gardens’.

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The revelation continues to this day, the technological paradise forever glittering on the horizon

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The millenarian rhetoric swelled with the arrival of Web 2.0. ‘Behold,’ proclaimed Wired in an August 2005 cover story: we are entering a ‘new world’, powered not by God’s grace but by the web’s ‘electricity of participation’. It would be a paradise of our own making, ‘manufactured by users’. History’s databases would be erased, humankind rebooted. ‘You and I are alive at this moment.’

The revelation continues to this day, the technological paradise forever glittering on the horizon. Even money men have taken sidelines in starry-eyed futurism. In 2014, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen sent out a rhapsodic series of tweets – he called it a ‘tweetstorm’ – announcing that computers and robots were about to liberate us all from ‘physical need constraints’. Echoing Etzler (and Karl Marx), he declared that ‘for the first time in history’ humankind would be able to express its full and true nature: ‘we will be whoever we want to be.’ And: ‘The main fields of human endeavour will be culture, arts, sciences, creativity, philosophy, experimentation, exploration, adventure.’ The only thing he left out was the vegetables.

Such prophesies might be dismissed as the prattle of overindulged rich guys, but for one thing: they’ve shaped public opinion. By spreading a utopian view of technology, a view that defines progress as essentially technological, they’ve encouraged people to switch off their critical faculties and give Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and financiers free rein in remaking culture to fit their commercial interests. If, after all, the technologists are creating a world of superabundance, a world without work or want, their interests must be indistinguishable from society’s. To stand in their way, or even to question their motives and tactics, would be self-defeating. It would serve only to delay the wonderful inevitable.

The Silicon Valley line has been given an academic imprimatur by theorists from universities and think tanks. Intellectuals spanning the political spectrum, from Randian right to Marxian left, have portrayed the computer network as a technology of emancipation. The virtual world, they argue, provides an escape from repressive social, corporate and governmental constraints; it frees people to exercise their volition and creativity unfettered, whether as entrepreneurs seeking riches in the marketplace or as volunteers engaged in ‘social production’ outside the marketplace. As the Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler wrote in his influential book The Wealth of Networks (2006):

This new freedom holds great practical promise: as a dimension of individual freedom; as a platform for better democratic participation; as a medium to foster a more critical and self-reflective culture; and, in an increasingly information-dependent global economy, as a mechanism to achieve improvements in human development everywhere.

Calling it a revolution, he said, is no exaggeration.

Benkler and his cohort had good intentions, but their assumptions were bad. They put too much stock in the early history of the web, when the system’s commercial and social structures were inchoate, its users a skewed sample of the population. They failed to appreciate how the network would funnel the energies of the people into a centrally administered, tightly monitored information system organised to enrich a small group of businesses and their owners.

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The territory began to be subdivided, strip-malled and I sensed that foreign agents were slipping into my computer through its connection to the web

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The network would indeed generate a lot of wealth, but it would be wealth of the Adam Smith sort – and it would be concentrated in a few hands, not widely spread. The culture that emerged on the network, and that now extends deep into our lives and psyches, is characterised by frenetic production and consumption – smartphones have made media machines of us all – but little real empowerment and even less reflectiveness. It’s a culture of distraction and dependency. That’s not to deny the benefits of having easy access to an efficient, universal system of information exchange. It is to deny the mythology that shrouds the system. And it is to deny the assumption that the system, in order to provide its benefits, had to take its present form.

Late in his life, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith coined the term ‘innocent fraud’. He used it to describe a lie or a half-truth that, because it suits the needs or views of those in power, is presented as fact. After much repetition, the fiction becomes common wisdom. ‘It is innocent because most who employ it are without conscious guilt,’ Galbraith wrote in 1999. ‘It is fraud because it is quietly in the service of special interest.’ The idea of the computer network as an engine of liberation is an innocent fraud.

I love a good gizmo. When, as a teenager, I sat down at a computer for the first time – a bulging, monochromatic terminal connected to a two-ton mainframe processor – I was wonderstruck. As soon as affordable PCs came along, I surrounded myself with beige boxes, floppy disks and what used to be called ‘peripherals’. A computer, I found, was a tool of many uses but also a puzzle of many mysteries. The more time you spent figuring out how it worked, learning its language and logic, probing its limits, the more possibilities it opened. Like the best of tools, it invited and rewarded curiosity. And it was fun, head crashes and fatal errors notwithstanding.

In the early 1990s, I launched a browser for the first time and watched the gates of the web open. I was enthralled – so much territory, so few rules. But it didn’t take long for the carpetbaggers to arrive. The territory began to be subdivided, strip-malled and, as the monetary value of its data banks grew, strip-mined. My excitement remained, but it was tempered by wariness. I sensed that foreign agents were slipping into my computer through its connection to the web. What had been a tool under my own control was morphing into a medium under the control of others. The computer screen was becoming, as all mass media tend to become, an environment, a surrounding, an enclosure, at worst a cage. It seemed clear that those who controlled the omnipresent screen would, if given their way, control culture as well.

‘Computing is not about computers any more,’ wrote Nicholas Negroponte of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in his bestseller Being Digital (1995). ‘It is about living.’ By the turn of the century, Silicon Valley was selling more than gadgets and software: it was selling an ideology. The creed was set in the tradition of US techno-utopianism, but with a digital twist. The Valley-ites were fierce materialists – what couldn’t be measured had no meaning – yet they loathed materiality. In their view, the problems of the world, from inefficiency and inequality to morbidity and mortality, emanated from the world’s physicality, from its embodiment in torpid, inflexible, decaying stuff. The panacea was virtuality – the reinvention and redemption of society in computer code. They would build us a new Eden not from atoms but from bits. All that is solid would melt into their network. We were expected to be grateful and, for the most part, we were.

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What Silicon Valley sells and we buy is not transcendence but withdrawal. We flock to the virtual because the real demands too much of us

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Our craving for regeneration through virtuality is the latest expression of what Susan Sontag in On Photography (1977) described as ‘the American impatience with reality, the taste for activities whose instrumentality is a machine’. What we’ve always found hard to abide is that the world follows a script we didn’t write. We look to technology not only to manipulate nature but to possess it, to package it as a product that can be consumed by pressing a light switch or a gas pedal or a shutter button. We yearn to reprogram existence, and with the computer we have the best means yet. We would like to see this project as heroic, as a rebellion against the tyranny of an alien power. But it’s not that at all. It’s a project born of anxiety. Behind it lies a dread that the messy, atomic world will rebel against us. What Silicon Valley sells and we buy is not transcendence but withdrawal. The screen provides a refuge, a mediated world that is more predictable, more tractable, and above all safer than the recalcitrant world of things. We flock to the virtual because the real demands too much of us.

‘You and I are alive at this moment.’ That Wired story – under headline ‘We Are the Web’ – nagged at me as the excitement over the rebirth of the internet intensified through the fall of 2005. The article was an irritant but also an inspiration. During the first weekend of October, I sat at my Power Mac G5 and hacked out a response. On Monday morning, I posted the result on Rough Type – a short essay under the portentous title ‘The Amorality of Web 2.0’. To my surprise (and, I admit, delight), bloggers swarmed around the piece like phagocytes. Within days, it had been viewed by thousands and had sprouted a tail of comments.

So began my argument with – what should I call it? There are so many choices: the digital age, the information age, the internet age, the computer age, the connected age, the Google age, the emoji age, the cloud age, the smartphone age, the data age, the Facebook age, the robot age, the posthuman age. The more names we pin on it, the more vaporous it seems. If nothing else, it is an age geared to the talents of the brand manager. I’ll just call it Now.

It was through my argument with Now, an argument that has now careered through more than a thousand blog posts, that I arrived at my own revelation, if only a modest, terrestrial one. What I want from technology is not a new world. What I want from technology are tools for exploring and enjoying the world that is – the world that comes to us thick with ‘things counter, original, spare, strange’, as Gerard Manley Hopkins once described it. We might all live in Silicon Valley now, but we can still act and think as exiles. We can still aspire to be what Seamus Heaney, in his poem ‘Exposure’, called inner émigrés.

A dead bison. A billionaire with a gun. I guess the symbolism was pretty obvious all along.

Reprinted from ‘Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations’ by Nicholas Carr. Copyright © 2016 by Nicholas Carr. With permission of the publisher, W W Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

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How do we know what we know?

FEE

by Bill Frezza

Our Media-Driven Epistemological Breakdown

How do we know what we know? Philosophers have pondered this question from time immemorial. Julian Jaynes, in his classic book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, speculates that before the development of modern human consciousness, people believed they were informed by voices in their heads. Today, an alarming number of people are responding to voices on the Internet in similarly uncritical fashion.

As Jesuit scholar John Culkin pointed out in his seminal 1967 Saturday Review article, “A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan,” “We shape our tools and, thereafter, they shape us.” Examining history through this lens, one can identify seven great epochs in mankind’s intellectual and social evolution. Each is characterized by the way a new technology changed not only how we think about the world, but our actual thought processes. These are:

1) Spoken language, which first led to the primacy of mythology;

2) Written language, which bequeathed to us holy books and the world’s great religions;

3) The printing press, which spread literacy to the elites who went on to birth the nation state, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the U.S. Constitution;

4) The telegraph, which transformed pamphlets and broadsheets into modern newspapers, whose agenda-setting influence goaded America to “Remember the Maine” and become an imperialist power;

5) Radio, which placed broadcast propaganda at the service of central planners, progressives, and tyrants;

6) Television, which propelled the rising tide of the counterculture, environmentalism, and globalism; and

7) The Internet, a nascent global memory machine that puts the Library of Alexandria to shame, yet fits in everyone’s pocket.

At each transition, the older environment and way of thinking does not disappear. Rather, it adopts an extreme defensive crouch as it attempts to retain power over men’s minds. It is the transition from the Age of Television to the Age of the Internet that concerns us here, as it serves up an often-toxic brew of advocacy and click-bait journalism competing to feed the masses an avalanche of unverifiable information, often immune to factual or logical refutation.

Rational epistemology holds that reason is the chief test and source of knowledge, and that each of us is not just capable of practicing it, but is responsible for doing so. Reason flowered when the Enlightenment overturned the ancient wisdom of holy books, undermining the authority of clerics and the divine right of kings. Wherever reason is widely practiced and healthy skepticism is socially accepted, error becomes self-correcting (rather than self-amplifying, as under a system based on superstition), as new propositions are tested, while old propositions get reexamined as new facts come to light.

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Goebbels proved that a lie repeated loudly and frequently in a culture that punished skepticism became accepted as truth.

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Yet, reason’s primacy is a fragile thing. As increasingly potent electronic media confer influence on new voices, formerly-dominant media and governing elites fight a rearguard action to regain their status as ultimate arbiters of knowledge and what matters. Goebbels proved that a lie repeated loudly and frequently in a culture that punished skepticism became accepted as truth. We all know how that turned out.

Revulsion at the carnage of the Second World War crested with the counterculture revolution driven by the first TV generation. By the time the dust settled, its thought leaders had grabbed control of the academy, reshaping it along postmodern lines that included an assault on language that critics dubbed political correctness. This was intentionally designed to constrain what people can think by restraining what they can say. The intention may have been to avert a repeat of the horrors of the 20th century, but the result was to strip much of the educated populace of the mental tools needed to ferret out error.

So now that the voices have returned to our heads, we are inadequately prepared to defend against them. Digitally streamed into every nook and cranny of our ubiquitously connected lives, these voices are filtered by our own self-reinforcing preferences and prejudices, becoming our own in the process. The result is an ongoing series of meme-driven culture wars where the shouting only gets louder on all sides.

What causes crime? Is autism linked to vaccines? Should GMOs be banned? Is global warming “settled science”? These are more than factual questions. Responses to them signal identification with an array of ever more finely differentiated identity groups set at each other’s throats. For those who wish to divide and rule, that’s the whole point.

In a cruel irony, this global outbreak of media-induced public schizophrenia has even empowered jihadists bent on taking the world back to the 10th century using the idea-spreading tools of the Internet to challenge a Western Civilization rapidly losing its mojo.

So we come back to the question: How do we know what we know? At the present time, we don’t. And therein lies the problem.

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Malaysia – The death of Freedom of Information

Freedom of information is an extension of freedom of speech, a fundamental human right recognized in international law, which is today understood more generally as freedom of expression in any medium, be it orally, in writing, print, through the Internet or through art forms… – Wiki

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The Malaysian Insider

Sarawak Report says MCMC blocking site further discredits Putrajaya

The main page of Sarawak Report that visitors from Malaysia will see upon trying to access Sarawak Report’s website, http://www.sarawakreport.org, following the move by the MCMC to block access to the whistleblower site. – ‘Sarawak Report’ website screenshot pic, July 19, 2015.

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Whistleblower site Sarawak Report has labelled the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC)’s blocking of the site today as an act that will only bring further “discredit” to Putrajaya.

MCMC confirmed today that it has blocked local access to the site as it was threatening “national stability” following months of exposes pertaining to business dealings of 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), the state-owned investment arm.

But Sarawak Report editor Clare Rewcastle-Brown (pic, left) said that they would not be perturbed by the MCMC move and vowed to continue with its exposes on the scandal and other relevant issues.

“Sarawak Report will not be impeded in any way by this action in bringing out future information as and when its investigations deliver further evidence,” she said in a statement issued tonight.

Rewcastle-Brown questioned if there is a “single person” who would believe MCMC’s claim that the site is threatening national stability.

“So far, no one in the Malaysian government has had the guts to take Sarawak Report formally to task over any factual detail of our revelations or issue legal proceedings which would trigger a public examination of the evidence.

“This is because our information is overwhelming, easily proven and patently substantiated by a mass of corroborative factual evidence,” she said.

Rewcastle-Brown noted that as Putrajaya was not in a position to refute the evidence, certain members of the government had instead spent the last few weeks doing their best to distract from the issue by attacking the integrity of Sarawak Report.

BN’s strategic communications director Datuk Abdul Rahman Dahlan, who is also a Cabinet member, recently used a “confession” by a former Sarawakian journalist, Lester Melanyi, to claim that Sarawak Report had forged and tampered with 1MDB-related documents that led to its exposes.

He also claimed that opposition politicians had worked hand-in-hand with the London-based site.

Rewcastle-Brown said that ministers had shouted about forged, tampered or distorted documents, but they have been unable to highlight even one example of such a deed to date.

She also said that if Sarawak Report exposes were a mere plot and not based on facts, politicians from both side of the political divide would not be voicing anger and concern about 1MDB.

“If all our exposes were a dark and tangled plot of elaborate forgeries and lies, why is it that politicians across the political spectrum have been voicing anger and concern for months and years about the growing indebtedness and missing billions at 1MDB?

“And why is there a mass of official investigations being conducted into this very matter?” she asked.

The state investment arm, a brainchild of Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak, sits on a RM42 billion debt accumulated over six years.

Former prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad is among its chief critics. – July 20, 2015.

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Malaysia – Instilling fears and insecurities

The Malaysian Prime Minister Najib is under heavy attack by Netizens and is under great pressure to step down. The talk of the town is filled and centered around the scams and scandals he’s deeply involved in, which were disclosed primarily by the Alternative and online Social Medias.

Najib knows he is up against awakened Malaysians and his battle to regain trust and control is diminishing by the hour.

The govern-ment machinery is working overtime to combat and restrain the massive information  pouring on the Internet which finds Najib struggling to survive each day.

Survive he must and will resort to every available tool he has to remain in power. False flag is a favorite tool of the controllers, and is effective in the pasts.

The recent mob incident at Kuala Lumpur’s Low Yat Plaza which started off from a simple theft of a mobile phone eventually ended up as a “racial” riot. The incident went viral online after a UMNO blogger PAPAGOMO painted the incident as racial and the police is now after him. The fracas was caused by thugs purportedly from the Malay group PEKIDA, with shouts of “Allah Akbar”. The police came in and quickly brought the situation under control.

Read more: Pekida’s action in Low Yat brawl regrettable, says moderate Muslim group

Soon afterwards the govern-ment and the police issued statements that it wasn’t a racial incident and that it was only a simple case of theft. Everything is back to normal and life goes on.

The next follow up by the govern-ment is of course to tell and “advice” the people not to spread rumors, especially on Social Medias and that  the people should not listen to lies on the Internet. Perfect!

After Low Yat fracas, minister wants tougher social media policy

Putrajaya must act against those who promote racism on social media before race relations in the country spirals out of control, says Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Nancy Shukri. – Read more

Voila! The Hegelian Dialectic was put in motion. Create and stage the ‘problem’. The people ‘reacted’. Now its ‘solution’ time. The mob incident IS NOT the problem, The problem IS the SOCIAL MEDIA spreading rumors and the “solution” is in the form of a CONTROLLED SOCIAL MEDIA! It was all a set up…a False Flag!

The Hegelian Dialectic worked all, if not most of the time in the past. Instilling fears and insecurities are of days gone by. Not now in 2015! The people have awakened and can see through the lies and the setup.

The controllers are out of ideas and their days are numbered. There is no more fear. There is no racial problem. There is only the corrupt govern-ment.

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Wikipedia sues NSA, DoJ over mass surveillance

RT

The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia free online encyclopedia, is preparing a lawsuit against the US National Security Agency and US Department of justice over a mass surveillance program initiated by the government.

Wikimedia is heading to court to prove that NSA’s Upstream program gathers foreign intelligence information through capturing communications with “non-US persons,” reports Reuters.

“Our aim in filing this suit is to end this mass surveillance program in order to protect the rights of our users around the world,” Wikimedia said in a statement.

“We are asking the court to order an end to the NSA’s dragnet surveillance of internet traffic,” Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales outlined in an opinion piece published in the New York Times.

Jimmy Wales's Wikipedia to file lawsuit against NSA in a challenge against mass surveilance. http://t.co/9vtHxwY6Dt pic.twitter.com/A5bEs0KZur

— The Kingmaker (@TKM_Group) March 10, 2015

Wikimedia is filing the lawsuit along with eight other organizations, such as Amnesty International USA and Human Rights Watch, all represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

“Privacy is the bedrock of individual freedom,” Wikimedia’s statement maintains.

America’s IT giants have also suffered the consequences of the exposure of the NSA mass surveillance programs and are currently presenting a united front against government intrusion.

READ MORE: ‘The day we fight back’: 6,000 websites protest surveillance, honor Aaron Swartz

Wikimedia intends to prove that NSA internet surveillance activities have been violating the US Constitution: the First Amendment protecting the freedom of speech and association and the Fourth Amendment, which serves against unreasonable search and seizure.

Kudos to @jimmy_wales for fighting on behalf of American freedoms http://t.co/UNv9Juxbpe

— Alexander Macris (@archon) March 10, 2015

Wikimedia also claims that current NSA practices go beyond the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act (FAA) granted by Congress in 2008.

“We believe that the NSA’s current practices far exceed the already broad authority granted by the US Congress through the FAA,” the statement goes on.

The previous challenge to the FAA (Amnesty v Clapper) was dismissed by the US Supreme Court in 2013 due to lack of “standing” an important legal concept requiring a party to prove it has suffered some kind of harm if it intends to file a lawsuit.

READ MORE: US court tosses out mass surveillance case against NSA, AT&T

For the current lawsuit Wikimedia has prepared a slide from a classified NSA mass surveillance presentation disclosed in 2013 that includes an explicit reference to Wikipedia and which uses the organization’s global trademark.

“Because these disclosures revealed that the government specifically targeted Wikipedia and its users, we believe we have more than sufficient evidence to establish standing,” the statement says.

READ MORE: ‘Encryption is a human right’: Wikipedia aims to lock out NSA

“By tapping the backbone of the internet, the NSA is straining the backbone of democracy,” Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Lila Tretikov wrote in a blog post.

“Wikipedia is founded on the freedoms of expression, inquiry and information. By violating our users’ privacy, the NSA is threatening the intellectual freedom that is central to people’s ability to create and understand knowledge,” Tretikov said.

READ MORE: New NSA reports show spy agency routinely collected intel on Americans

“Wikipedia is the largest collaborative free knowledge resource in human history,” the Wikimedia statement claims.

“It represents what we can achieve when we are open to possibility and unburdened by fear.”

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#WON the Internet

MOZILLA

Today will go down in history as the day we won real protections for net neutrality.

After a long campaign, this morning the FCC voted for what we demanded, and what a few big cable companies did not want: strong, enforceable net neutrality rules based on classifying broadband as a Title II communications service. Huge sums were spent lobbying Congress to try to limit what we can create and build and do online.

We accomplished what seemed impossible: we stood together, took on the goliaths, and won.

This was no small feat. It was the biggest show of public engagement the FCC had ever seen — a mass movement of historic proportions. Millions of public comments flooded Washington on this issue. By banding together, we’ve helped to keep the Web open and accessible for everyone, equally.

What’s next? We’ve known all along that cable companies would turn to the courts if they lost with the FCC, and that’s exactly what they’re preparing to do, but they likely have a very difficult road ahead. The President himself spoke in favor of strong rules to protect net neutrality. The FCC chairman, a former cable and wireless industry lobbyist, led the FCC to a vote on the rules we asked for. And anti-net neutrality bills in Congress have fizzled.

We have built a powerful and unified grassroots movement, and we aren’t going anywhere.

We all know this won’t be the last time we will need to join together to protect the Web from those that want to control it. With the net neutrality fight underway in the European Union, this victory in the U.S. will hopefully boost efforts there. Mozilla’s policy experts are also keeping an eye on legislation about surveillance, privacy, and online safety and security just on the horizon.

A handful of growing empires will no doubt try again to take more control of what is possible and what is imaginable on the Web. I hope we can call on you to stand with us when the time comes. Strength in numbers — that’s how we win.

Today we celebrate — click here to get a special photo to use for your Facebook profile to help commemorate this awesome victory.

Thanks again for your work to make today’s outcome possible and for all that you do to protect the open Web.

Mark

Mark Surman
Executive Director

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US regulator votes for net neutrality

Biggest government intervention in the internet in two decades could face legal challenges – FT

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WE DID IT! The U.S. FCC just announced an historic ruling to ban Internet slow lanes. It’s been a long road, but the Internet won, and it’s all thanks to you speaking out. Click here to see community reaction, publish your thoughts, and celebrate with the rest of the Internet.

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What does it take to wake the people up?

One thing I know I am not an alarm clock or could ever be one to another human being. Thankfully my personal alarm clock worked very well to wake me up. For the past two decades I’ve been nudging colleagues, friends and relatives to come out from their warm cozy blankets, open their eyes and sit up at least, as jumping out and standing up would be asking too much from them while still sleepy eyed.

Whatever information and knowledge I had then was relatively very small compared to now, as there was no Internet yet. With the advent of the World Wide Web (www), information start to ooze out like blood flowing from a deep gash wound. Yes, more and more people began to sit up and rub their eyes and begun to see what’s really around them as compared to the night before.

Not until lately, everything seems to be flung out of the closet. Things and issues that was quickly brushed aside before as “conspiracy theories” are now clearly and openly displayed as real conspiracies. Whistlers or whistleblowers are coming out on almost a daily basis. As you reading this might already know, the dark shadowy groups and organizations like the Bilderberg are dancing out from behind the curtain and even setup their own official websites. The latest to follow suit is the lovey-lovey Illuminati, and this lot’s appearance really gives me the goose bumps. All said, I see progress and things are moving toward the change that we the people want albeit quite not as quickly as we would want it to be…nuff said.

What this post is really about is that the world is visibly changing and the news and reports to the many happenings are openly and readily available. Many if not all the news do sound simply insane. For instance, Obama became a Nobel Peace laureate and most recently the war criminal teflon Tony Blair received the Save The Children award? If that’s not madness I don’t know what is.  Now, take this one on (I once thought was) a fabulous actress – Angelina Jolie. She’s set to become a peer! What this means is she is to be given a seat in the House of Lords at the Westminster and she will be a Lawmaker!

Good grief! I know in the US Hollywood actors do/did become President and State Governor, but the Brits? I thought they are more conventional, traditional and sober than their drunkard American cousins. Anyway, this Angelina is not as angelic as you may think she is. She’s been serving the dark side for sometime, perhaps as long as she’s been acting. Without a doubt she’s been picked and groomed by the Illuminati like many other artistes as declared by the Illuminati themselves on their official website.

On the front page they declared:

The Illuminati Organization is an elite collective of political leaders, business owners, entertainment celebrities, and other influential members of this planet. By uniting leaders of the world in an unrestrictive, private domain – free of political, religious, and geological boundaries – our organization helps to further the prosperity of the human species as a whole…

That’s proof enough about who and what Angelina Jolie is, and its a no secret that she is a member and an ambassadress for the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which many know by now what this organization represent.

So you see, if this happened twenty years ago prior the Internet, this would be quickly stamped and labeled as a conspiracy theory. Now… here you are… its openly displayed for all to see. Unfortunately, with all these information about the cabal and their NWO program freely and easily available, many more people are still sleeping and I just wonder what does it take to wake them up?

Here’s a pretty good round up of what’s happening round the world:

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Why the Internet is slowly strangling religion

SALON

Increased access to information is making it more difficult for faiths to exert total control over their followers

Amanda Marcotte, AlterNet

This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

While the burgeoning atheist movement loves throwing conferences and selling books, a huge chunk–possibly most–of its resources go toward the Internet. This isn’t borne out of laziness or a hostility to wearing pants so much as a belief that the Internet is uniquely positioned as the perfect tool for sharing arguments against religion with believers who are experiencing doubts. It’s searchable, it allows back-and-forth debate, and it makes proving your arguments through links much easier. Above all else, it’s private. An online search on atheism is much easier to hide than, say, a copy of The God Delusion on your nightstand.

In recent months, this sense that the Internet is the key for atheist outreach has started to move from “hunch” to actual, evidence-based theory. Earlier this year, Allen Downey of the Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts examined the spike in people declaring they had no religion that started in the ’90s and found that while there are many factors contributing to it–dropping familial pressure, increased levels of college education–increased Internet usage was likely a huge part of it, accounting for up to 25 percent of the decline in religious belief. While cautioning that correlation does not mean causation, Downey did go on to point out that since so many other factors were controlled for, it’s a safe bet to conclude that the access to varied thought and debate the Internet provides is persuading people to drop their religions.

But in the past few months, that hypothesis grew even stronger when a major American religion basically had to admit that Internet arguments against their faith is putting them on their heels. The Church of Latter Day Saints has quietly released a series of essays, put together by church historians, addressing some of the less savory aspects of their history, such as the practice of polygamy or the ban on black members. The church sent out a memo in September telling church leaders to direct believers who have questions about their religion’s history to these essays, which they presented as a counter to “detractors” who “spread misinformation and doubt.”

While there are plenty of detractors who will share their opinions offline, there’s little doubt that the bulk of the detractors plaguing the church are explaining their views online, which is why this has become a problem now for a church that used to act like it could exert total control over believers’ access to information. One of the church historians, Steven Snow, openly cited the internet as the source of the criticisms. “There is so much out there on the Internet ,” he told the New York Times, “that we felt we owed our members a safe place where they could go to get reliable, faith-promoting information that was true about some of these more difficult aspects of our history.”

While the memo sent to church leaders strongly implied that the websites bothering believers are full of disinformation, the likelier story is that they’re worried about all the historically accurate information out there. The Mormons tend to be plagued more than other major churches by historically accurate information, because they are a relatively new church and the historical records on their founders like Joseph Smith and Brigham Young are intact and hard to deny. This concern is reflected in the nature of the essays, which openly admit a lot of information that the church used to spend a lot of effort in minimizing, facts like exactly how many wives Joseph Smith had or the fact that polygamy was practiced by many members long after the church officially banned it. Not that they had much of a choice. If members of the church learn this stuff from Wikipedia instead of from their own religious authorities, it will likely sow more anger and distrust of the church for misleading them.

The Internet generally gathered around President Obama for his recent comments endorsing an extremely strong version of net neutrality that would make it very difficult for corporate internet providers to give certain people preferential internet access over others. His comments were seen as a victory for political activists, everyday bloggers, and non-profits that would lose out on the ability to compete with moneyed corporations and other institutions in the free-for-all that is internet discourse. But atheists and critics of religion also win out with net neutrality. Giant, well-funded churches would probably love to pay for better access to your computer screen than any atheist blogger could afford, but if net neutrality becomes the law, they won’t have that ability.

The Mormons might be the most obvious example of a church that has had to deal directly with non-believers using the Internet to get unprecedented abilities to publicize their critiques of religion, but there’s good reason to believe that the feedback religions are getting online is hurting other churches. Is it any coincidence that Pope Francis is undertaking the monumental task of trying to make the Catholic Church seem a little less forbidding in the age of the Internet?

At a recent conference on technology held by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, Monsignor Paul Tighe expressed concerns that the Catholic Church is losing out by not being more aggressive online. “If the church in some way is not present in the digital, we’re going to be absent from the experience and from the lives of many people,” he said. “If we withdraw, then we’re leaving those areas to the trolls. We’re leaving it to the bullies.”

Again, it’s hard to believe that trolls and bullies, as irritating as they may be, are the real issue here–trolling is aggravating, but it’s not very persuasive. No, the real threat to the faith is people making strong cases against the Catholic Church and religion in general. Some of those cases are boldly stated and some are more polite and accommodating, but either way, they are real arguments and far more threatening to religion than some trolls saying stupid stuff that is best ignored.

It will be interesting to see how religions adapt to the fact that the Internet makes it that much harder for them to control their believers’ access to information. Some will probably be adaptable, like the Mormons, realizing that a little more information-sharing and transparency is the only way to keep trust alive. Others, like Pastor Mark Driscoll of the fundamentalist Mars Hill Church in Seattle, will react by doubling down, trying to convince their followers to stay off the Internet rather than read persuasive cases against their beliefs. But the Internet’s beauty is it makes satisfying basic curiosity as easy as typing some words into a search bar. Odds are that’s a temptation fewer and fewer believers will be able to resist.

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Why corporations are desperate to destroy net neutrality

SALON

A free Internet is vital to the country’s infrastructure. For our plutocrats, it’s merely another profit center

Jim Hightower, AlterNet

When it comes to Internet Service Providers and high-speed Internet, the consumer marketplace has hardly been a model of competitiveness. Some of us are lucky enough to be able to choose from two providers, and some of us only have access to one.

These digital conduits are essential parts of America’s utility infrastructure, nearly as basic as electricity and water pipes. They connect us (and our children) to worldwide knowledge, news, diverse viewpoints and other fundamental tools of citizenship. And, of course, we can buy and sell through them, be entertained, run our businesses, connect with friends, get up-to-the-minute scores, follow the weather and—yes indeedy—pay our bills.

Yet while this digital highway is deemed vital to our nation’s well-being, access to it is not offered as a public service, i.e., an investment in the common good. Instead, it is treated as just another profit center for a few corporations.

Amassing market power to gouge customers is bad enough, but ISPs plan on eviscerating the pure egalitarian ethic of the Internet, which is why they were so upset when President Obama recently urged the FCC to back a free and open Internet.

Like an uncensored global bulletin board, the great virtue of the Internet is that no one controls its content. This digital communication technology has been so spectacularly successful and so socially valuable because it is a wide-open, democratic forum, accessible on equal terms to all who want to put information, images, opinions, etc. on it or to download any of the same from it. Since its invention, the guiding principle behind the use of this liberating technology has been that no corporation, government, religion, or other controlling power should be its gatekeeper.

This open-access tenet is dubbed “net neutrality,” meaning the system doesn’t care if you’re royalty or a commoner, an establishmentarian or a rebel, a brand-name corporation or an unknown start-up, a billionaire or a poverty-wage laborer — you are entitled to equal treatment in sending or getting information in the worldwide webosphere. That’s an important democratic virtue. As we’ve learned in other spheres, however, corporate executives are not ones to let virtue stand in the way of profit, and today’s telecom tycoons are no different. For some time, they’ve been scheming to dump the idea of net neutrality, viewing its public benefit as an unwarranted obstacle to their desire to grab greater profits.

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• Rather than having one big broadband “freeway” open for transporting everyone’s Internet content, the ISP giants intend to create a special system of lanes for high-speed traffic.
• This express lane will be made available to those who want to rush their information/view points/programs/etc. to the public and to get greater visibility for their content by having it separated from the mass clutter of the freeway.
• The ISPs will charge a premium price to those who want their content transported via this special Internet toll-lane system.

By creating this first-class fare, the likes of Comcast/TWC elevate themselves from mere transporters of content to exalted robber barons. They would be empowered to decide (on the basis of cash), which individuals, companies, and so forth will be allowed in the premium lane of what is supposed to be a democratic freeway. The “winners” will be (1) the ISP giants that would reap billions from this artificial profit lane, and (2) the powerful content providers (e.g., Disney, the Koch brothers, Walmart, the Pentagon, and Monsanto) that can easily pay top dollar to ride in the privileged lane (and deduct the ticket price from their corporate taxes).

The losers, obviously, will be the vast majority of internet users: (1) the dynamic cosmos of groups, small companies, and other content providers without the deep pockets needed to buy their way out of the slow lanes (which ISP monopolists could intentionally make even slower), and (2) the broad public that will have its access to the full range of Internet offerings blocked by the neon glare of those flashing their purchased messages in the fast lanes, limiting what we’re allowed to read, watch, listen to and interact with on our computers, smartphones and TV screens.

The biggest loser though, would be the Internet itself, which would be made to surrender its determinedly democratic ethic to the plutocratic rule of corporate profiteers.

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“setting the record straight”

RT

Internet hacktivists hold global ‘hackathon’ in honor of Aaron Swartz’s birthday

“FACT: Aaron did not hack into any of MIT’s computers. The CFAA 
requires that a person gain access to a computer that they weren’t
authorized to access. Aaron was obviously authorized to access 
his own laptop,” it notes, adding that Aaron wasn’t even violating
JSTOR’s Terms of Service at the time. "JSTOR and MIT had contractual
agreements allowing unlimited downloads to any computers 
on MITs network."

Online hacktivists are holding a “hackathon” spanning two days to honor the would-have-been birthday of dead computer programmer and hacktivist Aaron Swartz.

The hackathon will be a global phenomenon, spanning 11 cities including Berlin, Boston, New York, Buenos Aires and Oxford, according to its affiliated website. However, its main location will be in San Francisco where programmers, developers, artists, researchers, and activists gather together, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

READ MORE: ‘Inspiration for people, threat to US govt’ – Aaron Swartz film director to RT

This year’s hackathon theme is “setting the record straight,” it announced. The day will feature seven speakers sharing recent developments in many Aaron-related projects and issues. On Saturday, a film is being shown – “the Internet’s Own Boy” – documenting his life.

A hackathon is an event in which computer programmers come together for a shared purpose to engage in intensive collaboration on software projects.

The hackathon will start Saturday and Sunday at 11am in the Great Room of the Internet Archive. Anything created in the time span will be considered completely open source.

@natematias talking at #AaronSwartz hackathon at the Center for Civic Media. #Boston #aaronswartzhackathon http://t.co/M8VkdLuWxd—
Ali Hashmi (@alihashmi01) November 08, 2014

“We’re excited that SecureDrop is one of the many projects being hacked on over the weekend. SecureDrop is an open-source whistleblower submission system managed by Freedom of the Press Foundation that media organizations use to securely accept documents from anonymous sources. The project was originally coded by Aaron,” the EFF website announced.

Swartz was a 26 year-old information transparency activist, who took his own life nearly two years ago, having faced a standoff with the government.

When he was just 14, tech prodigy Swartz helped launch the first RSS feeds. By the time he turned 19, his company had merged with Reddit, which would become one of the most popular websites in the world.

But instead of living a happy life of a Silicon Valley genius, Swartz went on to champion a free internet, becoming a political activist calling for others to join.

Swartz drew the FBI’s attention in 2008, when he downloaded and released about 2.7 million federal court documents from a restricted service. The government did not press charges because the documents were, in fact, public.

He was arrested in 2011, for downloading academic articles from a subscription-based research website JSTOR – at his university – with the intention of making them available to the public. Although, none of what he downloaded was classified, prosecutors wanted to put him in jail for 35 years.

The official site underscores how it wishes to set the record straight.

“FACT: Aaron did not hack into any of MIT’s computers. The CFAA requires that a person gain access to a computer that they weren’t authorized to access. Aaron was obviously authorized to access his own laptop,” it notes, adding that Aaron wasn’t even violating JSTOR’s Terms of Service at the time. “JSTOR and MIT had contractual agreements allowing unlimited downloads to any computers on MITs network.”

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Internet has power to bring down regimes

RT

The Internet is the greatest tool of free speech ever created that gave voice to billions of people along with power to bring down regimes, a member of the Anonymous movement told RT, adding that such power terrifies governments around the globe.

READ MORE: Tense stand-off between Million Mask March protesters and police in London

Crowds of people wearing masks to hide their faces have marched in hundreds of cities all over the world, marking the Guy Fawkes Day with a global ‘Million Mask March’. As the Anonymous movement protested against government corruption, corporate malfeasance and the expanding surveillance state, RT caught up with Old Holborn, member of the movement.

“The internet has the power to bring down regimes. That is what terrifies them. That is why they are now monitor our phone calls, they monitor our emails, and they monitor our free speech. It terrifies them. They have no particular jurisdiction over the internet. It belongs to everyone,” Holborn told RT.

Often described in the media as a loose-knit collective, Anonymous was propelled to public prominence in the last years over a series of politically-motivated cyber-attacks on businesses, government and religious institutions. Anonymous originated in 2003 on the imageboard 4chan, representing the concept of many online members that believe the anarchic space of the internet belongs to the people.

“The internet is the greatest tool we have for free speech and everywhere on the planet we all have a voice now – 7 billion of us. Yes of course, somebody is going to get upset at something somebody else says. But we have to realize we all have a voice. We’re all equal. If you don’t like it, don’t listen to it. That is freedom of choice and freedom of expression,” Holborn says.

The agenda of those behind Wednesday’s protests is wide-ranging. The movement is said to be growing in strength as global citizens report greater dissatisfaction with their local governments and because of the perception that corporation has a stranglehold on international politics.

“We are not looking for a unified alternative. What we are looking for is for government to leave us alone. It is that simple. That is why we don’t have leaders, it’s everybody. Anonymous is whatever you want it to be,” the activist told RT.

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EFF Community Service – Surveillance Self-Defense

EFF

Introducing the New Surveillance Self-Defense

We’re thrilled to announce the relaunch of Surveillance Self-Defense, our guide to defending yourself and your friends from digital surveillance by using encryption tools and developing appropriate privacy and security practices. These resources are intended to inspire better-informed conversations and decision-making about digital security and privacy. The site is available today in English, Arabic, and Spanish, with more languages coming soon. – EFF

Modern technology has given the powerful new abilities to eavesdrop and collect data on innocent people. Surveillance Self-Defense is EFF’s guide to defending yourself and your friends from surveillance by using secure technology and developing careful practices.

 

• Want a security starter pack?

  Start from the beginning with a selection of simple steps.

  Surveillance impacts all of us, no matter where we live or what we do. While some of us might be directly affected, others may simply want to know what measures they can take to protect their communications and data from spying. This introductory playlist will help you discover how to assess your personal risk, protect your most cherished communications and information, and start thinking about incorporating privacy-enhancing tools into your daily routine.

  1. An Introduction to Threat Modeling
  2. Communicating with Others
  3. Creating Strong Passwords
  4. What Is Encryption?
  5. Keeping Your Data Safe
  6. Protecting Yourself on Social Networks
  7. Choosing Your Tools

 

Learn and find out more

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Besides the petrodollar, US is losing control of the Internet

Bloomberg

Back in September it was reported that Brazil and her partners in BRICS planned to get out of the “US-centric Internet” which is pipelined to the dreaded NSA and all the abbreviated US “agencies”. Now we see how serious Brazil is about this as Brazil’s Telebras begin to lay cables across the Atlantic. Will USA lose control of the Internet?

Brazil-to-Portugal Cable Shapes Up as Anti-NSA Case Study

Brazil is planning a $185 million project to lay fiber-optic cable across the Atlantic Ocean, which could entail buying gear from multiple vendors. What it won’t need: U.S.-made technology.

The cable is being overseen by state-owned telecommunications company Telecomunicacoes Brasileiras SA (TELB4), known as Telebras. Even though Telebras’s suppliers include U.S. companies such as Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO), Telebras President Francisco Ziober Filho said in an interview that the cable project can be built without any U.S. companies.

The potential to exclude U.S. vendors illustrates the fallout that is starting to unfold from revelations last year that the U.S. National Security Agency spied on international leaders like Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff and Germany’s Angela Merkel to gather intelligence on terror suspects worldwide.

“The issue of data integrity and vulnerability is always a concern for any telecom company,” Ziober said. The NSA leaks last year from contractor Edward Snowden prompted Telebras to step up audits of all foreign-made equipment to check for security vulnerabilities and accelerated the country’s move toward technological self-reliance, he said.

Nigel Glennie, a spokesman for San Jose, California-based Cisco, declined to comment. Last November, Cisco Chief Executive Officer John Chambers said uncertainties related to NSA spying were causing international customers to “hesitate” in buying U.S. technologies.

Vanee Vines, a spokeswoman for the NSA, didn’t return a call for comment.

Damage Control

The Telebras-planned cable, which will run 3,500 miles from the Brazilian city of Fortaleza to Portugal, shows how losses to U.S. technology companies from the NSA disclosures are now crystallizing. While much of the handwringing over damage to U.S. firms has focused on existing technology contracts, the pain may come more from projects that are just getting off the ground. In many cases, it’s too costly and complex to remove existing computing infrastructure, no matter the rhetoric coming from government leaders.

New projects are a different matter. With modern data networks being built worldwide — especially in emerging markets where information-technology spending is estimated to rise 9 percent this year to more than $670 billion, according to market researcher IDC — that’s where there’s opportunity to look increasingly to non-U.S. technology providers.

$35 Billion

U.S. companies could forgo as much as $35 billion in revenue through 2016 because of doubts about the security of their systems, according to the Washington-based Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, a policy research group.

Brazil’s new cable is the “perfect project to go non-U.S.,” said Bill Choi, an analyst at Janney Montgomery Scott, given that laying cables is a labor-intensive process dominated by non-U.S. companies such as French firm Alcatel-Lucent and Swiss-based TE Connectivity Ltd. (TEL)

Some of the anti-U.S. technology company talk may just be negotiating ploys to gain lower product prices. While Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ) have lost some contracts in Brazil and Germany, and Cisco has reported declining orders from emerging markets, the finances of most U.S. technology companies have held up so far. Gross margins for the companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Information Technology Sector Index are at their highest levels since 1990, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Yet there’s more risk for U.S. companies of being excluded from new projects, said Lee Doyle of consultancy Doyle Research. In Brazil, Russia, India and China, “the anti-NSA sentiment is real and significant,” he said.

Doyle added that only a minority of IT projects can realistically be implemented without any U.S. technology, yet “that doesn’t make it any less painful for U.S. tech companies looking to grow.”

Brazil’s Actions

Brazil is a key geography where the pain for U.S. technology firms is rising. The world’s seventh-biggest economy has long prioritized buying from its own companies. A 1991 law gave preference for state-sponsored projects to use locally made technology, and importers face steep tariffs.

Once news of Snowden’s leaks broke last year, Brazil began terminating its contracts with Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft for Outlook e-mail services. Brazil President Rousseff tweeted at the time that the change will help “prevent possible espionage.”

Controlling Expresso

Brazil is focusing instead on an e-mail system called Expresso, developed by state-owned Servico Federal de Processamento de Dados, known as Serpro. Expresso is currently used by 13 of the country’s 39 ministries.

“Expresso is 100 percent under our control,” said Marcos Melo, Serpro’s corporate solutions coordinator.

Jack Evans, a spokesman for Microsoft, said the company continues to hear from customers that “where their content is stored and how it is used and secured matters.” He said Microsoft is committed to “increasing choice and transparency about how we store our customers’ content.”

Last November, Rousseff also signed a decree requiring government ministries and agencies to use only technology services provided by public or partially state-owned companies, without competing for contracts in auctions.

The transition “for the preservation of national security” should be monitored by the ministries of defense, communications and planning and budget, the decree said.

Fortaleza Cable

The Fortaleza-to-Portugal cable, proposed in 2012 before the spying allegations, would further the country’s efforts to encourage local companies. The cable will bypass Brazil’s existing Internet traffic routes to Europe, which currently go through the U.S.

International submarine cables are prime targets for espionage, Rousseff said at a press conference in Sao Paulo on Oct. 20 as she campaigned for re-election. She said after the cables to Europe, Brazil will study building direct connections to Africa and Asia.

“It’s a very important strategy for the country, this question of submarine cables, because it’s good to remember that submarine cables are among the main mechanisms of spying today,” she said. Rousseff was re-elected on Oct. 26, in a result that had the tightest margin of victory since at least 1945.

Winning Vendors

So far, Telebras has said it will only partner with European, Asian and local vendors. In January, Ziober said at a press conference that Telebras will work with Madrid-based Islalink Submarine Cables SL and an as-yet-undetermined Brazilian associate to construct the technology pipe.

Ziober added that a project this complex could have multiple vendors, to be chosen from proposals presented after the third associate is finalized. Construction is slated to start in the first half of 2015, with the cable to be operational 18 months later, he said at an Oct. 15 event.

Among the beneficiaries is likely to be Padtec SA, a 400-person network-equipment maker based in Sao Paulo state. Padtec CEO Jorge Salomao Pereira said his company will submit an offer when the bidding process is opened to build and operate all of the submarine cable.

Closely held Padtec has 262.4 million reais of contracts with Telebras in Brazil’s national broadband network, including a 98 million-real agreement for maintaining fiber optic cables. State-owned development bank BNDES identified Padtec as a leader in the networking industry and last year helped the company raise 167 million reais for new products, acquisitions and international expansion.

The anti-NSA sentiment provides “a window of opportunity for other smaller companies to enter the market with this technology and become global players,” Salomao said.

Cisco’s Experience

Telebras’s Ziober said in the interview that the competition for the cable project is also likely to include Asian and European suppliers Huawei Technologies Co., Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson AB.

Huawei spokesman Bill Plummer declined to comment. Ericsson isn’t part of the cable project, said spokeswoman Elisabeth Manzi. Alcatel-Lucent representatives didn’t return messages for comment.

The Brazilian chill is already being felt by Cisco. The country, once one of Cisco’s most promising markets, is now among its poorest performing ones. Orders in Brazil fell 13 percent in the latest quarter ended July 26, continuing a series of double-digit declines there. Cisco doesn’t disclose underlying sales numbers for the country.

That’s a far cry from what Cisco had been working toward in Brazil. In 2012, the company said it would invest $1 billion in the country over four years. It opened an innovation center in Rio de Janeiro last year, eight days before Brazil’s most-viewed news magazine, Fantastico, revealed the NSA spying and disclosed that Brazilian leaders had been monitored.

‘Facebook a gift to intelligence agencies’

RT

‘Facebook a gift to intelligence agencies’ - Laura Poitras

Investigative journalist Laura Poitras says she is worried about intelligence agencies using the all-too-easily-accessible data gathered from social networks – as people share their personal information voluntarily and governments only need to ask.

Poitras, who helped NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden expose illegal activities of the organization, still believes that people should be worried about the amount of power governments have to conduct surveillance searches of what they are doing online.

“Facebook is a gift to intelligence agencies. People volunteer all their social information,” she told the Washington Post in an interview.

Users should be wary about the information that the likes of Facebook and Google have compiled on them, Poitras warns. Still she does believe that these technology companies pose less of a threat than governments.

“On technology companies, we should be concerned, but we are consenting to that relationship – and they don’t have the same powers. They can help the government find out who your sources are, but they don’t have the power to investigate people,” she said.

READ MORE: Defiant Apple, Facebook, other firms to inform public of govt surveillance requests

To try and overcome the problem of unwanted government surveillance, she advocates the greater use of encryption tools, especially for journalists, but does understand that they can often be hard to use for those without specialist knowledge of computer systems. Poitras told the Washington Post she believes this could change in the future.

“I think what we’re going to see is a market for privacy that’s going to emerge. I think technology companies will come forward and offer tools that are easier to use. I mean, [email encryption tool] PGP is not easy, but it could be, and I think it will be,” she said.

The investigative journalist also touched on the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which was setup in December 2012 to support free speech and the freedom of the press. It also offers encryption tools, which can be downloaded online, as well as a service called SecureDrop.

READ MORE: Facebook demands DEA stop using fake profiles in investigations

SecureDrop is an open-source whistleblower submission system, which any news organization can install to securely receive information and documents from whistleblowers and sources, according to the Foundation’s website. She also says that the organization can give guidance on what products can be trusted and which should be avoided.

“I think one of the really exciting things about the organization is that we have a technology board who has all sorts of experience in the free software movement who actually know how to determine what are the good forms of encryption and how to handle peer review,” Poitras added.

Poitras also talked about the release of her new film, Citzenfour, which potrays the eight days that she spent in Hong Kong with Snowden, after he began leaking sensitive NSA documents. The film opened on Friday in selected cinemas in New York, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles.

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Outernet aims to provide data to the net unconnected

Internet names caretaker discusses sliding out of US control

RT

ICANN, the organization managing IP addresses for the internet, may be ready to become independent from the US government in a matter of months, its head announced at a conference.

Members of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) gathered this week in Los Angeles for the organization’s 51st conference. The meeting of some 3,000 representatives from major web companies and domain name registries, governments and international organizations has no strict agenda. But two issues are dominating discussions: its post-US control future and assigning new top-level domain names.

ICANN has made a progress towards becoming answerable to a global group of ‘stakeholders’ rather than the US government, as has been the case so far, its president and CEO, Fadi Chehadé, said as cited by AP.

At the moment the organization operates the internet’s naming system under a contract with the US, but in March, Washington announced that it may chose not to renew it after it expires in 2015.

“There are many people in the community who would like to see we not renew the contract past 2015,”Chehadé said.

#ICANN Board will consider new Strategic plan Thurs @ #ICANN51– the result of 17 mos of discussion +3 comment periods http://t.co/bLlryvXJnV—
ICANN President (@icann_president) October 13, 2014

This, however, would depend on whether the US Department of Commerce is satisfied with ICANN’s reform proposal that it is yet to submit. But Chehadé gave an assurance that the shift that has no deadline would be measured in months rather than years.

Introduction of new generic top-level domains, and the progress with those already rolled out as part of the gTLD program, is another hot topic for ICANN. Hundreds of TLDs like .cooking or .airforce have been released so far and more are in the pipeline.

The program experienced an initial hype and several scandals over who should be in control of potentially profitable domain names like .sex or .bank, but in practice new domains don’t appear to be gaining ground as fast as expected.

ICANN argues that this is a long-term project, citing, for instance, .catholic TLD, which is operated by the Catholic Church. The Church has a 10-year development plan that involves making it a sort of authenticity stamp for catholic institutions globally, Chehadé said.

A tied-in issue for discussion is tackling whether identities of people and companies running websites should be public. Some privacy advocates argue they should only be revealed with a court order.

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The controllers hate the Internet

Turkish President Proclaims “I Am Increasingly Against the Internet Every Day”

A very significant and dangerous trend has been accelerating in recent weeks. This trend consists of leaders throughout the globe coming out and blatantly calling for censorship and restrictions on free speech.

Of course, in so-called Western democracies, the leaders have to be more subtle and nuanced in their approach. They can’t just come out and say they hate the internet. We saw this tactic from the UK Conservative Party as of late with its call for the banning “non-violent” extremism from public discourse. I covered this terrifying plan in my recent post: The UK’s Conservative Party Declares War on YouTube, Twitter, Free Speech and Common Sense.

While that’s how British politicians pitch totalitarianism, their Turkish counterparts don’t seem to have any qualms about just coming out and admitting their disdain for the proliferation of free speech that the internet allows. We learn from the Independent that:

The Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has defended his government’s efforts to control online speech, telling a press freedom conference: “I am increasingly against the Internet every day.”

Mr Erdoğan’s comments came during an “unprecedented” meeting with the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and the International Press Institute (IPI).

Local newspapers and major publications such as The New York Times and CNN International were among those slammed by officials, according to the CPJ.

“Media should never have been given the liberty to insult,” Mr Erdoğan was quoted as saying during the 90-minute meeting.

In a nod to the Western strategy, he also throws out the “terrorism” talking point.

He also expressed concern that criminal and terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State go online to recruit followers, saying he is “increasingly against” the internet.

His remarks come after he approved a law tightening control of the internet and increasing the powers held by telecoms authorities earlier in September.

Meanwhile in Egypt, the Associated Press notes that civil rights groups and humanitarian organizations are concerned that things under newly elected President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, will be even more authoritarian than they were under Hosni Mubarak.

While this trend of politicians waging war on free speech is dangerous, it is also extremely encouraging. They wouldn’t feel the need to take off the velvet gloves unless they were scared to death that the plebs were on to them and actually talking to one another.

…eat you hearts out bastards…their frustrations are killing them:

• Technology and The Internet Killed the corporate governments
• Dr. Mahathir Regrets Internet Freedom
• Internet will be censored if I am PM again, says Dr Mahathir

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Tor: browse the Internet with an added cloak of privacy

EFF

Tor Challenge Inspires 1,635 Tor Relays

Good news for whistleblowers, journalists, and everyone who likes to browse the Internet with an added cloak of privacy: the Tor network got a little stronger. Tor—software that lets you mask your IP address—relies on an international network of committed volunteers to run relays to help mask traffic. And that network is stronger now, thanks to the 1,000+ volunteers who participated in our second-ever Tor Challenge.

The goal of the Tor Challenge is simple: to improve the Tor network by inspiring people to run relays. These relays are the backbone of the Tor network; they’re the machines that actually forward and anonymize Tor users’ communications. We also see this Challenge as an opportunity to educate people about the value of Tor, address common misconceptions about Tor, and give technically oriented folks a concrete, somewhat measurable way of promoting freedom and privacy online.

This is the second time we’ve held this challenge, and the outpouring of support from the technical community far exceeded our hopes. When launching this campaign in June, we were hoping to surpass 549 participating relays—the total number of relays that took part in the challenge in 2011. And that was an ambitious number; 2011 was during the Arab Spring, and the EFF Tor Challenge was one small way that technologists could lend support to democratic activists who relied on Tor to organize and reach the larger Web. We hoped that this year we’d be able to inspire just as much participation.

The results far outstripped our hopes: we had nearly three times as many participating relays. That’s over 1,600 relays—either new or increased in bandwidth—helping to strengthen the Tor network.

Here’s a breakdown of the results:

	Tor Challenge 2011	Tor Challenge 2014
Exit Relays	123	326
Middle Relays	299	1203
Bridges	127	106
Total Participating Relays	549	1,635

One of the reasons this campaign was so successful was that we teamed up with three other organizations: the Free Software Foundation, Freedom of the Press Foundation, and the Tor Project. These organizations’ promotional efforts were key to the campaign’s success.

The other key? Over 1,000 individuals who cared enough to help contribute bandwidth to the Tor network. Our gratitude goes out to each of the participants. Thanks for making the Internet a little more private and a bit more resistant to censorship.

Special thanks to Dr. Karsten Loesing of the Tor Project for making these awesome graphs of the challenge.

Why we need Tor now more than ever

EFF’s Jillian York notes that Edward Snowden’s leaked documents have shifted the focus of the global conversation around Internet freedom from censorship to surveillance, but that the two forces are inextricably linked. read more

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Get Ready for the ‘Internet Slowdown’

Common Dreams

On September 10th, sites across the web will display an alert with a symbolic “loading” symbol (the proverbial “spinning wheel of death”) and promote a call to action for users to push comments to the FCC, Congress, and the White House. (Image: Battleforthenet.com)

Next Wednesday, Sept. 10, if your favorite website seems to load slowly, take a closer look: You might be experiencing the Battle for the Net’s “Internet Slowdown,” a global day of grass-roots action. Protesters won’t actually slow the Internet down, but will place on their websites animated “Loading” graphics (which organizers call “the proverbial ‘spinning wheel of death’”) to symbolize what the Internet might soon look like. As that wheel spins, the rules about how the internet works are being redrawn. Large Internet service providers, or ISPs, like Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T and Verizon are trying to change the rules that govern your online life.

The fight over these rules is being waged now. These corporate ISPs want to create a two-tiered Internet, where some websites or content providers pay to get preferred access to the public. Large content providers like Netflix, the online streaming movie giant, would pay extra to ensure that their content traveled on the fast lane. But let’s say a startup tried to compete with Netflix. If it couldn’t afford to pay the large ISPs their fees for the fast lane, their service would suffer, and people wouldn’t subscribe.

The Internet is protected from this two-tiered, discriminatory practice through regulated “net neutrality,” the fundamental principle of the Internet that allows any user to access Web content freely without any corporation censoring the content or slowing down the connection. Because so much of the world’s Internet traffic passes through the United States, the way that the U.S. regulates the Internet impacts the entire planet. Sadly, the state of Internet regulation in the U.S., under the Obama administration’s Federal Communications Commission, is in crisis. The Obama-appointed FCC chair, Tom Wheeler, has proposed new rules for the Internet that would effectively do away with net neutrality, allowing large ISPs to create these separate fast lanes and slow lanes.

Let’s look further at the example of Netflix. Streaming video depends on ample bandwidth. Customers with Internet at home provided by Comcast were complaining that their Netflix video was streaming poorly, with frequent buffering. So, last February, Netflix agreed to pay Comcast for “paid prioritization,” meaning Netflix Internet traffic would flow to the customers faster than other Internet traffic, on a fast lane. Since then, Netflix has inked similar deals with AT&T, Verizon and Time-Warner. VHX is a small, New York-based video-streaming startup company. VHX’s CEO, Jamie Wilkinson, expressed his concern, writing on the VHX blog: “The companies with which we compete—Apple, Amazon, Google, the cable companies themselves—can afford to pay for a ‘fast lane’ … We do not have that luxury.” VHX will “live or die” he wrote, based on the strength of net neutrality rules.

Corporate censorship is also a concern. Let’s say you advocate for union rights, in support of striking workers. A large Internet service provider could block your website, denying the public access to critical information. This is not hypothetical. In Canada in 2005, workers at the corporate ISP Telus went on strike. One of the strikers developed a website, Voices for Change, which supported the strike. Telus denied its Internet customers access to the website until the corporate censorship became national news. But if large ISPs get their way, this type of censorship could become routine.

In conjunction with the Sept. 10 “Internet Slowdown,” organizers are promising to “drive record numbers of emails and calls to lawmakers.” The Sunlight Foundation analyzed 800,000 comments already filed on this issue with the FCC. Of those, 99 percent supported strict rules protecting net neutrality. The protest organizers are demanding that Internet service be reclassified as a public utility, like telephone service. Imagine if the phone company were allowed to downgrade the quality of your phone call because you didn’t pay for the premium service. With nondiscrimination rules governing utilities, people get the same service. Currently, the FCC has labeled the Internet as an “information service,” subject to less-restrictive consumer protections.

The FCC has long been considered a “captured agency,” beholden to the corporations it is supposed to regulate. Unfortunately, before becoming FCC chairman, Tom Wheeler enjoyed a long career as the top lobbyist for both the cellular phone industry and the cable industry. In previous battles over Internet governance, massive public outcry has prevailed. If the power of the people fails this time to overwhelm the power of corporate money in Washington, D.C., then the “Internet Slowdown,” far from being a one-day protest, may become a constant condition. Whatever position you take, email President Barack Obama and FCC chairman Tom Wheeler—while you still can.

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The Sad & Strange Reason We Censor Ourselves

occupycorporatism.com

Susanne Posel ,Chief Editor Occupy Corporatism | The US Independent
August 27, 2014

Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter appear to provide a plethora of conversations on a myriad of topics that would assumingly broaden the public discourse; however researchers have discovered the opposite.

The Pew Internet Research Project (PIRP) surveyed 1,801 adults in 2013 trying to decipher the effects of social media and discovered on crucial element that has caused self-censorship across the web – Edward Snowden.

Because of revelations of the National Security Agency (NSA) spying on the internet, Americans have a conflicted stance on providing personal information online; even when it comes to social media.

According to the survey, 49% of those asked said that Snowden’s releases serves the public interest; while 44% say that leaking classified documents ultimately harms the public.

This close statistic shows that the nation is divided as to whether or not we should reveal government surveillance and has caused a rash of paranoia that has resulted in more person-to-person discussions because it is agreed that the web is not a safe place for privacy.

Keith Hampton, professor at Rutgers University (RU) and author of the study said : “Some had hoped that social media might provide new outlets that encourage more discussion and the exchange of a wider range of opinions. But we see the opposite—a spiral of silence exists online, too. If people did not think that their friends and followers in social media agreed with them, they were less likely to say they would state their views online.”

Key findings in the PIRP study include:

• 86% of people discussing Snowden in person while only 42% discuss the issue on Facebook or Twitter
• 0.3% of the 14% willing to discuss internet surveillance face-to-face would post online about it
• Finding an environment conducive for accord was a definer as to whether or not people shared their opinions
• If people believed others shared their honest opinions, they were 3x as likely to share online themselves
• Facebook users were 2x as likely to discuss Snowden if their social media friends were doing so already
• The average Facebook user is half as likely to share their opinion unless others do so first
• Social media users are 2x as likely to share their opinion on Snowden if they believed others would agree with them

Lee Rainie, director of internet science and technology research at Pew Research Center (PRC) explained: One possible explanation is that social media users are more aware of the diversity of opinions around them—especially on an issue where there is divided opinion. Because they use social media, they may know more about the depth of disagreement over the issue in their wide circle of contacts. This might make them hesitant to speak up either online or offline for fear of starting an argument, offending or even losing a friend.”

Called a spiral of silence , the PIRP found that “social media users who felt their online followers disagreed with their views were less likely to voice those views in face-to-face situations.”

This online self-censorship could spill over into real life and this is a concern for the PIRP researchers.

The “spiral of silence” could affect the real world “because social media users might have witnessed minority opinion holders experiencing ostracism, ridicule or bullying online — creating a perceived risk of sharing.”

The study points out: “[There is a] tendency of people not to speak up about policy issues in public—or among their family, friends, and work colleagues—when they believe their own point of view is not widely shared.”

The researchers wrote: “It might be the case that people do not want to disclose their minority views for fear of disappointing their friends, getting into fruitless arguments, or losing them entirely. Some people may prefer not to share their views on social media because their posts persist and can be found later—perhaps by prospective employers or others with high status. As to why the absence of agreement on social media platforms spills over into a spiral of silence in physical settings, we speculate that social media users may have witnessed those with minority opinions experiencing ostracism, ridicule or bullying online, and that this might increase the perceived risk of opinion sharing in other settings.”

According to researcher Danah Boyd, American teenagers on early social media sites took their cues from real world scenarios that created “networked publics” which is explained: “Networked publics force everyday people to contend with environments in which contexts are regularly colliding. Even when the immediate audience might be understood, the potential audience can be far greater and from different contexts.”

 

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Teen builds browser plugin that unmasks political money trail

RT

Ever wonder where your congressperson’s political contributions come from? A new browser plugin is aiming to shed light on the money trail, and it was built by a teenager.

While there are already great tools to help informed voters look into what special interests are impacting local and national politics, such as those by the Sunlight Foundation, the new web browser tool is possibly the easiest way so far to get a glimpse into the often shady underpinnings of corporate contributions.

The plugin automatically highlights the name of any US lawmaker as you browse through the web, and a simple hover produces a popup window with a quick rundown of where that politician’s money is coming from.

The ‘Greenhouse’ plugin, available now for Chrome and Safari (and soon Firefox), displays both the percentage of political contributions to House and Senate members by small donors as well as those from industry. The online tool does this by pulling in data provided by OpenSecrets.org from the last full election cycle in 2012.

According to the plugin’s 16-year-old creator, Nicholas Rubin, the intent of the tool is to provide greater context to voters, regardless of their political affiliation.

“The motto of Greenhouse is: ‘Some are red. Some are blue. All are green.’ What it signifies is that the influence of money on our government isn’t a partisan issue. Whether Democrat or Republican, we should all want a political system that is independent of the influence of big money and not dependent on endless cycles of fundraising from special interests. The United States of America was founded to serve individuals, not big interests or big industries. Yet every year we seem to move farther and farther away from our Founders’ vision,” says the self-taught programmer.

Rubin’s idea highlights what is already a burgeoning offering of online resources to track money in politics. The Sunlight Foundation, for example, currently offers a number of tools that allow users to see what organizations are paying for advertisements (Follow the Unlimited Money and a related mobile app called Ad Hawk) as well as the Foreign Lobbying Influence Tracker, which, as it name implies, offers data regarding foreign governments and their influence on US policy.

There are other tools available on the web for voters interested in peering into the sources of campaign contributions at the local and federal level, including MapLight. That website offers voters the ability to simply enter their home address and receive information regarding upcoming ballot initiatives, for example.

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UPDATE – Outernet is switching on

“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
– Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Outernet is switching on its first broadcast signal later this summer and the big question is where?

Summary of Update: Vote on the location of the Outernet test signal The Outernet blog is LIVE! First test stream of Outernet is a success Be a part of the Outernet design process Meet our Marketing and Communications Lead, Thane Richard

Outernet Blog is LIVE! We will be keeping you posted with updates as well as pieces about the work we are doing, the technology behind it, and how it is changing the world. We invite contributions, so visit the blog, read, and possibly write.

First test stream of Outernet is a success

On June 24, Syed Karim, Outernet’s CEO, watched as information came streaming over an emulation of the satellite broadcast. This simulation tested a few critical assumptions of the Outernet design:

• Confirmation that a Raspberry Pi coupled with a Linux-compatible DVB-S tuner can create a cheap, reliable, satellite receiver.
• Early testing of a web-based file delivery system for satellite broadcasts.
• Validation of a general concept of operations.

Stay tuned for a more detailed updates on Outernet’s progress via our blog.

Read more…

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Andrew Bartzis and Danielle L. – Psychic Parasite Release Jun 2014

Parasites release on June 20 – 23, 2014

 

Related

!ALERT – Shut Off Your Cell Phones and Routers on June 21, 2013

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Internet restrictions must not touch upon freedom of speech – Putin

RT

President Vladimir Putin (center) attending the Internet Entrepreneurship in Russia forum at the Silver City Business Center in Moscow, June 10, 2014.(RIA Novosti / Alexei Druzhinin)

Russian President has blasted any attempts to infringe basic Human Rights under the pretext of fighting against various negative phenomena on the World Wide Web as unacceptable.

The campaign against harmful tendencies in the internet, including pedophilia and propaganda of suicide cannot in any way justify restrictions aimed against civil freedoms and Human Rights, Vladimir Putin said at the Tuesday meeting with leaders of the Russian internet industry.

Putin added that all restrictions on the internet content must be introduced through the parliament and other public and political structures, through the joint effort of all citizens.

“We have had a lot of arguments over the bans, like those connected with pedophilia, propaganda of terrorism and illegal drugs, propaganda of suicide. But we are all grown up people. Do we really need to argue about this? Better to let us spare our children,” he told the participants of the Russian internet business forum.

The president also noted that the restrictions must not harm the interests of the free market.

At the same time, Putin said that there was no doubt that internet enterprises must be regulated by the law, just as any other aspect of social relations.

The Russian leader also suggested that the state could help the representatives of national internet companies to become truly independent and start expressing personal views. Putin said that those who are mentioning some special mission of internet companies must remember that such missions need pure sovereignty to become real.

“If all these companies [national search engines] have a single owner this is no longer a mission, this is a monopoly and monopoly is only good when it is your own,” Putin said and smiled. “In general it is a harmful thing.”

“Our mission is to help you – to help the national segment [of the Internet] and people who work in these prospective spheres to become independent. To help you express and formulate if not the viewpoint of the state and the society, but at least your own viewpoint in a way you feel necessary, because when it happens on the national basis, the state will eventually benefit,” Putin told the conference.

In late April this year, Vladimir Putin brought up the topic of relations between authorities, society and internet companies during the televised Q&A session with journalists and bloggers.

The head of the state admitted that “not everything was simple” in the situation, and promised that all decisions on the subject would be passed only after broad social discussion.

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Privacy Badger – New Tool to Stop Creepy Online Tracking

Help EFF Test Privacy Badger, Our New Tool to Stop Creepy Online Tracking

EFF is launching a new extension for Firefox and Chrome called Privacy Badger. Privacy Badger automatically detects and blocks spying ads around the Web, and the invisible trackers that feed information to them. You can try it out today:

Privacy Badger is EFF’s answer to intrusive and objectionable practices in the online advertising industry, and many advertisers’ outright refusal to meaningfully honor Do Not Track requests. This week, Mozilla published research showing that privacy is the single most important thing that users want from their web browsers. Privacy Badger is part of EFF’s growing campaign to deliver that privacy by giving you the technical means to disallow trackers within the pages you read on the Web.

This is an alpha release; we’ve been using it internally and don’t think it’s too buggy. But we’re looking for intrepid users to try it out and let us know before we encourage millions of people to install it. If you find bugs, you can file them on github against either the Firefox or Chrome repos as appropriate.

How does Privacy Badger work?

Privacy Badger is a browser-add on tool that analyzes sites to detect and disallow content that tracks you in an objectionable, non-consensual manner. When you visit websites, your copy of Privacy Badger keeps note of the “third-party” domains that embed images, scripts and advertising in the pages you visit.

If a third-party server appears to be tracking you without permission, by using uniquely identifying cookies to collect a record of the pages you visit across multiple sites, Privacy Badger will automatically disallow content from that third-party tracker. In some cases a third-party domain provides some important aspect of a page’s functionality, such as embedded maps, images, or fonts. In those cases, Privacy Badger will allow connections to the third party but will screen out its tracking cookies.

Advertisers and other third-party domains can unblock themselves in Privacy Badger by making a strong commitment to respect Do Not Track requests. By including this mechanism, Privacy Badger not only protects users who install it, but actually provides incentives for better privacy practices across the entire Web.

So users who install Privacy Badger not only get more privacy and a better browsing experience for themselves, but actually contribute to making the Web as a whole better for everyone.

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Heartbleed: Yes It’s Really That Bad

eff.org

Security researchers this week disclosed details about a major weakness in the basic architecture of the Web. Heartbleed exploits a critical flaw in OpenSSL, which is used to secure hundreds of thousands of websites including major sites like Instagram, Yahoo, and Google. This security exploit allows an attacker to obtain sensitive information like logins and passwords, as well as session cookies and possibly SSL keys that encrypt all traffic on a site. EFF has been tracking this issue closely, and we’ve put together guides for how systems administrators and website operators can take immediate action to secure their systems. We’ve also analyzed logs that seem to indicate intelligence agencies have exploited the vulnerability. We’ll have more on Heartbleed in the coming days; watch the EFF Twitter account for updates.

Why the Web Needs Perfect Forward Secrecy More Than Ever

EFF has long advocated for websites to support HTTPS instead of plain HTTP to encrypt and authenticate data transmitted on the Internet. However, we learned yesterday of a catastrophic bug, nicknamed “Heartbleed,” that has critically threatened the security of some HTTPS sites since 2011. By some estimates, Heartbleed affects 2 out of 3 web servers on the Internet. 1

Heartbleed isn’t a bug in the design of HTTPS itself but rather the result of a simple programming error in a widely-used piece of software called OpenSSL. It allows an attacker who connects to an HTTPS server running a vulnerable version of OpenSSL to access up to 64KB of private memory space. Doing the attack once can easily cause the server to leak cookies, emails, and passwords. Doing the attack repeatedly in a clever way can potentially leak entire encryption keys, such as the private SSL keys used to protect HTTPS traffic. If an attacker has access to a website’s private SSL key, they can run a fake version of the website and/or steal any information that users send, including passwords, private messages, and credit card numbers. Neither users nor website owners can detect this attack as it happens.

It’s worth emphasizing that some important services that users access everyday were affected by Heartbleed, including Yahoo Mail and LastPass. We weren’t immune either, since most EFF servers were running vulnerable versions of OpenSSL. Even the private identity keys used by Tor Hidden Services may have been compromised, potentially putting some journalist organizations’ communication with anonymous sources at risk.

Luckily, there’s one important mitigation that could actually protect some users from the worst-case scenario: perfect forward secrecy. If a server was configured to support forward secrecy, then a compromise of its private key can’t be used to decrypt past communications. In other words, if someone leaks or steals a copy of EFF’s private SSL key today, any traffic sent to EFF’s website in the past since EFF started supporting forward secrecy is still safe.

Unfortunately, most HTTPS websites still don’t support forward secrecy, which means that a large chunk of your past communications with those servers is vulnerable to decryption when private SSL keys are compromised. For example, if someone has been intercepting your HTTPS-encrypted messages to Yahoo for the past several years and then stole a copy of Yahoo’s private key yesterday with Heartbleed, they would be able to use it to go back and decrypt the previously-unintelligible recording of your old communications today — if those communications weren’t made using a forward-secrecy-enabled connection.

At this moment, forward secrecy is more crucial than ever. Now that the details of Heartbleed are public, anyone can use it against servers that haven’t yet patched the OpenSSL bug and changed SSL certificates.2 It can easily take weeks or months for developers to deploy new SSL certificates, and even so, certificate revocation systems are unreliable and poorly-suited to the modern web. In the meantime, any data you send now to affected servers that don’t support forward secrecy will be open to eavesdropping and malicious tampering as soon as their SSL private keys are exposed.

In the aftermath of yesterday’s events, it’s clear that forward secrecy is necessary to protect against unforseeable threats to SSL private keys. Whether that threat is an existing or future software bug, an insider who steals the key, a secret government demand to enable surveillance, or a new cryptographic breakthrough, the beauty of forward secrecy is that the privacy of today’s sessions doesn’t depend on keeping information secret tomorrow.3

Although we’ve patched this bug on EFF’s servers and are scrambling to rotate our keys as fast as possible, we’re relieved that our potential damage from Heartbleed is lower because we enabled forward secrecy last summer. It’s clearly time for other websites to do so as well.

PS: Fortunately, the integrity of HTTPS Everywhere downloads for Firefox and Chrome are not compromised by Heartbleed. That’s because, in addition to serving downloads over SSL/TLS, we sign HTTPS Everywhere updates with an offline key to guarantee authenticity even if transport-level security is broken. You can use these instructions to check that your copy of HTTPS Everywhere has the correct update key. In light of Heartbleed, we’re glad that the Chrome web store allows extension developers to include their own code signing keys in case Google’s SSL certificates are compromised; until the Mozilla Addons Store does similarly, we plan to keep hosting HTTPS Everywhere for Firefox on our own servers.

EFF,Org

Related:

• How the Heartbleed bug works, and what passwords you need to change

Internet security experts are scrambling to patch an alarming encryption vulnerability that has exposed millions of passwords and personal information, including credit-card numbers, email accounts and a wide range of online commerce.

How big of a deal is this?

Some reports suggest as many as two-thirds of the sites on the Internet are using OpenSSL, the encryption code that we now know is flawed and vulnerable to so-called Heartbleed attacks. Read more …

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Now I Know Who My Comrades Are

The Diplomat

Emily Parker
“Crackdowns on the Internet are often in direct response to the growing power of the Web. So increased control is actually a sign that authorities feel threatened by online dissent.”

The Diplomat’s Justin McDonnell speaks with Emily Parker, author of Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices From the Internet Underground, published on Feb. 18, 2014 by Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, about attempts at Internet censorship by authoritarian regimes at a time of rising online dissent.

China. Cuba. Russia. The Internet in these countries is among the most tightly controlled in the world.  Despite their distinct cultures and histories, did you in your investigation find any similarities in their use of and attitudes toward the Internet? 

These three countries recognize the economic benefits of the Internet, yet are wary of its threat to their control. China, Cuba and Russia all exercise control over the Internet, but in different ways. China has a sophisticated system that includes a great firewall and a large network of human censors. Cuba controls the Internet largely through denying access: Only a very small percentage of Cubans are online, in large part because Internet access is prohibitively expensive. Russia doesn’t censor the Internet in an extensive and systematic way, at least as compared to China. In recent years, however, we’ve heard more about Russia using legal methods to block Internet content, with the stated aim of protecting children or fighting extremism.

The growing Chinese middle class is sensitive to efforts to deprive them of information. Given the extremely sophisticated and pervasive online apparatus, how exactly has the party managed to maintain its sovereignty and what are both netizens and web-based activists doing about it?

The Chinese government can no longer maintain absolute control over the flow of information. Sometimes netizens will get around the censors by purposely misspelling words so that they are not picked up by automatic filters. Sometimes there is so much social media chatter about a particular topic that authorities seem to realize it would be more inflammatory to try to shut down a conversation. I’ve seen a sensitive word banned and then re-allowed after it became clear that netizens would find away to talk about it anyway. Despite pervasive online censorship, information still seeps through.

The Kremlin has also made recent attempts to assert control over its domestic media, shutting down RIA Novosti, a news agency known for having a balanced coverage and reflecting the views of the opposition. Why would a policy of greater openness and transparency be detrimental for a leader who enjoys great popularity at home and is wholly comfortable in power?

It’s not so clear that the leader is wholly comfortable in power. First, there are signs of a sagging economy, and that could lead to great unrest. Second, in late 2011, Russia was home to some of the largest protests since the fall of the Soviet Union. Those anti-Putin protests have largely died down, for now, but they were a powerful reminder that in Russia, there is real anger simmering beneath the surface. Those protests were unsettling to Russia’s leadership, largely because nobody predicted them.

An annual report published by Freedom House titled “Freedom in the World 2014” notes the expansion of criminalizing online dissent and systematic abuse of power to control the flow and access of information. The report paints a grim picture, revealing that there is in fact, a worldwide decline in democratic governance; many regimes (particularly in Eurasia) have remained hybrid or moved more toward an authoritarian direction. With the slow withering of democracy and the rise of a new authoritarianism, what’s at stake?

It’s important to remember that crackdowns on the Internet are often in direct response to the growing power of the Web. So increased control is actually a sign that authorities feel threatened by online dissent. It is a sign of weakness, not strength. Second, some authoritarian governments look stable and all-powerful, until suddenly they are gone. In Egypt and Tunisia, longstanding dictatorships disintegrated in what appeared to be the blink of an eye. In truth, the world just wasn’t watching carefully enough. This is not to say that revolution is always the best path. That’s why some activists in my book are fighting for evolution, not revolution. They are demanding greater citizen rights, not advocating an overthrow of the regime. These activists are helping to transform their countries whether a revolution takes place or not.

While I know you don’t attempt to predict revolutions in your book, do you think (authoritarian) governments and corporations who play by their rules will dominate the online sphere? Or will we?

Authoritarian regimes have already lost to a certain degree, in that they do not have the power they once enjoyed. In the Internet age, they can no longer maintain the same stranglehold over information and collective action. Sure, authoritarian governments will try their hardest to dominate the Internet, using firewalls, censors, surveillance, intimidation, arrests and the like. But this is not enough to completely rein in online dissent. Most important, authoritarian regimes derive much of their power from isolating critics from one another, both physically and psychologically. Now, critics of the regime go online and discover that they are not alone. Or as one Chinese blogger said to me, “Now I know who my comrades are.” That powerful realization is impossible to reverse.

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Tim Berners-Lee: we need to re-decentralise the web

Wired.co.uk

The world wide web is 25 years old

Twenty-five years on from the web’s inception, its creator has urged the public to re-engage with its original design: a decentralised internet that at its very core, remains open to all.

Speaking with Wired editor David Rowan at an event launching the magazine’s March issue, Tim Berners-Lee said that although part of this is about keeping an eye on for-profit internet monopolies such as search engines and social networks, the greatest danger is the emergence of a balkanised web.

“I want a web that’s open, works internationally, works as well as possible and is not nation-based,” Berners-Lee told the audience, which included  Martha Lane Fox,  Jake Davis (AKA Topiary) and  Lily Cole. He suggested one example to the contrary: “What I don’t want is a web where the  Brazilian government has every social network’s data stored on servers on Brazilian soil. That would make it so difficult to set one up.”

It’s the role of governments, startups and journalists to keep that conversation at the fore, he added, because the pace of change is not slowing — it’s going faster than ever before. For his part Berners-Lee drives the issue through his work at the Open Data Institute, World Wide Web Consortium and World Wide Web Foundation, but also as an MIT professor whose students are “building new architectures for the web where it’s decentralised”. On the issue of monopolies, Berners-Lee did say it’s concerning to be “reliant on big companies, and one big server”, something that stalls innovation, but that competition has historically resolved these issues and will continue to do so.

The kind of balkanised web he spoke about, as typified by Brazil’s home-soil servers argument orIran’s emerging intranet, is partially being driven by revelations of NSA and GCHQ mass surveillance. The distrust that it has brewed, from a political level right down to the threat of self-censorship among ordinary citizens, threatens an open web and is, said Berners-Lee,  a greater threat than censorship. Knowing the NSA  may be breaking commercial encryption services could result in the emergence of more networks like China’s Great Firewall, to “protect” citizens. This is why we need a bit of anti-establishment push back, alluded to by Berners-Lee.

He reiterated the need to  protect whistleblowers like Edward Snowden that leak information only in extreme circumstances “because they have this role in society”. But more than this, he noted the need for hackers.

“In 1989 I delivered a proposal to Cern for the system that went on to become the world wide web” pic.twitter.com/fR2nyPhhss

“It’s a really important culture, it’s important to have the geek community as a whole think about its responsibility and what it can do. We need various alternative voices pushing back on conventional government sometimes.”

In the midst of so much political and social disruption, the man who changed the course of communication, education, activism and so much more, and in so many ways, remains dedicated to fighting for a web founded in freedom and openness. But when asked what he would have done differently, the answer was easy. “I would have got rid of the slash slash after the colon. You don’t really need it. It just seemed like a good idea at the time.”

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Related read

• Two decades on, we must preserve the internet as a tool of democracy

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, speaks at a press conference on human rights at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, last month. Photograph: Martial Trezzini/EPA

Some 25 years after Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote his proposal, the challenge is to protect rights to privacy and freedom of opinion online…read further

 

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#STOPTHENSA – The Day We Fight Back February 11, 2014

DEAR USERS OF THE INTERNET,

In January 2012 we defeated the SOPA and PIPA censorship legislation with the largest Internet protest in history. Today we face another critical threat, one that again undermines the Internet and the notion that any of us live in a genuinely free society: mass surveillance.

In celebration of the win against SOPA and PIPA two years ago, and in memory of one of its leaders, Aaron Swartz, we are planning a day of protest against mass surveillance, to take place this February 11th.

Together we will push back against powers that seek to observe, collect, and analyze our every digital action. Together, we will make it clear that such behavior is not compatible with democratic governance. Together, if we persist, we will win this fight.

Take Part: This is your moment

The SOPA and PIPA protests were successful because we all took part, as a community. As Aaron Swartz put it, everybody “made themselves the hero of their own story.” We can set a date, but we need all of you, the users of the Internet, to make it a movement.

Join in and support >

Read this:

• How the NSA Almost Killed the Internet

 

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Networking – Outernet from space and its FREE?

By leveraging datacasting technology over a low-cost satellite constellation, Outernet is able to bypass censorship, ensure privacy, and offer a universally-accessible information service at no cost to global citizens. It’s the modern version of shortwave radio, or BitTorrent from space.

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. — Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

 

What Problem is Outernet Solving?

There are more WiFi devices in the world than people, yet only 60% of the global population has access to the wealth of knowledge found on the Internet. The price of smartphones and tablets is dropping year after year, but the price of data in many parts of the world continues to be unaffordable for the majority of global citizens. In some places, such as rural areas and remote regions, cell towers and Internet cables simply don’t exist. The primary objective of the Outernet is to bridge this global information divide.

Broadcasting data allows citizens to reduce their reliance on costly Internet data plans in places where monthly fees are too expensive for average citizens. Offering continuously updated web content also bypasses censorship of the Internet in countries that restrict access to independent media. Additionally, Outernet will offer a humanitarian notification system during emergencies and two-way Internet-access for a small set of users. The latter feature will be reserved for individuals and organizations that are unable to access conventional communication networks due to natural disasters or man-made restrictions to the free-flow of information.

Access to knowledge and information is a human right and Outernet will guarantee this right by taking a practical approach to information delivery. By directly transmitting digital content to WiFI, the most common type of radio in the world, a basic level of news, information, education, and entertainment will be available to all of humanity.

Although Outernet’s near-term goal is to provide the entire world with broadcast data, the long-term vision includes the addition of two-way Internet access for everyone. For free.

Visit Outernet

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Tor: Anonymity Online

Tor (previously TOR, an acronym for The Onion Router)^[5] is a free software for enabling online anonymity. Tor directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer network consisting of more than four thousand relays^[6] to conceal a user’s location or usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis. Using Tor makes it more difficult to trace Internet activity, including “visits to Web sites, online posts, instant messages, and other communication forms”, back to the user^[7] and is intended to protect the personal privacy of users, as well as their freedom and ability to conduct confidential business by keeping their internet activities from being monitored. – Wiki

What is Tor?

Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security. Learn more about Tor >

Why Anonymity Matters

Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location.

Surf the net safely in complete privacy with Tor, free from the evil eyes of the NSA and PTW.

Download Tor >

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The Dark Enlightenment: The Creepy Internet Movement You’d Better Take Seriously

They may believe in the Dark Side of the Force, but these Sith Lords aren’t joking around

Blossoming on the Internet like a fetid rose, a mysterious new political movement has generated a serious and not un-terrifying critique of modern society. Its members are loud and growing in number, and they demand nothing less than the elimination of the democratic system. Mostly white, male and angry, they lie in wait for the imminent collapse of civilization.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Dark Enlightenment. The Empire is striking back.

WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THE DARK ENLIGHTENMENT?

Matt Sigl will host a live Twitter chat Wednesday, December 4th at 1 p.m. EST to answer any questions readers have on the Dark Enlightenment movement. Join him at @Vocativ.

Much as Christianity grew out of the cult-sodden ferment of the Roman-occupied Middle East, the Dark Enlightenment has sprouted from the hyper-anxious anti-liberalism precincts in the darker recesses of the Internet.

So we’ve dug deep into the Web, where the movement lurks. We’ve talked online to its philosopher king, Nick Land, and we’ve conversed with his faceless adherents.

Here’s a quick FAQ sheet on the nascent movement:

What is the Dark Enlightenment? As the term suggests, the Dark Enlightenment is an ideological analysis of modern democracy that harshly rejects the vision of the 18th century European Enlightenment—a period punctuated by the development of empirical science, the rise of humanist values and the first outburst of revolutionary democratic reform. In contrast, the Dark Enlightenment advocates an autocratic and neo-monarchical society. Its belief system is unapologetically reactionary, almost feudal.

The many bloggers who constitute the movement style themselves as “Dark Lords of the Sith,” self-described fearless truth-tellers, who—mixing their cinematic metaphors—offer Matrix-evocative “red pills” of awakening in the form of sulfurous conclusions about the state of the world. Indeed, questioning the prevailing Western narrative is typically a Dark Enlightenment writer’s modus operandi, skewering the values of the liberal establishment.

Where does the term Dark Enlightenment come from? Inspired by the pugnacious writings of Mencius Moldbug, the prolific blogger who serves as the movement’s unofficial center of gravity, the neologism is the creation of philosopher Nick Land. In 2012, Land wrote an impressively thorough manifesto titled simply The Dark Enlightenment, which boldly articulates the movement’s central thesis: “For the hardcore neo-reactionaries, democracy is not merely doomed, it is doom itself. Fleeing it approaches an ultimate imperative.” The essay continues, ”[Neo-reaction] conceives the dynamics of democratization as fundamentally degenerative: systematically consolidating and exacerbating private vices, resentments, and deficiencies until they reach the level of collective criminality and comprehensive social corruption.” No, this isn’t your grandpa’s conservatism. (Unless your grandpa was General Franco.)

As for Mr. Moldbug? Yes, he does exist, and no, that is not his real name. (That would be Curtis Yarvin.) You can find plenty of photos and video that document his many conference appearances. Mostly, though, Moldbug—who lives in the San Francisco area and works in the software industry—blogs and blogs and blogs.

What do they believe? Post-red pill awakening, liberal progressivism is seen as a state religion, an unquestioned humanist ideology that determines all outcomes and silences dissenters through dismissal. It’s a worldview generated and sustained by the mechanisms of the system itself. Moldbug has given that system the ecclesiastical label of the Cathedral. Seeing the Cathedral for what it is marks the first step to becoming darkly enlightened.

What is the Cathedral? According to Land and Moldbug, the Cathedral is a complex ideology network built atop the university system, the media (run and operated by graduates of the former) and employees of the bureaucracy, all of whom grow ever more dependent on the perpetuation of the Cathedral. The leveling mechanisms of democracy—with its race-to-the-bottom vote begging (buying) and illusions of social empowerment—remove any possibility of inventive political solutions, or, eventually, rational analysis. Inside the Cathedral, any questioning of democracy’s legitimacy is sacrilege. Before long, apostates will find penance by buying indulgences (like, say, Obamacare), whether they like it or not.

Why pay attention to a niche movement of political extremists who pine for the good old days of European feudalism? Because these guys mean business. The Dark Enlightenment’s desire to raze the democratic edifice of modern civilization opens the movement to darker and more subversive views. Nowhere is this more evident than its focus on human biodiversity, or HBD in insider parlance.

What is HBD? Human biodiversity is the rejection of the “blank state” of human nature. Creepily obsessed with statistics that demonstrate IQ differences between the races, the darkly enlightened see social hierarchies as determined not by culture or opportunity but by the cold, hard destiny embedded in DNA. One blogger calls it “The Voldemort View” (adding Harry Potter to the Star Wars/Matrix mix), claiming that, “mean differences in group IQs are the most likely explanation for the academic achievement gap in racial and SES [socioeconomic status] groups.”

Cue the adherents of The Bell Curve, eugenics enthusiasts, believers in white supremacy and sympathizers of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. In the Dark Enlightenment, we seem to have stumbled across a place where pseudo-intellectually grounded racism is flourishing in a way it hasn’t since before World War II.

In our discussion, Land was explicit in his view on this: ”HBD, broadly conceived, is simply a fact. It is roughly as questionable, on intellectual grounds, as biological evolution or the heliocentric model of the solar system. No one who takes the trouble to educate themselves on the subject with even a minimum of intellectual integrity can doubt that.”

Unsurprisingly, the Dark Lords of the Sith despise modernity’s preoccupation with “equality,” viewing it as a triumph of democratic ideology over science.

Did I mention that almost all of the darkly enlightened are white men?

Is this fascism? Desire for genetically determined ruling classes, distrust of popular democratic reform, distaste for the aesthetic standards of mass culture, and nausea over the political correctness of modern life—the Dark Enlightenment does have all the markings of a true neo-fascist movement. It’s here that the dangers of the Dark Enlightenment are hard to dismiss.

I asked Land the fascism question, specifically. His response was illuminating: “The Dark Enlightenment is the only cultural space promising an intelligent discussion of fascism today. Even though this discussion remains very germinal, the best fascist and anti-fascist arguments are to be found within its environs.” But he adds, “Speaking entirely personally, I think the DE is the only coherent antidote to fascist thinking presently available.” While he didn’t articulate how an anti-democratic, racially charged, anti-modern, authoritarian political movement could be, in any way, anti-fascist, he’s a bright enough guy. I’m sure he has an answer.

What is their blind spot? My immersion into the hermetic truths of the Sith Lords left me wondering  what exactly they saw as so disastrous about modern society. The world is richer, healthier, less poor, less violent, and able to access more information than ever before. Even in the developed West, in America, the very Vatican of The Cathedral, poverty and economic turbulence cause less death and suffering than they did only decades ago. And Europe, despite its recent near-economic collapse and massive unemployment, looks more like a comfortable, retired continent than a truly suffering one. None of which is to deny or minimize the problems of modern society. It’s only to suggest that the solution may not be a return to monarchy and rigid racial castes. Anyone read much about how great things were in 14th century Europe?

Could the Dark Enlightenment become a major political movement? Probably not. To acquire momentum in the real world, the systems of modern democratic capitalism would have to suffer a blow far more damaging than any received so far. If it does, the members of the Dark Enlightenment believe they will be in position to take over.

For now, though, the Dark Enlightenment will remain an archipelago of diverse worldviews—Catholic fundamentalism, xenophobic ethno-Nationalism, techno-singulatarian futurism, neofascism—united mostly by their disavowal of modernity. And maybe a little alienation. White alpha-males aren’t what they used to be.

But if the movement is diffuse and barely organized, its members are smart and riled up. And it’s no coincidence that Dark Enlightenment advocates would be the ones to rule (again) should their philosophy become dominant.

What’s the verdict? In the end, the Dark Enlightenment should be taken seriously at least by anyone interested in contemporary political thought; its beliefs are reasonably argued and its leading writers can be an engrossing read. And it is becoming increasingly evident that major structural reform, maybe radical in nature, could be what America requires if it is to continue to flourish in the 21st century.

Still, something essential is always left out of the neoreactionary equation. Universal equality and classical democracy are not synonymous with an all-purpose, lowest-common-denominator leveling of mankind. Rather, they speak only to an existential fairness in which each of us has the right to value, direct and make meaning of our own lives.

May the Force be with you.

AUTHOR: Matt Sigl

CONTACT: msigl@vocativ.com

@MattSi

http://www.vocativ.com/12-2013/dark-enlightenment-creepy-internet-movement-youd-better-take-seriously/

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WILL USA LOSE CONTROL OF INTERNET?

bambooinnovator.com
The USA dominates the internet, through corporations such as Google.

The Internet is a collection of linked networks.

Now, people in countries such as Germany and Brazil are talking of having their local internet traffic avoid being routed through the USA.

In India, it has been reported that government employees are being advised not to use Gmail.

NSA surveillance may cause breakup of internet, warn experts / Will NSA revelations lead to the Balkanisation of the internet? -The Guardian

www.prisonplanet.com

The main problem is the USA’s National Security Agency.

“The NSA might be referred to as part of the ‘deep state’.”

http://www.ft.com/

Will Google and Facebook suffer?

“Beyond the diplomatic problems, the more immediate impact is likely to be on the US internet sector.

“Technology companies were already reeling from reports that the NSA had been trying to insert vulnerabilities into technological standards that would help it to spy.

“This week the Washington Post reported that the NSA had downloaded large packets of information that were being transferred between data centres owned by Google and Yahoo – in effect taking advantage of a weakness in their networks to overcome the companies’ efforts to protect their customers.

http://www.ft.com/

 

XKeyscore: NSA tool…

 

“Technology experts say that the cumulative effect of the revelations could be to undermine US stewardship of the internet and to encourage a more Balkanised network where big countries enforce their own rules – along the lines of the proposals put forward by Brazil which wants to force internet companies to retain data on Brazilian customers within the country.

 

“One of America’s most promising global exports could be crippled along the way.”

http://www.ft.com/

Some people think it unlikely that things will change.

“The only possible leverage countries like Brazil have with the US on this matter would be to disconnect their networks from us and connect through other countries.

 

“Doing this will certainly cost them enough money to trump their principles and they’ll just get spied on by the countries with whom they connect instead of the US.”

NSA spying will not change Internet governance | ZDNet

The Rebel

Related:

• The BRICS “Independent Internet” Cable. In Defiance of the “US-Centric Internet”

 

Mozilla’s Lightbeam for Firefox add-on lets users visualize how sites are tracking them and why

By Ben Woods

 

Mozilla, makers of the Firefox browser, has released an add-on called Lightbeam for Firefox which presents a visualization of your browsing history and analyzes which applications are tracking or monitoring you online and how they are connected.

The company had previously released an experimental add-on for Firefox called Collusion in a bid to better understand how first-party website tools shape a visitor’s experience and how their data is tracked.

Following on from its work with Collusion, this second phase of the project now aims to allow users to see exactly who is getting access to their data, and how, with a view to changing Web behaviour of individuals and businesses alike. Lofty, and worthwhile, ambitions.

With a new name and new features, Lightbeam will now show how third-party tools – whether that’s social sharing options, advertising, personalization features or anything else – as well as first-party ones, track and share data as you move around the Web.

To use it, simply install the plugin and it will start analyzing the websites you visit to provide you with a graphical representation of the tools being used on those sites. From there, you then have the option to share your data with the Lightbeam database in order to contribute to the wider picture of how different elements, some of which are likely to be a little opaque, of the Web are connected.

Mozilla says it’s still early days, though, and that it will continue to refine Lightbeam. All of the code for Lightbeam for Firefox is also available on Github for you to “hack, expand and improve”.

TNW

 

Obama to Congress: Time to Ignore ‘Activists,’ ‘Bloggers,’ and ‘Talking Heads…

“All of us need to stop focusing on the lobbyists, and the bloggers, and the talking heads on radio, and the professional activists who profit from conflict, and focus on what the majority of Americans sent us here to do,” – Obama

Related

• Technology and The Internet Killed the corporate governments

• Kerry Says Internet “Makes it Much Harder to Govern” and “Organize” People

• Ex-Malaysian Premier Dr Mahathir regrets Internet freedom
  

• Brzezinski admits alternative media stalling war with Syria
  

• Read the book – The Skyful Of Lies by Nik Gowing of BBC (PDF) >

 

The BRICS “Independent Internet” Cable. In Defiance of the “US-Centric Internet”

The President of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff announces publicly the creation of a world internet system INDEPENDENT from US and Britain ( the “US-centric internet”).

Not many understand that, while the immediate trigger for the decision (coupled with the cancellation of a summit with the US president) was the revelations on NSA spying, the reason why Rousseff can take such a historic step is that the alternative infrastructure: The BRICS cable from Vladivostock, Russia  to Shantou, China to Chennai, India  to Cape Town, South Africa  to Fortaleza, Brazil,  is being built and it’s, actually, in its final phase of implementation.

No amount of provocation and attempted “Springs” destabilizations and Color Revolution in the Middle East, Russia or Brazil can stop this process.  The huge submerged part of the BRICS plan is not yet known by the broader public.

Nonetheless it is very real and extremely effective. So real that international investors are now jumping with both feet on this unprecedented real economy opportunity. The change… has already happened.

Brazil plans to divorce itself from the U.S.-centric Internet over Washington’s widespread online spying, a move that many experts fear will be a potentially dangerous first step toward politically fracturing a global network built with minimal interference by governments.

President Dilma Rousseff has ordered a series of measures aimed at greater Brazilian online independence and security following revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted her communications, hacked into the state-owned Petrobras oil company’s network and spied on Brazilians who entrusted their personal data to U.S. tech companies such as Facebook and Google.

..

BRICS Cable!

http://www.bricscable.com/(see video)

BRICS Cable… a 34 000 km, 2 fibre pair, 12.8 Tbit/s capacity, fibre optic cable system

• For any global investor, there is no crisis – there is plenty of growth. It’s just not in the old world
• BRICS is ~45% of the world’s population and ~25% of the world’s GDP
• BRICS together create an economy the size of Italy every year… that’s the 8th largest economy in the world
• The BRICS presents profound opportunities in global geopolitics and commerce

 

• Links Russia, China, India, South Africa, Brazil – the BRICS economies – and the United States.
• Interconnect with regional and other continental cable systems in Asia, Africa and South America for improved global coverage
• Immediate access to 21 African countries and give those African countries access to the BRICS economies.
• Projected ready for service date is mid to second half of 2015.

See also

http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/world/brazil-plans-to-go-offline-from-uscentric-internet/article5137689.ece

Brazil plans to go offline from US-centric internet

http://www.excitingrio.com/brazil-looks-break-us-centric-internet/

Brazil Looks To Break From US-centric Internet

By Umberto Pascali

source: Global Research

..

 

Technology and The Internet Killed the corporate governments

Remember the song “Video Killed The Radio Star” by the Buggles in 1979? Well, we now have a song entitled “The Internet Killed the corporate government” by the One People, who else. I urgently request any songwriter to write one because I am certain that it will hit the World’s Top Charts.

Yes, my fellowmen the Internet is a bane for the cabal, banksters, and the powers that were (PTW).  Let’s hear at what they’ve been grumbling openly:

• Kerry Says Internet “Makes it Much Harder to Govern” and “Organize” People

In Brazil this week Secretary of State John Kerry paid respect to Henry Kissinger and made statements about how difficult the internet has made it for the ruling class to “govern” people

By JG Vibes
Intellihub.com
August 15, 2013

“Well, folks,” he said, “ever since the end of the Cold War, forces have been unleashed that were tamped down for centuries by dictators, and that was complicated further by this little thing called the internet and the ability of people everywhere to communicate instantaneously and to have more information coming at them in one day than most people can process in months or a year.

“It makes it much harder to govern, makes it much harder to organize people, much harder to find the common interest,”  – Secretary of State John Kerry

Read more >

• Ex-Malaysian Premier Dr Mahathir regrets Internet freedom
  

Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad admitted today he might have made a mistake in giving guarantees for Internet freedom, which has been blamed for empowering and enabling opposition parties to win more seats in the 13th general election.

The former prime minister said if he had the opportunity to do so again he would reconsider his decision to grant absolute freedom for the Internet when setting up the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) in 1996.

Read more >

• Brzezinski admits alternative media stalling war with Syria
  

The massive and growing evidence forced out by the alternative media , which points to a US backed chemical attack by Al Qaeda led rebel forces  to be blamed on Assad, has only accelerated the inevitable downfall of the corporate press that is now only trusted by 23 percent of the public .

Technology too play a big part in tearing down the controls of the PTW.

“Most profound is the transparency and mass power to bear witness created by the ubiquity of new, cheap digital technology.” – Nick Gowing

In a moment of major, unexpected crisis the institutions of power – whether political, governmental, military or corporate – face a new acute vulnerability of both their influence and effectiveness. This study analyses the new fragility and brittleness of those institutions, and the profound impact upon them from a fast proliferating and almost ubiquitous breed of ‘information doers’. Empowered by current, cheap lightweight, ‘go anywhere’ technologies available to all, they have an unprecedented mass ability to bear witness. The result is a matrix of real-time information flows that challenges the inadequacy of the structures of power to respond both with effective impact and in a timely way. –  Nik Gowing (BBC) – Executive Summary from ‘The Skyful Of Lies’ and Black Swans (University of Oxford – RISJ) 2009.

Read the book (PDF) >

The biggest mistake they made is their refusal to keep up with the digital world, due to sheer laziness, arrogance (and stupidity), and underestimating the power of IT and the new technology.

The trend of the new transparency is that it catches unaware and surprises with what it reveals. Many at the highest official levels confess frankly they find this new reality inconvenient. – Chapter 4 – New realities, old resitences: ‘the one dime store in an E-Bay world’

We keep hearing from the people on the streets that the Prime Ministers, Presidents and politicians are stupid. Well, well they really are. Their folly is our victory.  So I want to express my heartfelt gratitude to the founders of the Internet – Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, Tim Berners-Lee, and also to Marc Andreessen (Netscape), Brian Behlendorf (Apache Web Server), and many many others (yes, Bill Gates too) in the World Wide Web for without them there would not be this awesome thingy called the Internet. I wouldn’t be blogging my grouses either 😉 Thank you WordPress …you’re beautiful.

“When everyone can talk to everyone, there can be no secrets.” – KRYON –
The 2013 Old-Soul Toolkit

To the PTW….I love your arrogance.

THANK YOU beautiful people….Love always

Redza

What is Bitcoin?

A short video looking at ‘Bitcoin’, a decentralized digital currency.

What is a bitcoin? Like exactly? It’s digital currency and it’s been around for a while now so what’s all the fuss these days? It’s because more and more places are accepting bitcoins as real currency. If you’re still a little bit confused on where bitcoins come from (or how you can just invent digital currency), watch the video explainer above by Duncan Elms. Get to mining.

Related:

• Bitcoin is ludicrous…
• Bitcoin mining costs real world money

“Part 137, Ashtar Tells of The Changes Needed On The Ground Before Disclosure..with answers from Heather (trustee OPPT) & “D”

Ashtar’s Contrast and our responses

In response to another channelled message – this time Ashtar. Heather’s comments are in bold, I’ll add my blunt, straight to the point comments in purple….. and if AK or anyone else has something to add to this as well, I will edited it in in yet another colour.

With Absolute Gratitude, Love and Peace, I DO this one last “time” …We DO this one last “time”…because apparently some did not get the memo…”NOTICE: ALL that IS, BE embodiments of eternal essence absent limit…DO what you BE…NOW”… Rec. No. 2013032035, restated and incorporated by reference as if set forth in full PRE-PAID, PRE-AUTHORIZED, and PRE-APPROVED.

“Part 137, Ashtar Tells of The Changes Needed On The Ground Before Disclosure

by Kathryn E. May, PsyD on 04/01/13”

“It is I, Ashtar. I have breaking news, and I have chosen this channel because I know the good people will pass it on and assure great distribution to the many readers you serve.”

H: Why use a channel? Stand before us, with us, transparently…eternal essence embodied…so that we may experience the intent and integrity directly and use are tools of resonance to know if you BE and DO in Absolute Truth giving Absolute Data.

Me: if you have breaking news that’s that important that it needs to be passed on, then you need to tell us yourself- I’ve seen how the whisper game is played and I do not consent to second/third/forth hand news. We’re sick and tired of these “chosen one” games.

“First, I will inform you of the state of the Disclosure plans. Barack Obama is fully aware of the growing impatience on the part of Lightworkers, and also aware of the slanderous comments about his dear Michelle being the reason for the hold-up. This is absolutely not true. He has not been dragging his feet.”

H: This moment is about transparency…it is difficult by design of another to know what is Absolute Truth or not when it is done absent transparency to all and the opportunity to vet using our tools of resonance within…

me: If you were dealing with us directly and in complete transparency with no data missing, then we wouldn’t have all this gossip, would we?

“He has been following orders from the Council which oversees the Ascension process of Planet Earth, which we are all pledged to abide by.”

H: Which “Council” is that? Who purportedly “sits” on this “Council”? “What IS the purported “Ascension process”? Ascension from what to what? I AM eternal essence embodied absent limit since before this experiment began and I DO what I BE,…I DO NOT CONSENT TO LIMITS placed upon me, especially by those who choose not to present them self transparently before me.

me: 1) If there is a council then I wish to be on it to represent myself as I am a Free BEing and do not accept any representation or council member to speak on my behalf.
2) As I said in the RTS skype room this morning: there is no such thing as 3D, 5D, 9.5D, 3182D or any other “level” of “D”- this is a construct of hierarchy, an invention of those who would tell you what to do: “I’m 7D and you are only 5D, so therefore I am HIGHER than you!” ….. bollux! We are all Eternal Essence Embodied- no higher, no lower, all EQUAL.

“This process is difficult enough without having rumors flying around which insult the integrity of our Ascended Masters.”

H: Please clarify to me what IS your definition of “Ascended Master”. Do they require others to BE less than them to support their purported “Ascended Master” state? I BE transparent and DO with full responsibility and liability for all to rely upon, for all to experience, question, and dissect…the purported “Ascended Masters” have not provided me with the same opportunity and experience, and I DO desire, choose and request transparency NOW, especially when you or another claims that they are “oversee’ing” anything regarding my embodiment and what I BE.

me: I don’t have a “Master”- ascended, descended or any other type

“Next, let me update you on the progress. As you might have suspected, this is a multi-pronged effort, including not only the spectacular celebration of welcoming your Brother and Sisters. It is far more complex than that. It involved the complete overhaul of your financial, legal and social systems. That cannot be done without complete chaos unless the work has been done by our representatives on the ground to have the following things in place:”

H: Again….This moment is about transparency…it is difficult by design of another to know what is Absolute Truth or not when it is done absent transparency to all and the opportunity to vet, review, and dissect using our tools of resonance within…and, the closure of unlawful and illegal slavery systems, inclusive of financial, legal, and corporate WERE DONE ABSENT COMPLETE CHAOS, PEACEFULLY.

me: if it’s MY financial, legal and social systems that you are helping to “over haul” then I suggest that you get MY input on it. I didn’t vote for someone to represent me or my family. I represent ME, no one else, and as I AM Eternal Essence Embodied I no longer need “financial, legal and social systems”- the value is ME, MY SELF and I and everything else is irrelevant.

“An alternate financial system through which everyone can access funds to continue their lives in an orderly fashion, including being able to access food and basic necessities for the interim.”

H: Alternate “financial system”…Who is to operate it? Please identify and clarify with specificity and particularity the proposed mechanics, “operations”, “terms and conditions” and principals of this proposed “financial system”…I sense there are many and that they are complex…sooo unnecessary unless the purpose is to distract, hide or disguise the simplicity of what IS ABSOLUTE VALUE…BE’ing eternal essence embodied and the exchange mechanism, DO’ing what you BE…It is that simple.

H: “Funds”…please identify with specificity and particularity what the purported “funds” are, and clarify and produce the documentation of the history and origin of these proposed “funds” so that all may review, dissect and vet them and who purportedly “owns” them and how they came in their possession.

H: I DO NOT CONSENT TO ANY SLAVERY SYSTEM, INCLUSIVE OF FINANCIAL SYSTEMS that limit my BE’ing and DO’ing in any way, shape or form. Again…this is the moment for transparency, Absolute Data and Absolute Truth.

“Systems of distribution for food, medical care and other necessities outside the usual profiteering channels which have held poor countries and their people hostage.”

H: What is this proposed system of distribution? Who is to operate it? Is it privately “owned”? Please identify and clarify with specificity and particularity the proposed mechanics, “operations”, “terms and conditions”, and principals of this proposed “system of distribution”.

“Organizations which are capable of identifying, pursuing and prosecuting the Dark Ones who have created hardship for all of you over the eons.”

H: What are the identities of these organizations? Who are the principals of these organizations? If they are capable of “identifying, pursuing and prosecuting the alleged “Dark Ones” why haven’t they done so well before NOW? What purportedly makes them “capable” NOW? Interesting claim and “timing”….just when many are remembering through their tools of resonance within that they BE eternal essence embodied…that all that IS, BE eternal essence experiencing through all embodiments simultaneously.

me: So, by YOUR admission and through the system you seem to think that YOU are going to create, then….. if you had “organizations” that were capable of identifying, pursuing and prosecuting the alleged “Dark Ones””…. and did nothing about them and allowed them to “create hardship” for us, then therefore you are completely liable and to be held responsible for allowing their actions without intervening- according to Your OWN system.

“This is an especially important and difficult part of the procedure, since the present systems of courts and prisons are completely riddled with corruption and greed. We cannot permit the criminals who have misused their power so viciously to continue, or to disappear into the population to begin their destructive work again, as they have done in the past.”

H: Judgment? Again…. Interesting claim and “timing”….just when many are remembering through their tools of resonance within that they BE eternal essence embodied…that all that IS, BE eternal essence experiencing through all embodiments simultaneously. Why maintain the illusion of separation? Why maintain the illusion of division? Why maintain the illusion of “versus”? Who benefits from that? How can one purport on so many occasions that we are all one, that they are “Ascended Masters”, yet in the next breath support the existence of the contrast…..which is it? I DO NOT CONSENT to any limits on what I BE and DO or imposition of limits on any embodiment of eternal essence absent free will choice to BE limited made by an embodiment.

“New social organizations which can provide shelter for those who need it and emotional support during the massive changes. Many who have not been reading these messages as you have will be frightened and confused by the sudden Shift to the Light”

H: I BE eternal essence embodied absent limit…all I see, know and experience BE eternal essence embodied absent limit…what DO I have to fear? I DO NOT CONSENT TO FEAR IMPOSED UPON ME…thank you for holding the contrast…I get it…that’s a wrap!!! The play is over…I DO NOT CONSENT TO AN ENCORE…however, I bow in absolute gratitude, love and peace…I embrace you.

me: the only ones perpetuating fear at this point is the Cabal and YOU. What is YOUR agenda in creating this fear?

“Educational structures to help explain and teach The True Way, and to help usher in the New Golden Age by teaching the children the glorious ways of the New Era.”

H: What is the purported “True Way”? Who is to teach and explain to the children, the people? The purported “Ascended Masters”?

me: I will teach my children my self thank you- just like I do now.

This is made much easier by the internet – this wonderful resource which allows you to talk across the planet with no time lapse.

H: Who created the internet? Who purportedly “owns” the internet?

It will be used extensively to keep all of you ACCURATELY informed. Deceptive information and misinformation will no longer be permitted within this medium.

H: I am so glad no more “deceptive information and misinformation will no longer be permitted within this paradigm”…we already started…join in when you choose by your free will.

me: ditto what Heather said: We’re already there, but you’re welcome to join us when you wish.

“Media. Your television stations will be removed from the control of profit-oriented companies and returned to the people. You will no longer see violence, mind-twisting “entertainment” or bogus news reports from the Powers That Be who have used these outlets for the purpose of mind-control and massive theft of the planet’s resources.”

H: Many already see, sense, know, and have experienced the Absolute Truth, by their tools of resonance within, regarding contrived events, the intent, and energetic patterns responsible for creating them….in case you did not receive the most recent memo… “NOTICE: The role and label of “Powers that Were”, inclusive of “Powers that BE”, are reconciled/canceled/retired…with standing ovation, gratitude, love and peace…all BE eternal essence embodied absent limit…DAMN FINE PERFORMANCE…that is a wrap!!!.”

me: thanx, but I don’t need your TV shows- I have internal KNOWING and that is the best show on Earth…. actually, in the whole universe.

“Spiritual resources for people who have relied on the traditional Church settings for their sense of community, solace and connection with God. You will all be called upon to help replace the rigid doctrinaire practices of the present religions with the kind and loving teachings of The True Way.”

H: What is “The True Way” again?

me: *insert smiley smacking head against brick wall*…. wait! this will do:

“This will be an ongoing process. As you have seen, our dear St. Germain has been doing an admirable job as “the Pope,” gently modeling new behaviors and attitudes which will fairly quickly be shifted to teaching The True Way. Of course, we ask that you keep this information “under your hats.” For the time being it will just be thought of as an unfounded and impossible rumor, but we did want you to be in on the wonderful joke so that you can watch carefully and smile with us each time he presents a new and radical break with tradition, smiling sweetly as he dismantles thousands of years of enslavement of the poor and women.”

H: I don’t even know what to say to that…lol….better to let the Absolute Truth be made visible by the embodiments of eternal essence consciously DO’ing. More fun that way. The originals are on their way to DO…the squad has been looking forward to the fun of pulling the curtain back on this one, and that with DOD, Pentagon, and more, for some time. *wink wink*.

me: …… buhahahahahahahhaha!!!!!! oh stop! please stop! my stomach hurts from laughing so much….. ok wheeewwwww, I got my self under control again. my reply: Ummmmmmm You might wanna check with your internal/eternal Knowingometer- I think you’ll discover it needs new batteries. But feel free to bow and scrape to whomever you choose. I’ll just stand over here and giggle and point.

“Technological advancements, which we will be introducing quickly and efficiently to take the place of your current primitive sources of power. We do not wish for millions of people to freeze or swelter as we make the shift to efficient sources. We are making every effort to provide an orderly transition.”

H: Technological advancements…interesting…how is it an advancement to reveal what IS, what always has existed? Oh wait, you mean the synthetic copies that were made from the Absolute Tech that is already deposited within each embodiment of eternal essence? OK…bring it…NOW…let’s have some fun…we just require transparency of any and all terms and conditions that you may have so that we can make an informed choice of whether we play with you.

me: I already got one- it’s very nice- but feel free to share your toys with everyone else. I advise you to do it fairly, without rules, with full transparency. We love to play when everyone shares nicely.

“So you see, it is a massively complex undertaking. Every one of these elements are nearing the stage of completion – that is, they are organizing organically to the point where they will be in place and viable when they are needed.”

H: No. I don’t see a massively complex undertaking and DO’ing because it was not made transparent and visible to me for my review, dissection, and vetting using the tools of resonance within me…some may deem me “unworthy”, “unintelligent”, “incapable”, an “animal that calls themselves human”…but those are not limits I choose or consent to have put upon me…I BE eternal essence embodied…I can more than handle Absolute Truth and Absolute Transparency…I DO it and require it to BE DONE if you want to play with me.

me: it’s only complex because you’ve made it complex.

“Those of you who are asking what you path is – come forward to join one of these categories of transition work. Rather than ask when it will all be done, join in the work to make it happen. Set up groups so that you have contact and frequent communication with your neighbors and friends. Be a resource for information in your community by letting people know you are available to help out whenever needed. Your assignments will come thick and fast, and you will be instrumental in making the Ascension plans come to fruition.”

H: I DO what I BE…I have never resonated with any one telling me what to DO or how to BE…but thank you for holding the contrast with your hierarchies, federations, categories, and assignments…and for assisting me in reconfirming the essence I remember within me…eternal essence.

“Many of you have heard of the Transition Movement which was begun in the UK and has spread around the world. Contact these folks to become part of their network. They are already organizing to help one another for the Change. You can begin with http://www.TransitionUS.org, and go on from there to contact people in your area. They are good people who are already philosophically and emotionally aligned with the coming Shift.”

H: I am eternal essence’s network of embodiments…all are. DO I NEED ANYTHING ELSE? No…DO I CHOOSE ANYTHING LESS THAN ETERNAL ESSENCE? No. Thank you again for holding the contrast….it is done.

“I absolutely will not give you a fixed date for the Disclosure Moment. It will depend upon how many of you mobilize to take positive action. Follow the guidelines I have given you here. Reach out to offer yourself as a resource and you will find fulfilling work which will lift you spiritually, which is the goal of all this to begin with, isn’t it? Lifting yourself spiritually does not involve being given something from On High. It is an individual process of learning to breathe, think and feel in the Light. Concentrate on learning to be in complete command of your every thought, feeling and action so that you never do anything you will regret, and so that you are always acting as a Beacon of Light.”

H: Thank you to all for sending out this purported “Message from Ashtar”, it is a useful tool to remember and anchor who we BE and to DO what we BE. I BE eternal essence absent regrets and limits…I BE absolute love and gratitude.

me: bullshit. this is more of the typical “oh YOU have to bring yourself up to OUR level so that we can contact you” crap. This is just another attempt at harvesting energy and laying blaming and guilt. Next thing that comes after this is a message of “oh dear, you just didn’t raise up your frequencies high enough, you didn’t work hard enough, you didn’t tell enough people about us…. guess we’ll have to try again later when you’re better at this”….. Fuck off! WE ARE A BEACON OF LIGHT!!! Stop peddling your ridiculous drivel- you want to meet us, you want to come down and play on our lovely planet, then DO IT. Just like the Faction 3 Pleiadians are already doing, walking around Earth on various military bases- so don’t feed us this crap about how you’re too lofty to be able to hang around us “3D beings”!!! All these guilt trips are disgusting and they verge on outright LIES!

ABSOLUTE TRANSPARENCY RIGHT FREAKIN’ NOW. Belly up to the bar and tell the truth- not just to us but to your OWN people!!!

“You are all apostles, Dear Children, as we are. You are the bearers of the good news and the Light of the Central Sun, which you have known as the Godhead. It is you who will usher in the New Golden Age of Gaia. We will be there with you, celebrating and offering our gifts just as you offer yours. This is a joint project, as you have been told. Be yourself – our brilliant, radiant Self. Do not be afraid to speak out, to tell what you know, what you have read in these pages. Anyone who scoffs and refuses to believe you will learn soon enough that you are a leader of the New Age and will come to you for answers when the time comes. Announce yourselves. Declare your intention to be of service. Tell your Guides and Helpers. Tell Mother/Father God to place your name on the roster of Lightworkers who can be counted on to work for the Ascension cause. Then begin. You know what your talents and abilities are. You can look around you and see what others are in need of. Begin your Ascension now, by dedicating yourself to the fulfillment of the Great Dream of Gaia and her people.”

H: “Begin [my] Ascension”…lol…I DULY DECLARE THAT I BE eternal essence embodied absent limit and DO transparently BE of service to all embodiments of eternal essence and offer this to you absent border, dimension, condition, exception and judgement with absolute love, gratitude and peace…all that IS, BE eternal essence embodied absent limit…what DO you choose by your free will to DO in this NOW in service to all embodiments of eternal essence? Or DO you declare you choose to BE with limit and DO limits onto the other embodiments of eternal essence?

me: “Be yourself – your brilliant, radiant Self. Do not be afraid to speak out, to tell what you know,…” That’s what I’m doing. That’s what all of us ARE DO’ing….. and yet in the preceding paragraphs you are telling us we have to DO more- we have to change?
“Anyone who scoffs and refuses to believe you will learn soon enough that you are a leader of the New Age and will come to you for answers when the time comes.” EXACTLY. We don’t need to sign up for anything: We are BEing and DOing, exactly as we should. Exactly as our Eternal Hearts guides us to do.

“We are here with you, at the ready. We have developed a plan for the Disclosure process which is dramatic, flexible, and fast-moving. We are, literally, on our toes, in high anticipation of the Great Unfolding. What a glorious time it is to be here with you.”

H: I CHOOSE DO’ing absent limit…I CHOOSE TO IMAGINE absent limit and DO what I imagine. Meet me at the crossroad of NOW and we can transparently DO together if you choose to.

me: then get on with it.

“And now I leave you to get on with your Ascension work.”

H: I BE eternal essence embodied absent limit and continue to BE of service to all embodiments of eternal essence…and I DO BE of service to you as you choose in this NOW what you BE and DO what you BE. I love you whatever choice you make. With Absolute Gratitude, Love and Peace, Heather Ann Tucci-Jarraf, eternal essence embodied absent limit and DO’ing.

“I am Ashtar. Salut.”

“Via Kathryn May, April 1, 2013, 12 PM” http://www.whoneedslight.org/index.html?entry=part-137-ashtar-tells-of

My final note: My friends, I love you. I love you all. I thank you for the roles you have played in this grand experiment we’ve all been taking part in. But the curtains have now closed and there are no encores. It’s time to take off your costume, wipe off the stage make-up and join us for the after show party. Grab a beer, sit back and we’ll have a grand time talking and laughing and sharing our experiences. IT’s TIME. NOW.

Five Tools To Protect Your Privacy Online

Friday, February 15th, 2013.

 

by Simon Black

Sovereign Man

Reporting from the 6th Region, Central Chile

We’ve discussed many times before—hardly a month goes by without some major action against Internet users… from Obama’s ‘kill switch’, to ACTA, SOPA and PIPA, to stasi tactics against people like Kim Dotcom.

Online privacy is becoming more important by the day. And nobody is going to give it to you, you have to take steps yourself to secure it.

Below are five different tools and services that will get you started:

1. Tor Browser

Tor is a great weapon in the fight for online anonymity as it allows you to surf the web without giving up your location and other personal data to the websites you visit.

The Tor Browser Bundle is the easiest and most secure way to get started; simply download it, and start surfing the web with the Tor Browser. It’s available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Learn more about and download the Tor Browser Bundle here

2. Duck Duck Go

If you want privacy, don’t search with Google.

Google store all of your searches to customize ads for you, but even worse, they can hand over the whole list of searches to any government agency that are curious about what you’ve been looking at for the last couple years.

A better alternative is Duck Duck Go, a completely anonymous search engine that does not store any information about you or your searches. The search results are essentially identical to Google’s, so there’s no loss of quality.

Search with Duck Duck Go here

3. HTTPS Everywhere

HTTPS Everywhere is a plug-in for Firefox and Google Chrome that tries to force a website to connect in secure mode, thus encrypting your traffic with the website you are visiting. This makes your browsing more secure because it prevents eavesdropping thieves or state-mafia from intercepting your unencrypted Internet traffic.

Download HTTPS Everywhere here

4. Cryptocat

Cryptocat is an encrypted chat that beats Facebook and Skype when it comes to security and privacy. If you want to chat in private then this is one simple solution. It’s also open source, which means you can see the full code and be sure there are no government “backdoors” built in.

Read more about and download Cryptocat here

5. Silent Circle

Silent Circle is a new player on the market, but it is founded by “old” players in the security and encryption industry. One of the founders, Phil Zimmerman, is also the creator of PGP, one of the most-used encryption platforms in the world.

Silent Circle is a suite of products offering:

• Encrypted email
• Encrypted video chat
• Encrypted phone calls
• Encrypted text messaging

Silent Circle is the only service on this list that is not free. But having the gold standard of encryption may be worth it for you. It is for me.

Read more about Silent Circle here

Bottom Line

You can set up most of the tools we discussed in 5 minutes. Each of them will go a long way in securing your privacy online.

+++

From Zen – If you have other tips, ideas or recommendations please leave them in the comments section for all to share. Tx!

ZenGardner.com

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