Posts Tagged Censorship
Twitter Censors User for Opinion
Posted by TheRedPillGuide in Big Internet Giants, Control Grid, Internet, Privacy & Communications, News on August 3, 2012
via: TheIntelHub
August 2, 2012
While it’s obvious that most large corporations are fronts for the illumines global criminal activity, now Twitter has censored it’s user for opinion.
The Wall Street Journal reports;
The biggest brouhaha so far erupted on Monday and Tuesday, when a finger-pointing spat emerged over a journalist getting booted off Twitter after he was critical of NBC’s Olympics coverage.
The journalist was reinstated on the short-messaging service Tuesday—but not before the blogosphere lit up with criticism over whether Twitter was curtailing free speech. Twitter apologized for what it said were its missteps in the incident.
Beyond that, two athletes have been kicked out of the Games for posting controversial statements on Twitter. At least one other athlete had been reprimanded for using social media to name their sponsors, in apparent violation of Olympics rules—and athletes have used Twitter to strike back, criticizing the IOC rules.
British diver Tom Daley also warred on Twitter this week with a critic, who was later arrested on suspicion of malicious communication and revealed to be a British teenager.
Another push by the globalists to control the populace.
Cybersecurity “Compromise” Distracts From Destruction of Internet Freedoms
Posted by TheRedPillGuide in Internet, Privacy & Communications, News on July 25, 2012
via: OccupyCorporatism
by: Susanne Posel
July 24, 2012
Last week, “compromise legislation” was brought before the US Senate that will enable federal agencies to assess cyber threats while giving them “permission” to exchange information with corporations “under certain conditions” under the justification of better protecting corporations from cyber-attacks.
Although the threat has not manifested as of yet, President Obama stated that: “. . . foreign governments, criminal syndicates and lone individuals are probing our financial, energy and public safety systems every day. It would be the height of irresponsibility to leave a digital backdoor wide open to our cyber adversaries.”
Obama cited an infection where a Texas water plant had to disconnect their control from the internet in order to save themselves from hackers. Backing up Obama is a report from The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that states they have received 198 “reports” of suspected cyber incidents.
The development of a multi-agency Cybersecurity Council is recommended to mitigate risks to corporations.
Under presidential declaration, the “cyber threat is one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation” and “America’s economic prosperity in the 21st century will depend on cybersecurity.”
In an executive inspired report entitled the Cyberspace Policy Review , Obama has created the Cybersecurity office that works within the National Security Staff oversees the control over broadband networks that collaborate with all forms of infrastructure; including classified military intelligence, the internet, local schools and hospitals and domestic businesses.
By seizing control over our digital communications, under the guise of protecting America against cyber threats, information must be shared between “network operators and defenders, law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and emergency management officials in the Federal, State, local, and tribal governments, private industry, and allied governments.”
Support the Declaration of Internet Freedom
Posted by TheRedPillGuide in Control Grid, News on July 7, 2012
via: NaturalNews
Saturday, July 07, 2012
by: J. D. Heyes
(NaturalNews) An alliance of groups who advocate for freedom and privacy have joined to push U.S. lawmakers into acknowledging so-called digital rights of all Americans by signing a new Declaration of Internet Freedom.
The declaration, which has been supported by groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, features five simple principles (not 2,700 for keeping a free and open Internet. They are:
Expression: Don’t censor the Internet.
Access: Promote universal access to fast and affordable networks.
Openness: Keep the Internet an open network where everyone is free to connect, communicate, write, read, watch, speak, listen, learn, create and innovate.
Innovation: Protect the freedom to innovate and create without permission. Don’t block new technologies, and don’t punish innovators for their users’ actions.
Privacy: Protect privacy and defend everyone’s ability to control how their data and devices are used.
The EFF, in a statement, said support for the effort was a vital part of its strategy, and the strategy of others, to keep lawmakers in the U.S. and around the world out of the business of regulating the Internet.
An election issue
“For too long in the U.S., Congress has attempted to legislate the Internet in favor of big corporations and heavy-handed law enforcement at the expense of its users’ basic Constitutional rights,” the statement said. “Netizens’ strong desire to keep the Internet open and free has been brushed aside as naive and inconsequential, in favor of lobbyists and special interest groups. Well, no longer.
The statement referenced an earlier effort by concerned groups and citizens to halt an onerous piece of Internet regulation known as the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. As is usually the case, the bill seemed reasonable: help protect electronic copyrights. But in reality, what it would have done was allow broad censorship across the wide, wide Web, and led to a dampening of innovation while threatening Internet security. At one point, its passage was considered a foregone conclusion by the industry, but a grassroots uprising stopped the bill cold.
“Why were Internet users so empowered for the first time? For one reason, Internet freedom now affects virtually all of the American public – young and old – given the web’s importance to everyone’s daily life,” the EFF said, noting that the uproar was bipartisan – groups and elected officials on both sides of the political aisle banded together to stop SOPA.
The group, as well as others who have signed on, believe that now, Internet freedom has become “an election issue, and candidates for elected office must treat it as such.”
Though freedom lovers got a victory in the SOPA – and subsequent – legislative failures, the assault on controlling the World Wide Web continues. And, in fact, most observers think it has actually accelerated.
More attempts to regulate coming
In fact, the bills are actually being recycled into newer versions of the same thing – and shelved, for the time being, until backers feel the political climate is right to reintroduce them.
Former U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd, who became head of the Motion Picture Association after he left office, told the Washington Reporter in April he was “confident” about conversations between Hollywood and Silicon Valley to revive SOPA.
“Between now and sometime next year [after the presidential election], the two industries need to come to an understanding,” he said, mysteriously.
When asked if that meant negotiations were proceeding apace, Dodd said, ” I’m confident that’s the case, but I’m not going to go into more detail because obviously if I do, it becomes counterproductive.”
Moreover, federal agencies – including the FBI – want current laws changed or expanded in order to allow more monitoring and wiretapping of the Web.
All of which proves the point that defense of freedom requires eternal vigilance.
Sources:
Your Privacy Is Yours
Posted by TheRedPillGuide in Big Brother, Control Grid, News on June 28, 2012
via: SGTReport
Source: Whiskey and Gunpowder
by: Wendy McElroy
June 27, 2012
“I Lived. I Died. Now Mind Your Own Business.” That’s how I want my tombstone to read.
What do I have to hide? Everything! Which is to say, every piece of personal information someone or something demands to know is something I don’t want to tell because no one has the right to demand access to my life.
The right to privacy rests largely on a presumption of innocence. It assumes that — in the absence of evidence of wrongdoing — an individual has a right to shut his front door and tell other people (including government) to mind their own business.
Today, this assumption has been twisted inside out so that a desire for privacy means you have something to hide. You are expected to prove your innocence by revealing every financial transaction, by filling in pages of government paperwork, by allowing state agents to frisk your person and property when you board a plane or enter a public building. These invasions rest upon the presumption of guilt.
Privacy is also is the single most effective means of preserving freedom against an encroaching state. The act of closing your front door expresses the key distinction between the private and public spheres.
The private sphere consists of the areas of life over which you, as a peaceful human being, exert absolute authority and into which the government or any other uninvited party cannot properly intrude. Traditionally, the home or family is viewed as the private sphere. But it also includes the food you eat, your sex life, the books you read, your opinions of life.
Google reports ‘alarming’ rise in government censorship requests
Posted by TheRedPillGuide in Big Brother, Control Grid, News on June 23, 2012
via: NaturalNews
Saturday, June 23, 2012
By: J. D. Heyes
[NaturalNews] In what may be the most ironic thing to happen all year, tech giant Google – a serial privacy violator – says the company is experiencing what it describes as an “alarming” increase in the number of censorship requests being received by Western (in particular, the U.S.) governments. Seems the Leviathan – also known to regularly violate privacy rights (see increased use of drones and other surveillance devices) – doesn’t like to be held to account, either.
Besides wanting to censor Internet search results, governments are also looking to tamp down YouTube videos, Google said in a recent “transparency report.”
“It’s alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect — Western democracies not typically associated with censorship,” Dorothy Chou, a senior policy analyst at Google, wrote in a blog post, as reported by CNN.com.
“For example, in the second half of last year, Spanish regulators asked us to remove 270 search results that linked to blogs and articles in newspapers referencing individuals and public figures, including mayors and public prosecutors,” she wrote. “In Poland, we received a request from a public institution to remove links to a site that criticized it. We didn’t comply with either of these requests.”
A 718 percent increase
A staggering number of requests came from none other than U.S. government agencies. Google reports that, in the final half of 2011, U.S. agencies made requests to have 6,192 content pieces removed from search results, blog posts or archives of online videos, the report noted.
That was a whopping 718 percent increase from the 757 items requested removed by U.S. agencies in the first six months of last year.
In addition, Google said it received 187 requests from law enforcement agencies and courts to remove content between the months of July and December, a 103-percent increase from 92 requests received in the first half of the year, the report said.
Moreover, many of the requests were trivial and aimed more at trying to protect the integrity of the department – not for some noble reason like, say, removing content that is simply untrue (and even that would be make the removal a first amendment free-speech issue).
In one example cited in the report, an American law enforcement agency wanted Google to remove a blog that merely “allegedly defamed a law enforcement official in a personal capacity.”
Google says it denied that request.
In a separate incident, another police agency asked the tech giant to remove 1,400 YouTube videos (a company which Google owns) because of “alleged” harassment. In still another case – this one in Canada – the government’s passport office wanted Google to delete a YouTube video “of a Canadian citizen urinating on his passport and flushing it down the toilet,” the report said.
High compliance rate
Google said it did not comply with either of those requests either, but astonishingly, the company did comply with a large plurality of requests from the U.S. – 42 percent of them – in the last half of 2011.
But even that large percentage is better than in previous years. The company says in the second half of 2010, it complied with an alarming 87 percent of U.S. requests to remove content.
In its report, Google said that “[s]ome content removals are requested due to allegations of defamation, while others are due to allegations that the content violates local laws prohibiting hate speech or pornography. Laws surrounding these issues vary by country, and the requests reflect the legal context of a given jurisdiction.”
It appears, however, that many of the requests the company is receiving have nothing to do with legitimate issues.
