STEALING
CYBERSPACE
PART 1 of 2
By
Jon Christian Ryter
April 28, 2011
NewsWithViews.com
Emboldened by what the media purported to be a "people's revolution" that toppled the regime of Tunisian strongman Ben Ali over, the media reported, rising unemployment and Ben Ali's corruption, the "freedom movement" instigated by the Muslim Brotherhood leapfrogged Libya and brought its Islamic brand of political unrest to Egypt. Egyptian strongman and President Hosni Mubarak was ready. Among the first things he did, at 10:12 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 27, 2011 was to tell his minions to instruct Telecom Egypt to shutdown both the Internet and cell phone service. At about 12:20 a.m. on Friday, Telecom Egypt went offline.
Fourteen minutes later, the other four Internet and cell phone providers went dark. While this was the first national attempt to close all of the onramps to the Information Superhighway over a long period of time, it was actually the third attempt by a government to exercise what every government in the world possesses—a kill switch to shut off the Internet and interrupt its journey through cyberspace. The protesters in Egypt—both domestic and foreign—used the Internet to share information among one another and organize demonstrations. Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter were the primary communications vehicles to organize against the government.
The first country to test its kill switch was China. On June 3, 2009, one day before the 20th Anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in Beijing, the Chinese government shut down the ability of their citizens to access the Internet. In addition, during the downtime, international sites like Blogger, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress and Hotmail were placed behind the Great Firewall of China.
The second country to test its kill switch was Australia on Sept. 2, 2009. But, before that, on March 18, 2009, Wikileaks published a list of 2,300 Aussie websites which the Australian Labor Party put on its political "hit list." The social progressive globalists in the land down under do not like conservatives and view them as a threat to their agenda.
They were already making plans to shut down a couple thousand problematic websites, which would be camouflaged by an assortment of porn and network marketing sites also targeted for extinction. Several of the targeted conservative sites were anti-abortion websites. Most of the other targeted sites were purely political. Several dealt with exposing government attempts to stifle speech through filtration devises that censor content over the world wide web. As the government answered the Wikileaks accusations, they admitted they had blocked some political content but insisted they did so only because they originated in other countries and were "piped into Australia" to inflame the citizens.
Exercising the kill switch in Aussieland was easier than it was in Egypt only because all of Australia's Internet service providers get their cyberspace access through State-owned Telstra. On Sept. 3, 2009 the Sydney Morning Herald reported that for one hour, from 7:50 to 8:50 a.m., Telstra's international Internet network went down. A Telstra executive, Craig Middleton, told Skye News that customers could not access any international or Australian websites. Since roughly 95% of all Internet users used Telstra, almost every home and business in the nation and every cell phone user in the country was affected. What Australia was checking was whether or not they could shut down the Internet to private consumers but keep it open for use by the government—and a select group of industrials and businessmen. They found they could.
Middleton's explanation would have the Australian people—and those following the story worldwide—believe that the shutdown was a fluke caused by Aussie websites on ISPs tied to Telstra using links tied to websites in the United States, Canada, England or elsewhere in the world, suggesting that the international connections caused some sort of cyber-meltdown. It would have been easier for Middleton to tell the truth and admit that the government was testing its kill switch. Of course, an honest answer to the question would have ended Labor Party Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's career. But then, it still did. While the Labor Party held the government in the June, 2010 election, Rudd was replaced by current Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard. After the Rudd government shut down the Internet, Rudd's popularity dropped to 21%.
It amazes me how the voting public continues to elect to office social progressives throughout the world when the core objective of communists (which they are) is to subjugate the people under their political control, under the pretext of taking the wealth of the rich and giving it to the poor. (In reality, the wealth the social progressive steals is the sweat equity wealth of the middle class which controls the majority of the votes in any democratic society. By reducing the middle class to the underclass, the classless society then becomes the chattel of the social progressive elites who become the masters of the universe.) Controlling free speech is a necessary step in achieving that objective.
In April, 2009, Sen. Jay Rockefeller [D-WV] introduced the first kill switch piece of legislation—The Cybersecurity Act of 2009—in the US Senate. Details about the legislation were posted on this website on Aug. 23, 2009. Rockefeller's bill scared the members of both the House and Senate that it went nowhere—even though the far left had a death grip on both Houses of Congress. But, in this instance, every Democrat in both Houses knew if they voted for the bill, their political careers would be over. It could not get out of committee.
On June 10, 2010, Senators Joe Lieberman [I-CT], Susan Collins [R-ME] and Tom Carper [D-DE] (all Northeast US liberals) introduced the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act. Seven days later the Huffington Post revealed that Lieberman's bill, like Rockefeller's before it, contained a provision that gave Barack Obama the right to use the kill switch and shut down the Internet if he felt there was a cybercrisis severe enough to merit it. The bill, according to the Huffington Post, would require that private ISPs, search engines and even software companies, immediately comply with any emergency measure mandated by the Department of Homeland Security or face fines, sanctions or loss of license.
In Obama's case, the Election of 2010 was a severe enough crisis since the Tea Party, which received no mainstream media coverage, effectively used the Internet to upset scores of races, took over the House of Representatives and put themselves back in the ball game in the Senate. Barack Obama cannot afford conservatives to have this type of unbridled access to the Internet in 2012 since it will allow the right to mobilize against the Soros-tactics of the far left.
Add to that a new bill introduced in the House of Representatives on March 15, 2011 by Congressman Jim Langevin [D-RI] that would give the Dept. of Homeland Security authority to decide which—and when—private ISPs can be regulated as "critical infrastructure." His bill, HR 1136, the Executive Cyberspace Coordination Act (which will amend Chapter 35 of Title 44 [remember this reference—it will be very important in a couple of minutes] to create a National Office for Cyberspace that will fill in some of the bureaucratic holes deliberately left in Lieberman's 221 page Cybersecurity and Internet Freedom Act of 2011 that replaces last year's Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act. Co-sponsoring the legislation were Robert Andrews [D-NJ], Roscoe Bartlett [R-MS], Norman Dicks [D-WA]. Dutch Ruppesberger [D-MD], and Loretta Sanchez [D-CA]. (Note: it is very important for the American people to understand that none of the nations who created laws to allow their governments to shut down the Internet enacted those laws to protect their nations from cyberterrorists. Even though every government in the world mistrusts its allies as much as its enemies, and fears a catastrophic cyberattack, they fear their citizens far more.)
Lieberman's Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010 did not fare any better than Rockefeller's Cybersecurity Act of 2009. Laws that abrogate the constitutional rights of US citizens don't sit well with the voters. That's why the framers of negative bills bury those negatives in previously enacted laws, or by creating other new bills which serve as parking lots for the negative clauses they do not want to appear in bills they know will be closely scrutinized and which, by themselves, don't make much sense to those who stumble across them.
Last fall, when Obama realized that Lieberman's bill was not going anywhere, he decided to enact the legislation by Executive Order, and instructed the Federal Communications Commission [FCC] to assume regulatory control of the Internet and implement Lieberman's still-buried-in-committee bill. Gary Kreep, Executive Director of United States Justice Foundation uncovered the scheme in December, 2010, shortly before the FCC was scheduled to vote on the matter. Even though, in a 3-to-2 vote, the FCC ruled they had the authority to regulate the Internet, the 112th Congress had a different view. Kreep used the Internet to warn Americans what the FCC takeover of the Internet meant, and that there was a kill switch in the new regulations that would allow Obama to shut down the Internet in the event of any number of self-described cybercrises.
Kreep's advocacy in December triggered a scramble on the part of the far left to create a new bill that would disarm the American people enough to propel the legislation to Obama's desk for his signature. For that reason, the newest attempt to fool the people is called the Cybersecurity and Internet Freedom Act of 2011.
The preamble of the bill is deliberately designed to deceive the American people into believing that "...the Government must not encroach on rights guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States...." by making it fuzzily clear, in line 10 of the preamble, that "...neither the President, the Director of the National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications, nor any other officer or employee of the Federal Government should have the authority to shut down the Internet" (Note: subsection 10 of the bill's preamble [lines 18 to 22] does not specifically deny anyone the right to shut down the Internet, it merely suggests they shouldn't—not that they can't.
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Left open is a collective consensus—a "consortium decision" rather than an individual decision to shut down the Internet for the good of the nation. Lines 18 to 22 would have us believe that one person alone might attempt to abrogate our rights, but that a consortium of bureaucrats working for that same wanabee dictator would somehow not allow the despot to shut down the Internet unless it was absolutely and unequivocally necessary to protect the security of the United States.) For part two click below.
Click here for part -----> 2,
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