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Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Why is Net Neutrality advocate Free Press MIA?

Free Press has been working hard to position itself as the champions of Net Neutrality and Internet freedom. Even before Google and Verizon announced the terms of their legislative proposal, Free Press agents were all over the liberal media lamenting the "End of the Internet as we know it" and condemning Google for turning to the dark side.

Free Press

They were here at the Daily Kos, the Hunfington Post, Democratic Now, really all over the place. According to them, they convinced more than 300,000 people to sign the "Google: Don't Be Evil" petition and express support for a FCC takeover of the Internet.

Yesterday, my dairy, Obama's Internet Coup d'état, was about President Obama's proposed Internet regime. You would think that a group with a website named SaveTheInternet.com and a staff of 37 people would be all over this story, but so far they have been silent.

Monday, I talked to Jenn Ettinger of Free Press. I called her because she had just written a piece last Thursday on their website Activists Tell FCC: 'Don’t Waffle on Net Neutrality!' about a SaveTheInternet.com breakfast they served to the FCC Commissioners. At that time she said she hadn't heard of the Obama proposals on Internet wiretapping and would have to talk to their policy people to determine their position.

Today I see she has a new piece on their website, Free Press Asks FCC to Crack Down on Fake News, but nothing on these latest Obama proposals. It would seem that Free Press is all about condemning Google and begging the FCC to do stuff. So, Yes, I mean this to be a very public calling out of Free Press.

WHAT IS THE FREE PRESS POSITION ON OBAMA'S DEMANDS FOR THE ABILITY MONITOR ALL INTERNET TRAFFIC? YOU HAVE RECENTLY MADE A BIG SHOW OUT OF NET NEUTRALITY. YOUR SILENCE ON THIS IS NOT AN OPTION.

After all, even if Free Press is only interested in Net Neutrality and is only opposed to tiered web pricing, and doesn't care about government spying and privacy, they still should be speaking out against this proposal. The gov't is asking that all Internet traffic be copied to them. They expect protected communications to be unencrypted for them. This will already more than double the Internet workload and this will slow down service for everyone. They expect to see my email before I do! If that isn't a violation of Net Neutrality, I don't know what is?

If Free Press is opposed to tiered web pricing, of the type they falsely accused Google and Verizon of making a deal on, where a company like Google can pay for preferential treatment for it's data, they must doubly be opposed to a tiered web where the gov't gets preferential treatment for our data, and we pay extra for it!

How can a group that calls itself Free Press remain silent in the face of such an extreme attack on the Internet as we now enjoy it?

At least one good thing did come out of the Google, Don't Be Evil campaign:



FCC Net Neutrality's Trojan Horse

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Obama's Internet Coup d'état

The NY Times broke an important story Monday morning. Under the title U.S. Tries to Make It Easier to Wiretap the Internet, it said:
WASHINGTON — Federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is “going dark” as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone.

Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.

The bill, which the Obama administration plans to submit to lawmakers next year, raises fresh questions...
It certainly does. It raises a lot of questions. Salon was more blunt in their summation:

In other words, the U.S. Government is taking exactly the position of the UAE and the Saudis: no communications are permitted to be beyond the surveillance reach of U.S. authorities.
The more technical CNET News reported it this way:

The Obama administration will seek a new federal law forcing Internet e-mail, instant-messaging, and other communication providers offering encryption to build in backdoors for law enforcement surveillance, The New York Times reported today.

Communication providers, apparently including companies that offer voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services, would be compelled to reconfigure their systems so that police could be guaranteed access to descrambled information.

It could become illegal for a company to offer completely secure encrypted communications--through a protocol such as ZRTP, for instance--if its customers held the keys and the provider did not.
Well, I've got news for Obama's Internet Police, as long as we have network neutrality and I can control the computers on both ends of a connection, I can use widely available Open Source tools like IPSec to be as secure as I want to be, and only I will have the key. I have been doing this for years between my notebook and my home network because I know that the wireless WEP/WPA encryption provided by the 802.11 devices is trivial. I can also send email that my ISP can't read. Now Obama proposes to make what I have been doing for a decade illegal. In short, Obama's Internet plans can't work without criminalizing privacy guards that have been available to Internet users for decades and making those who refuse to go along with it criminals.

In a number of my Susan Landau, a Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study fellow and former Sun Microsystems engineer, points out, the same math holds true for our technical talent pool: “Every engineer who is developing the wiretap system is an engineer who is not building in greater security, more features, or getting the product out faster,”

Again, from the NY Times article:
James X. Dempsey, vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an Internet policy group, said the proposal had “huge implications” and challenged “fundamental elements of the Internet revolution” — including its decentralized design.

“They are really asking for the authority to redesign services that take advantage of the unique, and now pervasive, architecture of the Internet,” he said. “They basically want to turn back the clock and make Internet services function the way that the telephone system used to function.”
That last comment is a particularly telling one given that certain so-called advocates of Net Neutrality such as Free Press have been loudly banging the drums to have the FCC protect Net Neutrality by re-classifying the Internet under the Communications Act of 1934. How convenient for them!

Again just last Thursday, Free Press staged an event at the FCC's meeting to demand that they takeover the Internet:
“We’ve tried all the traditional methods, including petitions, comments and phone calls, to tell the FCC to protect Net Neutrality, so this time we decided to resort to tastier tactics,” said Craig Aaron, managing director of Free Press. “The public can’t afford to wait much longer for the FCC to stop waffling and move forward on enacting real Net Neutrality rules to ensure that the Internet remains open for everyone.”

Open indeed! I have already made my detailed critique of the Free Press position that:
The FCC Should Classify Broadband Internet Connectivity as a Telecommunications Service Under the Communications Act and Pair that Determination with Tailored Forbearance.
I would only add that now we know what "Tailored Forbearance" will mean. When I talked to Jenn Ettinger of Free Press on Monday, they didn't yet have a position on these new attacks on Internet freedom. Let's hope they have one soon.

I would also ask the reader to re-examine the attacks on Google launched by Free Press because of the Google/Verizon proposal on network neutrality in light of Obama's plans for the Internet. I have said example, when the Bush Administration demanded people's search data from AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo and Google in 2006, only Google refused to comply and brought the whole matter to light of day. If I was a conspiracy theorist, I might even suspect that the campaign against Google was something of a preempted strike by the principal enemies of Internet freedom.

On Friday, Derek Turner of Free Press argued before the FCC:
The FCC chairman himself, based on his own statements, knows exactly what these meaningful rules should look like, but so far he hasn’t taken actions needed to achieve his own and President Obama’s vision of Net Neutrality. So it’s time for this FCC chairman to stop dithering. And that means him taking the action to restore his agency’s own authority to protect Internet users, and then enacting strong and enforceable Net Neutrality rules to protect all consumers online.

First off, let us be clear. This whole debate around Net Neutrality and the FCC is about giving the Federal gov't powers it doesn't now have and have never had on the Internet. It is disingenuous for Derek Tuner to talk about "restoring" the FCC's authority, unless he is talking about restoring the type of control exercised by the government when telephone was king. Are these people fools or tools?

The infrastructure changes that are being demanded are hugely expensive, both in terms of initial capital outlay, and especially ongoing costs. The Internet works as well as it does because every node forwards a data packet that comes to it to the next node on it's journey to it's destination without fear or favor. That is the essence of network neutrality. They don't have to be tracked so there is little in the way of accounting costs. All that will change if Obama has his way.

Michael A. Sussmann, a former Justice Department lawyer who advises communications providers warns “Implementation would be a huge technology and security headache, and the investigative burden and costs will shift to providers.” Which means that those huge costs will ultimately be shifted to the Internet user with the government's blessing. When your government spies on you, you have to pay for it too.

The need for this gross and expensive intrusion into our Internet privacy is of course justified in the name of national security. The story is that they need these powers to investigate terrorists. Just how broadly they are coming to define the "terrorist threat" is shown by Friday's unprecedented FBI raids against anti-war activists in Chicago and Minneapolis. Most played a leading role in the 2008 GOP convention protests. Now they are being investigated, after having their computers and cell phones taken, for "providing material support to terrorism."

These new 'national security' requirements that the Internet is to be saddled with coincide nicely with something else that is going on. On Slashdot last Monday, Gov TechGuy writes:
Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee unveiled new legislation to combat online piracy on Monday that gives the Department of Justice more power to shut down websites trafficking in pirated movies, films or counterfeit goods. The new bill would give the government the authority to shut down the sites with a court order; the site owner would have to petition the court to have it lifted. The judge would have final say over whether a site should be shut down or not. Business groups including the US Chamber of Commerce hailed the legislation as a huge step forward.
Some of the comments to this blog post ran:
...shut down websites trafficking in ... counterfeit goods
Bye Bye EBAY, and good riddance
to which Anonymous Coward replied:
The government isnt going to shut down sites backed by the almighty $$$
But your movie blog is gone the first time you give a bad review.
Your political forum is shut down the first time some kid quotes 1984.
Etc, etc..
before Ed111 added, on a more serious note:
Yes.......... but how?

When a website is "taken down" on a U.S based server that does not mean it is dead. Far from it. What happened was the hosting company shut it down due the court order. There are some hosting companies that will refuse based on principles.

Now let's say that the site owner is risking contempt of court if they move the website out of the U.S jurisdiction. Maybe they will get the site started up under somebody else? Sell all the corporate assets to a foreign company for $1.

I guess what I am getting at, is that shutting down a website has not been incredibly effective when the principles involved and hosting is not inside the U.S. Just how long will it take before the Justice Department can get a court order to interfere with the DNS records of allegedly infringing websites?

Manipulation and control over the DNS is what is ultimately required to do anything effective. This law will just drive all the businesses outside of the U.S, just like the DMCA has driven a lot of businesses outside as well.

It will be DNS too, since the Great Firewall of Freedom will be more expensive then the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined and even less effective.

Talk about a wonderful day for hosting providers huh?
This is the kind of thing that happens as empires decay.
Manipulation and control over the DNS is what is ultimately required to do anything effective.
This is a most important "technical" detail because ultimately for the U.S. government to be successful in enforcing these controls on the Internet it must either wrestle control of the root domain name servers [DNS] from the international ngo's that have been running them, ICANN and InterNIC, or corrupt those organizations to it's will. That is why I think it fair to call this a coup d'état and nothing less than an attempt by the U.S. government to takeover the Internet.

These new Internet laws will do more than just run ISPs and websites off-shore. It will run Internet innovation and software development to places were liberty is still loved as well. If these new federal laws force any restrictions or requirements on to the software developers, as it is reported they do, and indeed must do, if they are to work, they will be in complete contradiction to the Free Software & Open Source movements [OSS]. For those that came late to the party, OSS is literally the software that runs the Internet. It runs Facebook, it runs the DailyKos, it does all the email forwarding and DNS searches. It gave us Linux and Apache and Perl and Google and Android. It has been the goose that laid the golden egg in the world of Internet innovation. Obama's plans will kill the goose, at least in the U.S.

The very foundations of OSS mandate that no such government restrictions can be forced on software and no closed source 'hooks' can be forced on the open source world. The Free Software Foundation lists 'free from restriction' as the first condition of free software. If Obama's Internet becomes law, it will criminalize all those who 'keep the faith' of the Free Software Movement. As some of the OSS community has already been forced offshore because of U.S. government copyright enforcement, now many more will leave the U.S. in an effort to preserve what Open Source theorist Eric Raymond called our freedom to write software that doesn't suck? Maybe Linus Torvalds will move back to Finland so he doesn't have to worry about the Fed telling him he must include this and that in the Linux kernel. Their gain will certainly be our lost.

While I expect some members of this community will fold under the pressure the Federal government will bring to bear, I know many others that will resist the destruction of freedom on the Internet and our freedom to write software without restrictions.

Speaking as one of the peons, let me say we have labored, in some cases more than a quarter century, to build the Internet as a tool for human liberation, and to do this we have build organizations that I believe represent the absolute best in international cooperation and a body of excellent software, freely available to all, that has made the dream of instant, multimedia, global, lowcost and secure communications a reality. We will not go quietly into that goodbye!

We will apply First Amendment Remedies! We will write code that can't be cracked and exploits that can't be tracked. As another Slashdoter commented:
All the more reason to move over to I2P, or other general darknets, which can provide application-agnostic anonymous networking with end-to-end encryption. Why wait for the inevitable when we can build a secure internet on top of the old one?
I love the Free Software Movement. Before we submit we'll build virtual communities underground, buried deep in the Internet. we'll communicate via encrypted tunnels. We'll live like the Viet Cong in Cu Chi, a whole city underground while the enemy patrols just over our heads, except in this case maybe it's the other way 'round, and we're just a little bit over their heads!

Welcome to the Matrix. Good night and Good luck!

Here is a recap of my other DKos diaries on this subject:
Julian Assange on Threat to Internet Freedom
FCC Net Neutrality's Trojan Horse
Free Press: Country Codes for the Internet?
The Mountain comes to Mohammad
Keith Olbermann's Deception
Court rules -> Google Must Be Evil & Maximize Profits
EFF on the Google\Verizon Net Neutrality Proposal
Google-Verizon: What is the Free Press Agenda?
End of the Internet As We Know It!
Free Press would make this Illegal!
Google Verizon Announce Terms of Deal

Sunday, September 12, 2010

FCC Net Neutrality's Trojan Horse

FCC Net Neutrality's Trojan Horse

There is an important exception to the copyright law that allows 'fair use' of copyright materials without the copyright owner's consent under a wide variety of circumstances. While many copyright holders consider this a 'loop hole' in the law, now that Congress has extended copyright coverage for as long as 120 years for corporations, it is more important than ever.

Martin Sheen was gracious enough to narrate my documentary Vietnam: American Holocaust for the SAG dayrate minimum because he believed in the project and knew that otherwise there was no way he could fit into my budget.

Of course, the reason I asked Martin to narrate had a lot to do with the leading role he played in Apocalypse Now, which is undoubtedly the greatest narrative film ever made on the war. So when it came time to make a trailer for the doc, I made fair use of about 15 seconds from Apocalypse Now so as to be sure that I made that connection for a younger generation that knew him only as our 'acting' president.

I posted the trailer to YouTube, Facebook and MySpace. Today, it only remains in the original form on YouTube. Both Facebook and MySpace took it down in short order, citing copyright infringement. The alleged infringement was not because I used some footage from Apocalypse Now, but because their automatic piracy detection software caught a few bars of The End by the Doors, playing in the background.

So on Facebook and MySpace I was convicted of copyright infringement by a computer program that knew nothing about 'fair use', had my trailer removed without warning and was told that repeated 'violations' could led to my account being closed. This is not surprising. Issues of 'fair use' are generally so complicated that it is difficult even for a court to make a determination, piracy detection computer programs, like the Hollywood corporations that promote them. have little use for fair use and would like to see it go away.

Fair Use is hard enough to rely on as it is. My fiscal sponsor, Carole Dean, doesn't want to hear about 'fair use' anymore. She told me she lost $50k on a fair use case. When she described what sounded like a textbook example of 'fair use', I said, "I don't understand how you lost." She said she didn't. The $50k was for lawyers fees and court costs.

Google, which is a product of the Free Software movement, and owns YouTube, takes a somewhat different stand on copyright infringement, and takes a strong position in defense of fair use, and they have the money to fight back effectively as in this landmark case.

Infact, when you allege to Google that your copyright in being infringed on, not only are your wishes not complied with immediately and without question, you are given this stern warning:

Please note that you may be liable for damages (including costs and attorneys' fees) if you materially misrepresent that a product or activity is infringing your copyrights.

Indeed, in a past case (please see http://www.onlinepolicy.org/action/legpolicy/opg_v_diebold/ for more information), a company that sent an infringement notification seeking removal of online materials that were protected by the fair use doctrine was ordered to pay such costs and attorneys fees. The company agreed to pay over $100,000. Accordingly, if you are not sure whether material available online infringes your copyright, we suggest that you first contact an attorney.

The case that Google cited above, and which EFF defended, is one that would be a special interest to DKos Readers, since it involved the publication of Diebold emails relating voter fraud and their easily hacked voting machines.

Google, which has always and continues to stand in the corner of Internet freedom and network neutrality, doesn't want to see the FCC given new broad powers in the name of protecting it. It should be clear why certain bulk copyright holders and content providers would like the to FCC gain control of the Internet in the name of defending net neutrality for, as the legislation says, 'lawful' content, and would like to see Google's role in this discussion marginalized. What I still don't understand is why the DKos community is falling for it.

Would Net Neutrality Law Block WikiLeaks?

The Founding Fathers wanted America to have a rich public culture. They understood that all politics, all scientific and engineering development, all intellectual development of any sort required a rich feed of all that had gone before. To achieve this, they sculptured copyrights laws that gave the individual creator of a work a brief period in which he could directly profit from a monopoly on his work. After that period the work would fall out of copyright and into the public domain, and like fruit that falls to the ground, enrich the cultural soil of the community. Even though ours was an agrarian society with little use for copyright laws at the time, they felt it important enough to earn a place in the Constitution:
The Congress shall have Power [. . .] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
Before 1783 the longest period of copyright in America was 7 years. U.S. copyright law was written the way it was because the authors of the Constitution always saw the author's interest as secondary to that of the public. Sadly, the Constitution did not set the length of copyright.The first federal copyright law, the

Copyright Act of 1790 granted a copyright term of fourteen years that was renewable for another fourteen if the author was still living. Under pressure from the financial interests of the copyright holders, already the march was on toward extended copyright terms, but change was slow in the beginning. In 1831 the first term was extended to 28 years and in 1909 the second term was likewise extended to 28 years.

With the passing of the [sic] Sony Bono Copyright Term Extension Act in 1998, U.S. copyright law became a complete perversion of it's Constitutional intent. The U.S. copyright law was extended to as long as 120 years for works owned by corporations. Chris Sprigman gives a very good description of how Disney money bought this law barely 5 years before the copyright on Mickey Mouse was due to expire in his THE MOUSE THAT ATE THE PUBLIC DOMAIN. Simply put, according to the terms of the Copyright Act of 1998, no new works will enrich the public domain over the copyright holders objection until 2048!

Fortunately for us and our culture, the 'facts on the ground' have been somewhat different. Owning to the tremendous developments in computer technology, computer software and especially the Internet, we have been the beneficiaries of absolutely unprecedented access not only to the great body of existing works, but a proliferation of new works, many of them freely making ''fair use" of copyrighted material in their creation. My YouTube video Headless Body Turns Up in AZ Governors Debate, in which I take news footage of Jan Brewer's meltdown and add captions is but one small example.

Of course, not everybody is happy with this situation, the big corporate content owners, for example. They have been accustom to having it their way for years. When records came out they licensed the songs to us on records. When tapes came out, they licensed the same songs to us on tapes, and then when CD's came out, they licensed them to us again. The story is much the same with video media. I have payed Columbia at least 3 different times for my right to legally have a copy of Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited. They have no 'upgrade' policy. Now comes the age of digital recording and digital copies. There is no degrading with age and no lost, provided digital copies can made. That is why they have fought against or wanted to tax every recording media from the copier, video tape and cassettes on. Now they would like to charge me again and this time separately for every instance of "Like a Rolling Stone" I have on every digital device I use. But pine as they may, technology moves against them and that gravy train is over.

So just when they think they pretty much have everything as they like it on the legal front, the dam breaks open on the technological and communications front. We have not been stifled so far because just when we were forced to become pirates of our own cultural, the means to do so became readily available. Most important among these means has been the Internet, a low cost way of sending any creative work that could be reduced to a digital stream anywhere in the world without fear or favor, and so far, without much concern for the copyright status of the content.

And just what does all of this have to do with network neutrality? Quite a lot it would seem, because while the liberal left lobbies for new Net Neutrality legislation that will give the FCC more control over the Internet in the name of fixing something that isn't broken, network neutrality, the big content providers are making sure there is a lot in the sausage for them, and their vision doesn't look anything like a free or open Internet.

Looking at Pickering & Markey's Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008 we see that it is designed "to maintain the freedom to use for lawful purposes" and "enable consumers to reach, and service providers to offer, lawful content, applications, and services of their choosing." All of the rule making around network neutrality is riddled with this language about 'lawfull content'. At first glance, there would seem to be no problem, one can hardly expect a legal framework for Net Neutrality that protects 'illegal content' can one? Except that is exactly what the current international Internet regime has been doing more or less effectively now for twenty-five years. Not only has what I will loosely refer to as the IETF-W3C-ICANN regime [ and I know that is inadequate and leaves out a lot, but I wish to remind everyone that real organizations have been handling matters till now and doing pretty good at it.], have been enforcing net neutrality with very few and only short lived violations, they have done this both for 'lawfull' content and what some would consider 'illegal' content, including adult pornography, materials used in violation of copyright, and secrets embarrassing to governments and businesses. But this is not the intent of the upcoming Net Neutrality Sausage.

When RIAA CEO Mitch Bainwol said

he isn't opposed to net neutrality legislation that recognizes the difference between legal and illegal content, protects only legal activities, and doesn't hinder efforts to combat illegal activities. "

Markey said the bill would not interfere with the music industry's fight against piracy.
But I think the real question is does it give the FCC increased powers to further the industry's piracy fight? Because even if those powers aren't exercised by the current administration, what about a Republican administration? If it does, perhaps another way should be found because if we create an atmosphere where each national government is monitoring and filtering for what it considers 'illegal content' it will lead to the balkanization of the Internet of which some have warned.

The Internet community has it's own definitions of what constitutes legal and illegal Internet content. The Internet Engineering Task Force [IETF] is first of all concerned with a very different 'illegal' content, namely data and systems that violate the well established protocols and standards. For example RFC3462 refers to "re- encoded into a legal 7-bit MIME message or the Text/RFC822-Headers content-type." All sorts of viruses and malware are also considered illegal content.

There is another definition of illegal content that is generally accepted in the Internet community, for example this is the way that INHOPE defines illegal content:

* Child pornography images and websites
* Illegal activity in chat rooms (e.g. grooming)
* Online hate & xenophobia websites

As you can see, they define illegal content very narrowly and in terms of content that any reasonable person would oppose. But when it comes to copyrighted material, and the enforcement of the copyright laws of all the countries on the Internet, the Internet has taken a 'copyright' agnostic viewpoint. The position taken by different ISPs, on the other hand, has varied.

In January. the news came out that Verizon, unlike Comcast, Quest and Cox, was refusing to boot paying customers off their network because they had received "too many" RIAA or MPAA DMCA warning letters accusing them of piracy. BroadbandDSLReports.com supported Verizon's policy, "given the legal repercussions of terminating accounts based on little more than an IP address and a wink from the entertainment industry."

When it comes to the type of 'illegal' content that concerns Hollywood, copyright violation, one IETF writer points out that

from a technical perspective this is trivial, ISPs cannot distinguish illegal from legal content, assuming a minimal amount of encryption/obfuscation. The content industry could only tell the ISP "user XY is doing something illegal, do something about it" and the ISP would have to believe that without being able to verify it.
and with regards to the various technical copyright enforcement schemes:
Another issue is that such schemes might drive illegal filesharing deeper underground, e.g. onto darknets which provide pseudonymity and plausible deniability at the cost of increased bandwidth consumption, another network overlay and data being bounced through random nodes, which is completely the opposite of what we want to achieve.
You just have got to love the way the Internet has been put together. Initially designed to be decentralized enough to survive a nuclear attack, it has proven very resistant to the attempts of governments and corporations alike to control it. Nonetheless, the content owners expect a lot of help from the FCC as they implement their version of Net Neutrality.

The Copyright Alliance, writing on their blog , 4/27/10 says "At stake is the ability of copyright owners to protect their rights online." Commenting on the FCC's Net Neutrality fillings, AFTRA is “generally in favor of the Commission’s proposed rules in this proceeding as applied to lawful content, so long as the Commission encourages any parties subject to these rules to take affirmative steps to stop the distribution of content that violates federal law, including content distributed in violation of copyright.” According the the blog, the outlook of the National Music Publisher's Association [NMOA]
echoes that of FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, who has frequently stated that net neutrality rules should only be applied to lawful content. “To be meaningful in practice, however,” the filing states, “the FCC must also clearly and unambiguously ensure that the distinction between lawful and unlawful content can and will be enforceable,” adding that “[n]et neutrality cannot serve as a vehicle to maintain — or, even worse, expand — opportunities for activity that is illegal, such as the digital theft of copyrighted works.”
Business aren't the only ones that have an interest in blocking what they consider illegal content. Governments have also done this, and they pray to a higher god than 'copyright'. They pray to the god of 'national security'. As Adrian Chan points out in Why the Pentagon's War on Wikileaks Is Like the Music Industry's War on Napster, they desire a similar control over the Internet and the content of it's communications. The current Net Neutrality emphasis on 'lawfull' content is not likely to offer much protection to the likes of WikiLeaks.

Concerns like these played a large role in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's opposition to the Proposed FCC Net Neutrality Rules introduced in January and slapped down by the courts in April. Blogging on January 14th, say said:
While the question of how to best protect the openness of the Internet is a timely and important one, EFF believes the FCC currently lacks the statutory authority to issue the broad regulations on ISPs that it has proposed. The "ancillary jurisdiction" that the FCC has asserted as a basis for the regulations is legally insufficient and would, if accepted, give the FCC potentially unbounded power to regulate the Internet however it likes... in order to protect the free speech interests of Internet users, the Commission should reject copyright enforcement as "reasonable network management." Copyright enforcement has nothing to do with the technical business of network management.
The corporate copyright holders and content providers on the other hand, want the FCC to take on a much larger mandate in the name of defending network neutrality, one that would give the FCC 'unbounded' power, in the words of EFF, including presumably, the power to enforce their copyright regime on the Internet. This is the Trojan Horse problem which EFF has been concerned about.

Since he works for NBC, it is not surprising that Keith Olbermann favors this road to net neutrality. That is why he argued,
But the FCC could, under at least one reading of its authority, ensure that net neutrality extends to the wireless Internet, as well as to the wired Internet.
This no doubt would be the much wider mandate the FCC is seeking which coincidently would also put the FCC in a better position to police after NBC's piracy concerns on the Internets!!

What about the Free Press, the FCC lobbying group that loudly condemned the Google/Verizon proposal, spearheaded a petition campaign calling upon Google to "Don't be Evil", and has raised such a scare about the imminent lost of net neutrality. How do they think it should be achieved?
The FCC Should Classify Broadband Internet Connectivity as a Telecommunications Service Under the Communications Act and Pair that Determination with Tailored Forbearance.
They write in 'fair use' of copyrighted material and has the clout to back it up. They haven't folded in the face of Hollywood demands the way Facebook and MySpace have.

And it is certainly easy to see why the FCC wants this new authority, as the Technology Liberation Front points out, without it, it may soon have nothing to do:
If the Federal Communications Commission cannot regulate the Internet, it may die. The telephone and television industries are declining, whereas communications industries which the FCC monitors to some extent but does not regulate, e.g., the Internet backbone, broadband Internet access and wireless, are thriving. The Internet, which the FCC cannot regulate, is subsuming legacy communications services which the commission can regulate. That spells doom for legacy regulation. Career regulators are worried.
So I say again, there is a lot of Trojan Horse Meat in this Net Neutrality Sausage they are cooking up for us and we should just decline this meal and not fix what isn't broken. All we need is an FCC that has to power to make sure our corporations obey the rules of the Internet. It doesn't need the power to try to make the rules for the World Wide Web.

The next thing we know, they'll be telling us that only 'lawful' speech is protected by the First Amendment.

Here is a recap of my other DKos diaries on this subject:
Free Press: Country Codes for the Internet?
The Mountain comes to Mohammad
Keith Olbermann's Deception
Court rules -> Google Must Be Evil & Maximize Profits
EFF on the Google\Verizon Net Neutrality Proposal
Google-Verizon: What is the Free Press Agenda?
End of the Internet As We Know It!
Free Press would make this Illegal!
Google Verizon Announce Terms of Deal

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Racist Arnold



















Why has Arnold

Schwar enegger called Black

Athletes "Nigger"

and why hasn't the mainstream

media reported this?










XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2003 18:10:09 ET XXXXX

SECOND BLACK BODYBUILDER CLAIMS SCHWARZENEGGER RACIST COMMENTS

Another black bodybuilder has come forward claiming that California gubernatorial candidate
Arnold Schwarzenegger has a history of making racist comments, the DRUDGE REPORT can reveal.

Robby Robinson, one of the most respected and well known of all body builders [a former Mr.
America, Mr. World and Mr. Universe titleholder], backs up claims made by fellow black bodybuilder
Rick Wayne.

"No disrespect to fans of Arnold but Rick's claim is in keeping with my experiences with the
man," Robinson explains in a message.

Robinson says that Schwarzenegger repeatedly directed the term "nigger" at him.

Don't Believe Me. Check it out for Yourself - Web References:





www.drudgereport.com/ar1.htm - 5k - Oct 2, 2003

www.pacifica.org/programs/dn/030915.html




portland.indymedia.org/en/2003/09/271872.shtml




WHY IS THE MEDIA IGNORING THE SCHWARZENEGGER RACE STORY?





POLITICS US - In recent days, Internet journalist Matt Drudge has posted several stories
charging California gubernatorial recall candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger with holding racist views
towards African-Americans. But so far, the mainstream media has not reported this aspect of the actor's
background, save for a minor mention in a San Jose Mercury News story of last week.




http://prorev.com/politics.htm














Just do what I did. Type "Schwarzenegger"

and "nigger" into and see what you

find.



Right Makes Might

While we still have hundreds of specialist running around Iraq looking for Weapons of Mass Destruction, the Bush administration is missing the one secret weapon that the Iraqi resistance will use to defeat us in this war. The Iraqi Resistance is right and we are wrong. We are not justified in occupying Iraq.

Not all wars have a right side. Lots of wars have two wrong sides. But some do. Such as when one country invades and occupies a country that never even attacked it. We will lose this war not because we aren’t strong, but because we are wrong.

The South lost the Civil War ultimately because nearly half their population stood to gain their freedom by its defeat. Germany and Japan lost the Second World War because the whole world united to oppose their imperialist and racist ambitions.

It’s a sad thing to find your country on the wrong side of a war. Vietnam was the wrong side of a war and we killed over a million Vietnamese trying to bring them democracy. Those people were no more threat to us than, well, the Iraqis. Vietnam went Communist and the sky did not fall. The Hawks are still waiting for the dominoes to fall in South East Asia while they continue looking for WMD in Iraq.

We ‘lost’ the Vietnam War not because we lacked the where-with-all to kill another million Vietnamese but because enough Americans became convinced that we were wrong and demanded an end to the grisly business. And we will ‘lose’ the Iraq War for the same reasons. The only question is how many people will die before we stop trying to conquer them.

If you’re willing to look beyond the government and media spokesmen blowing smoke in your nose, it’s not too hard to figure out what is really going on in Iraq right now. You don’t have to know about all the tribal and religious decisions. You don’t even have to know were the Sunni triangle is, because really, people are pretty much the same all over the world. Just put your self in their shoes: and ask what would you do? How would you feel?

I’m a baby boomer. So I grew up with the notion that there was this Soviet Menace that felt and said they had a better, more equal, more just System than ours and threatened to impose their System on us by force of arms. A lot of the fears I shared with my peers most of my life were related to just such a possibility. Turns out we were wrong about the USSR. They were a lot less aggressive and militarily weaker than our intelligence told us at the time.We now know that danger was nothing like it was cracked up to be, but at the time it was made out to be very real.

Suppose it had actually happened? Suppose it had actually happened here as it did in Afghanistan? Suppose Soviet Troops were shooting people at checkpoints on the streets of American cities, busting down doors at midnight and putting their boots on people’s necks, all the while setting up Provisional Soviets and Governing Councils staffed largely with ex-patriots from the Eastern Block. How would we react? What would we really think about those ‘Americans’ that worked with the Occupation? What would our ‘rules of engagement’ be?

I think there’d be Hell to pay. I think they’d find they made a big mistake in trying to occupy the land of an armed people. I’ll be honest about my rules of engagement. I grew up in the post WWII morality. You don’t start wars and you don’t invade and occupy other people’s countries. I watched the old movies. Every time a partisan slipped up behind a Nazi soldier and slit his neck, I cheered. I cheered twice when they got a quisling.

[for your reference: ”quisling (kwiz’lin), n. [after Vidkun Quisling (1887-1945), Norw. Politician who betrayed his country to the Nazis and became its puppet ruler], a person who betrays his own country by helping an enemy to invade and occupy it; traitor.” – College Edition – Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language (1966) ]

So by definition the Iraqis who work with us are traitors to their country. Can we really expect to build a government that has the respect of the Iraqi people by relying on traitors? Or maybe I just need a new “New World” dictionary like the one George Bush must be using. The one that will no doubt explain how you have democratic elections with foreign invaders calling the shots.

The unspoken deal the U.S. government had with Hussein before the falling out was “You take care of all the Iraqi communists and we’ll look the other way.” In the name of fighting the Soviet threat we aided a tyrant in his rise to power. A lot of good people were destroyed, including the best people in the Baathe party.

Okay we invaded Iraq and threw Saddam Hussein out of power. Now the longer we stay there, the more likely it is that he or someone of his ilk will return to power. Why? Because as long as our armies are there, the struggle for Iraqi independence remains principally a military one. This is familiar terrain to Hussein, and one for which he has prepare. While he was widely despised before the invasion, now he can play a new role as the patriotic leader of the resistance. If patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, then Bush is allowing Hussein to play that card by maintaining the occupation.

Kill Fallouja: I need someone to chair the next Lula meeting

Kill
Fallouja: My Letter Of Resignation


I
started
Linux
Users Los Angeles

[Lula] eight years ago when Linux was a baby and needed all the
friends it could get. I saw in Linux and it's “free as in
'beer', and free as in 'speech' philosophy a tool with vast potential
for the liberation of humanity.


I
have been the president of LULA for all of those years and have
helped it grow and strive. My one regret is that more and more it has
become an insular collection of geeks that can get along just fine
without me.


I
need someone to chair the next Lula meeting. I have made requests to
a number of leading members but so far no one has said they can do
it.


I
won’t be there because I will be showing my new video
'Oops:
A Tragedy Of Errors - News Clips From The Iraq War'

to the
LA
Answer Coalition
.
I personally feel this is more important because most likely while
the two groups are having their simultaneous meetings the United
States of America will be committing mass murder in Fallouja.


The
U.S. Marines are doing it now
.
And Linux is their
little
helper
.
Linux was embedded with the troops before the media ever knew what
the word meant. There is no cease-fire. We keep helicopters, drones
and aircraft over Fallouja 24/7. U.S. Marine snipers shoot anything
that moves. Hospitals are bombed, ambulances are shot up. Children
are shot in the back. Men who try to leave Fallouja are turned back


Cease-Fire
American Style


But
the cease-fire allows the Marines to carry out defensive operations
within the city, which they define as, among other things, allowing
fire on insurgents who display weapons, break the curfew or move
their forces toward U.S. troops.”
LA
Times, 4/17/04 p. A6
.


So
these are the “cease-fire” rules of engagement. Let’s
even allow that as we are bringing them democracy, all Iraqi’s
lose any right to bear arms on pain summary execution. And it’s
a given that even though we don’t yet control Fallouja, we
intend to enforce a curfew by shooting on sight. But please tell me
Mr. United States Marine how can you tell whether it’s an
unarmed insurgent or an innocent civilian that is breaking the
curfew? And since you have the city completely encircled, how can the
citizens of Fallouja move at all without moving towards U.S. troops?
I guess they can hop up and down and call it 'Freedom'.


Read
the paper. Read between the lines.


Sniping
experts – there are several here with the Marines – say
there may not have been such a “target-rich” battlefield
since the World War II battle for Stalingrad.” LA Times again.
So if from behind the riflescope Fallouja looks like Stalingrad while
the Nazi’s lay siege to it, who does that make the U.S. Marine
look like that uses the sniper rifle?


21
year old Marine says of Fallouja “It’s a sniper’s
dream” LA. Times again.


Despicable,
just despicable!


The
US Marines have undertaken to subdue Fallujah, west of Baghdad,
apparently without regard for civilian casualties.”
The
Independent
,
4/15/04


Cease-fire
American style just means they aren’t using the artillery; they
aren’t dropping
cluster
bombs
and
using
Gatling
guns
from
AC-130
gunships
.
Yet.


Hachim
Hassani
, an
Internet entrepreneur from Culver City, CA and member of the Iraqi
Governing Council has been in Fallouja all week trying to negotiate a
peace. [I wonder if he ever came to a Lula meeting.] He’s
afraid the Americans are just letting him hold the meetings so they
can say they tried everything before the slaughter.
LA
Times, 4/15/04, A9
.
His fears are justified.


The
truth is that Bush and his Crew were as wrong about the Iraqi people
Greeting Us as Liberators as they were about Weapons of Mass
Destruction. But that doesn’t mean we can just pick up and
leave from where we aren’t wanted.


There’s
no WMD and there’s no more Saddam Hussein but the whole of Iraq
is in revolt against the occupation. Don’t believe the story
that it is only 6,000 or so of Sadr's Mahdi Army and “a couple
thousand” “terrorist” “foreign fighters”
and “Baathist Loyalist” in Fallouja that somehow have our
well armed force of over 130,000 so over extended that leaves are
cancelled. Don’t believe the lies! See what the new game plan
is.


If
they Don’t Want Us To Liberate them, We Can Rule Through Terror


Even
if we can’t get their telephone system back up and running a
year after we bombed it into oblivion, we can rule Iraq through fear
and terror. So to get the situation under control before the U.S.
presidential elections somebody has to be made an example of. And
that somebody is Fallouja, a city of 300,000 people.


The
CentCom media blitz about the four contractors killed in Fallouja is
just the cover story to prepare the American public to accept the
mass murder they have decided is necessary. They say they just want
the terrorist who killed and mutilated the bodies of the four armed
civilian contractors, i.e. mercenary soldiers. This is a damn lie.


The
Iraqi's who killed and those that mutilated are two separate groups.
The four mercenaries were killed by resistance fighters and left on
the field. Others mutilated the bodies. Not that anything can justify
such behavior, but it could be more easily understood had the press
reported on the massacre of 15 Iraqis by the new sheriff in town, the
U.S. Marines, on that very same street the week before.



The
Marines say they just want a handful of 'bad guys' and for this so
far they have killed over
600
people including at least 46 children under 5
.
But wait. The real slaughter has not yet begun.


Today
the 'cease-fire' still holds but we Americans are an impatient lot.
The Marines warn that this situation can't go on much longer. Soon
negotiations will break down and the Marines will be 'forced' to go
in, guns a blazing. And they will do it with your tax dollars and
your technology and your acquiescence. You will meet and discuss
“Setting
up a compile cluster with distcc”

at 7:00PM Tuesday. It will be morning in Fallouja. They’ll be
picking up their dead again.


A
lot of people have been making comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam
as of late. According to Robert F. McNamara, who as Secretary of
Defense from 1960 to 1967 was in a good position to know,
3,400,000
people died in the Vietnam War
.
So this is the question the comparison poses for me:


How
many this time? How many this time?


I
once had high hopes for Linux. I felt sure it could make a real
contribution to the success of humanity, now more and more I have my
doubts. I have a real and growing fear that if the Mr. Smith’s
of Linux have their way, in the future they will look back and say
“Wasn’t it nice that so many smart people worked to hard
for free to forge their own chains.”


I
feel that Lula no longer reflects the vision I have had for it and
has in fact belittled itself as an organization for change and
progress. I cannot attend Tuesday night's meeting, in fact I would be
a shamed to in view of what our country is doing in Iraq. Therefore I
am resigning as the president of Linux Users Los Angeles effective
7:00PM April 20, 2004.


Rights
and the Mailing List


Rights.
You have rights. But you have responsibilities too. And you have no
right to sit on your ass while your country commits atrocities.


Today
we remember the Holocaust. The real shame of the Germans was that
they allowed a bad leader to hijack the very considerable resources
of their country to do some really horrible things while they when on
with user group meetings and such as usual.


Clay
Claiborne

April
19, 2004


Kill Fallouja: My Letter Of Resignation

I started
Linux
Users Los Angeles

[Lula] eight years ago when Linux was a baby and needed all the
friends it could get. I saw in Linux and it's "free as in 'beer',
and free as in 'speech' philosophy" a tool with vast potential for the
liberation of humanity. I
have been the president of LULA for all of those years and have
helped it grow and strive. My one regret is that more and more it has
become an insular collection of geeks that can get along just fine
without me.

I need someone to chair the next Lula meeting.
I won't be there because I will be showing my new video href="http://linuxbeach.net:7070/ramgen/Oops-Beta.rm"> 'Oops: A
Tragedy Of Errors - News Clips From The Iraq War' to the href="http://answerla.org/upcoming/upcoming.htm"> LA Answer Coalition.
I personally feel this is more important because most likely while
the two groups are having their simultaneous meetings the United
States of America will be committing mass murder in Fallouja.



The U.S. Marines are doing it now
. And Linux is their href="http://slashdot.org/articles/03/03/02/0216215.shtml?tid=103&tid=163">
little helper. Linux was embedded with the troops before the media
ever knew what
the word meant. There is no cease-fire. We keep helicopters, drones
and aircraft over Fallouja 24/7. U.S. Marine snipers shoot anything
that moves. Hospitals are bombed, ambulances are shot up. Children
are shot in the back. Men who try to leave Fallouja are turned back


Cease-Fire American Style



"But the cease-fire allows the Marines to carry out defensive
operations
within the city, which they define as, among other things, allowing
fire on insurgents who display weapons, break the curfew or move
their forces toward U.S. troops." href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-sniper17apr17,1,2717166.story">
LA Times, 4/17/04 p. A6.


So
these are the "cease-fire" rules of engagement. Let's even
allow that as we are bringing them democracy, all Iraqi's lose any
right to bear arms on pain summary execution. And it's a given that
even though we don't yet control Fallouja, we intend to enforce a
curfew by shooting on sight. But please tell me Mr. United States
Marine how can you tell whether it's an unarmed insurgent or an
innocent civilian that is breaking the curfew? And since you have the
city completely encircled, how can the citizens of Fallouja move at
all without moving towards U.S. troops? I guess they can hop up and
down and call it 'Freedom'.


Read the paper. Read between the lines.


"Sniping
experts - there are several here with the Marines - say there may
not have been such a 'target-rich' battlefield since the World
War II battle for Stalingrad." LA Times again. So if from behind
the riflescope Fallouja looks like Stalingrad while the Nazi's lay
siege to it, who does that make the U.S. Marine look like that uses
the sniper rifle?


21 year old Marine says of Fallouja "It's a sniper's dream." LA.
Times again.


Despicable, just despicable!


"The
US Marines have undertaken to subdue Fallujah, west of Baghdad,
apparently without regard for civilian casualties." href="http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=511587">

The
Independent,
4/15/04


Cease-fire American style just means they aren't using the
artillery; they
aren't dropping
cluster bombs
and using href="http://world.guns.ru/machine/minigun-e.htm"> Gatling
guns from
href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-hassani16apr16,1,2200929.story">AC-130
gunships.
Yet.


href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-hassani16apr16,1,2200929.story">
Hachim
Hassani, an
Internet entrepreneur from Culver City, CA and member of the Iraqi
Governing Council has been in Fallouja all week trying to negotiate a
peace. [I wonder if he ever came to a Lula meeting.] He's afraid
the Americans are just letting him hold the meetings so they can say
they tried everything before the slaughter. href="http://www.latimes.com/la-fg-iraq15apr15,1,6800314.story">

LA
Times, 4/15/04, A9. His fears are justified.


The truth is that Bush and his Crew were as wrong about the Iraqi
people
Greeting Us as Liberators as they were about Weapons of Mass
Destruction. But that doesn't mean we can just pick up and leave
from where we aren't wanted.


There's
no WMD and there's no more Saddam Hussein but the whole of Iraq is
in revolt against the occupation. Don't believe the story that it
is only 6,000 or so of Sadr's Mahdi Army and "a couple thousand"
"terrorists" "foreign fighters" and "Baathist Loyalists" in
Fallouja that somehow have our well armed force of over 130,000 so
over extended that leaves are cancelled. Don't believe the lies!
See what the new game plan is.


If
they Don't Want Us To Liberate them, We Can Rule Through Terror


Even
if we can't get their telephone system back up and running a year
after we bombed it into oblivion, we can rule Iraq through fear and
terror. So to get the situation under control before the U.S.
presidential elections somebody has to be made an example of. And
that somebody is Fallouja, a city of 300,000 people.


The
CentCom media blitz about the four contractors killed in Fallouja is
just the cover story to prepare the American public to accept the
mass murder they have decided is necessary. They say they just want
the terrorists who killed and mutilated the bodies of the four armed
civilian contractors, i.e. mercenary soldiers. This is a damn lie.


The
Iraqi's who killed and those that mutilated are two separate groups.
The four mercenaries were killed by resistance fighters and left on
the field. Others mutilated the bodies. Not that anything can justify
such behavior, but it could be more easily understood had the press
reported on the massacre of 15 Iraqis by the new sheriff in town, the
U.S. Marines, on that very same street the week before.


The
Marines say they just want a handful of 'bad guys' and for this so
far they have killed over href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-hassani16apr16,1,2200929.story">

600
people including at least 46 children under 5 .
But wait. The real slaughter has not yet begun.


Today the 'cease-fire' still holds but we Americans are an impatient
lot.
The Marines warn that this situation can't go on much longer. Soon
negotiations will break down and the Marines will be 'forced' to go
in, guns a blazing. And they will do it with your tax dollars and
your technology and your acquiescence. You will meet and discuss
"Setting
up a compile cluster with distcc"

at 7:00PM Tuesday. It will be morning in Fallouja. They'll be
picking up their dead again.


A
lot of people have been making comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam
as of late. According to Robert F. McNamara, who as Secretary of
Defense from 1960 to 1967 was in a good position to know,
3,400,000
people died in the Vietnam War
. So this is the question the
comparison
poses for me:


How
many this time? How many this time?



I
once had high hopes for Linux. I felt sure it could make a real
contribution to the success of humanity, now more and more I have my
doubts. I have a real and growing fear that if the Mr. Smith's of
Linux have their way, in the future they will look back and say
"Wasn't it nice that so many smart people worked to hard for free
to forge their own chains."


I
feel that Lula no longer reflects the vision I have had for it and
has in fact belittled itself as an organization for change and
progress. I cannot attend Tuesday night's meeting, in fact I would be
ashamed to in view of what our country is doing in Iraq. Therefore I
am resigning as the president of Linux Users Los Angeles effective
7:00PM April 20, 2004.


On Rights and the Mailing List


Rights.
You have rights. But you have responsibilities too. And you have no
right to sit on your ass while your country commits atrocities.


Today
we remember the Holocaust. The real shame of the Germans was that
they allowed a bad leader to hijack the very considerable resources
of their country to do some really horrible things while they when on
with user group meetings and such as usual.


Clay
Claiborne


April
19, 2004


Linux Beach

The Buffalo Wing of Al Qaeda?

Three Muslim medical students were driving in two cars from Illinois down to Miami to continue their internship at Larkin Hospital. The country had just been moved to a “high” “orange” terrorist alert status in anticipation of the anniversary of September 11. As evening approached of on Thursday, September 12, 2002 they stopped at a Shoney's restaurant in northern Georgia for a meal. Calhoun, population 10,600 and 90% White doesn’t see a lot of young Muslim men and Ayman Gheith’s skullcap certainly made him stand out. So when Eunice Stone came in for a meal with her son, she sat in the booth separated only by a latticework from the three men and proceeded to ease drop on their conversation.

When Eunice over heard one of the men make a reference to “bringing it down” she had heard enough. The man was talking about bringing a car down to Miami, but Eunice jumped to other conclusions, and sadly for these three young men and America so did the whole Home Front Security apparatus of the United States.

As the three men left the restaurant, Eunice scrambled to get their license plate numbers and called the police. And so a terrorist alert went out. The three men were apprehended in Florida on I-75 at 11:45PM. Florida Highway Patrol, who there lying in wait for the cars claimed they were stopped for failing to pay a highway toll, a charge that was latter dropped when the men produced a receipt.

The three men were held in separate vans by the side of the road for more than 17 hours before they were finally allowed to get in their cars and go on their way. In those 17 hours the eyes on the nation where drawn to that isolated stretch of Florida highway known as “Alligator Alley”.

First the cars were searched and when nothing was found, Collier County brought in its bomb-sniffing dogs. When the dogs alerted on residue left from medical equipment the police went into high gear. By 3 AM they had shut down a 20-mile stretch of I-75 in both directions. They created a 3-mile no-fly zone that disrupted air traffic. Miami-Dade Police Department flew in with two robots for bomb removal. Van, trucks and police vehicles of all descriptions line the road and hundreds of law enforcement officers from all over were busy setting up tents in the middle of the highway. The FBI and Justice Department got involved early. Governor Jeb Bush got personally involved. The new helicopters where soon overhead.

Most of America awoke to this terrorist scare on Friday the 13th. It dominated the coverage of the morning news shows of the three major networks, and the three major cable news networks covered virtually nothing else all day.

All the while propaganda points were being made in support of the war on terrorism. The threat at home and a broad was connected to the need to go to war against Iraq. Eunice Stone was called a hero and was interviewed numerous times on Fox News. Each time her story became more embellished, by the end she had them laughing and joking and celebrating 9/11.

Meanwhile back on that highway the three men sat in custody in road side vans accused of failing to paid a $1.50 toll, and not even being told about the terrorist charges until shortly before they were released. The FHP & FBI knew within the first few hours that the medical students story checked out and that there was nothing incriminating to be found in the vehicles. Still they dragged it out. They re-searched the cars and then the searched them again, they searched them again and then they searched the 8 miles back to the toll booth in case they threw something out. They blew up a backpack with a water cannon. Then the searched the car again. The FBI used the Broward Sheriff's Office helicopter to fly in special boot detecting equipment and everything was X-rayed. Then they searched the car again. By 5: 00PM 50 of the more than 200 local, state and federal law enforcement personnel involved had a meeting to review the day’s events. "We had a very significant drill," was how Collier County Sheriff Don Hunter summed it up.

Meanwhile there was a problem. While significant hay had been made all morning long about the “terrorist threat” that had been stopped on a Florida highway. Those forces in the government and the media that would like to take the war on terrorism into a war with Iraq were having a very good day. They were scoring points.

But there was a problem. The story was unraveling. The men had nothing to do with terrorism. They had broken no laws. They couldn’t even stick them with failing to pay the toll. They had a receipt. And Eunice Stone’s story was sounding more and more shaky every time she was interviewed on FNC. Sooner or later the men would have to be released. Sooner or later their side of events would come out. Then the incident might be seen in an entirely different light as a farce, or worst yet, as simply another example of our famous Southern hospitality when it comes to people of color.

That would be very bad. Bad indeed if the next new cycle continued to highlight Eunice Stone while these men were free to tell their story and the nation had time to consider the injustice that had been done to them. Bad for the war on terror. Bad for state and federal official that had to now account of the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on this particular traffic stop. Very bad for those who are now trying so desperately to build popular support for a war against Iraq.

What to do? How to play this? Those were the questions that concerned Larry Thompson and others at the Justice Department as they managed events on I-75 and the public face of the war on terrorism they were producing.

They needed a diversion. They needed a following act. The surprise arrest of an Al Qaeda terrorist cell somewhere in the U.S. would do very nicely. But it had to be done quickly, so that the next morning’s headlines could be about another government success in the war on terrorism rather than government farce and persecution.
Since at least September 11th, 2001 the government has had under investigation many suspected terrorists of Middle East or Muslim ancestry. In Lackawanna, a suburb of Buffalo, NY had been investigating a group of American’s of Yemeni’s ancestry that had traveled to Pakistan and possibly Afghanistan in the spring of ’91. The FBI had talked to all of the five men arrested that night on previous occasions. The FBI had been investigating them for 6 months and it was no secret. One became so concerned he hired an attorney. Two were scheduled to appear before a Grand jury on September 26th.

But this Friday 13th turned out to be unlucky for them. In the justice department frantic search for a diversion to the Florida farce, came to notice in a new light. Within hours the local FBI office and Buffalo police were mobilized and the media had a new story: An Al Qaeda cell smashed right here in the U.S. The first arrest was made in Lackawanna less than an hour after “terrorist suspects” were released in Florida.

Facts Are Stubborn Things #1

According to the L.A. Times on 8/20/03 “There was speculation that the U.N. may have been attacked because Vieira de Mello had recently expressed support for U.S. policy and the new Iraqi Governing Council.” So how come this relevent piece of information was completely absent from the TV News coverage of the Baghdad attack on the U.N.?

Could it be that they want us to see no other explanation than “an evil expression of these terrorists...an attack against all humanity” as Akila Al-Hashimi of the U.S. picked Iraqi Governing Council was quoted as saying in that same article.

Of course she'll say anything. Back in February when she still worked for Saddam she told the Arab League “the defense of Iraq is now the defense of the civilized world.” Sure she worked for Saddam, but now she's our Joe. Why should anybody doubt our democratic intentions or her intergity?

As a matter of fact the United Nations has recently moved away from all pretense of opposition to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Just days before this attack, on August 15th, the U.N. passed a resolution that ``welcomes the establishment of the broadly representative Governing Council of Iraq.” That is another point over looked by the media in its frenzy to report the “terrorist act” against the U.N.

Well the fact is that by expressing support for a regime installed by a foreign invader purely by force of arms they were taking sides in a war. And now they are Shocked, Shocked to find that they are the target of attack.

President Bush called this a terrorist attack since the war is over, but the FBI has identified the bomb as about 1000 lbs. of military explosives from Saddam's army.

Recently Bush was responsible for exploding a bomb at least 20 times as big in Baghdad. Hey the “Mother Of All Bombs” as they liked to call it was just the largest of thousands he sent. But that wasn't terrorism because the TV just showed us the fireworks, not the carnage on the ground. Beside he was just doing what he had to do to rid Iraq of Weapons of Mass Destruction er I mean Freeing the Iraqi People.

PICO/LA CIENEGA NEIGHBOORHOOD GATHERING FOR PEACE AND DEMOCRACY
Every Friday, at 5 PM on the corner of Pico and La Cienega
For more information: jessw@netwood.net

Facts Are Stubborn Things

Monday, September 6, 2010

Krugman Gives Clue to Why Endless U.S. Wars

Agent Orange, the toxic defoliate which America dumped on Vietnam to kill the growth of plants that were used as cover by the Vietcong. 19 million gallons of defoliates were sprayed on Vietnam, mostly Agent Orange, near Vietnam's borders north of Saigon and near the Mangroves lining Saigon's shipping channels, meaning it was not just killing trees, it was being breathed in by American soldiers who did not know exposure could later lead to potentially fatal conditions such as Hodgkin's disease, soft tissue cancer and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

So said Keith Olbermann in Segment #4 GOP Vets "Not Helping" of last night's Countdown. This story focused on the effects on humans of Agent Orange and the need of many of our Vietnam veterans for treatment and compensation. It was a good segment as far as it went. The problem I had with it was that it didn't go far enough. Keith, Agent Orange was sprayed on the Vietnamese too, and you neglected to mention that. Even today, Vietnam has to care for about 3 million victims of Agent Orange. They range from their now aging war vets to the deformed babies still in the womb. What are they Keith? Chopped liver?

from Vietnam: American Holocaust This is rough cut when I narrate. Martin Sheen narrates the DVD.

In Tuesday's diary about Glenn Beck's Tea party on the mall, I said it was a characteristic of that crowd to ignore the victims of our war policies. I said it stemmed from the insipid racism that saw these people of color as not even worth an 'honorable' mention, but Keith, I expect better from you. How do you justify your continuing participation in a media conspiracy of silence with regards to the effect of Agent Orange on the Vietnamese? If my "conspiracy theory" is wrong here, please point me to all the MSM coverage of the effects of Agent Orange on the Vietnamese that I have missed. Effects that are today suffered by Vietnamese vets that fought on both sides of the conflict. Effects that are well known in Vietnam and recognized around the world but never reported here. And if you are not a participate in this conspiracy of silence, please explain your silence about the suffering of the Vietnamese last night since you were talking about Agent Orange anyway.

Not just our veterans but also our victims must be compensated for the crime of unleashing Agent Orange on humanity. America must recognize what we have done to the Vietnamese and start making it right by helping to clean up the toxic sites we left behind, for example. These sites will continue to add to the number of children killed by the U.S. in the Vietnam War until they are clean. Beck's show was a sham and a farce, but fixing this really is a question of restoring honor.

Resources on Agent Orange effects on Americans and Vietnamese:

Vietnam Agent Orange Relief and Responsibility Campaign

This project is supported by Veterans for Peace, here is a speech by VFP member David Cline who died in 2007:

Agent Orange - A Continuing Legacy of the US War in Vietnam

Saturday, September 4, 2010

Headless Body Turns Up in AZ Governor's Debate

With our special captions, we reveal Gov. Jan Brewer's inter-monologue.

On a slightly more serious note, I think we should thank Jan Brewer for her admission that "Arizona has been brought back from it's abyss." Then we should ask her is it only Arizona that has been brought back from the abyss, or is it all the states? Is only Arizona saved from the abyss and all the other states now in it? Or have all the states been brought back from the abyss, in which case who is to be chiefly credited with bringing these United States back from the abyss?

Besides having a little fun at Jan Brewer's expense. I hope to clarify some questions that have been raised in my diary in that past two days. On Thursday my diary titled Keith Olbermann's White Blindspot started a fire storm as some Kossacks claimed that I was saying that KO is a racist. So maybe I can further clarify my understanding of these terms if I tell you that I don't think Jan Brewer has a white blindspot. I think Jan Brewer is a racist. And I would hate to be forced to lump KO and JB [Jumbled Brains] in the same category because I don't think KO is altogether perfect on the race question and one size must fit all.

Now I would ask you to help me understand the DKos community better. From the comments to my diaries, I have already isolated two areas were my views would appear to differ with this community.
1.) I think KO's view of the world and his reporting reflect a certain racial bias. Others disagree, he has no bias whatsoever.
2.) I think the Vietnam War was a racist war as conducted by the U.S. Others disagree.

Here are some other issues that have been in the news recently, that I frankly think are all about stoking racism among white Americans, but the self-reporters would disagree:

The Birthers oppose Obama because he is not an American. It has nothing to do with his race.

That 18% of American's falsely believe that Obama is a Muslim has nothing to do with him being Black.

The anti-immigrate hysteria is just about enforcing our laws and is not in the least bit motivated by racism.

The anti-Muslim hysteria of the Tea Party is just about whatever, but it certainly has nothing to do with racism.
You see, I would say all the above statements are false and furthermore, I would say they all represent and are unified by a dangerous racist trend that is currently growing in America. So now it occurs to me that in so much as so many have so strongly disagreed with me on 1.) and 2.) above, maybe I am in broad disagreement with this community about whether white racism plays a significant role in American culture and politics today. It would help me better understand this community's attitude on racism if you would answer the following poll.