This blog is dedicated to the struggles of people everywhere to advance human progress and save this planet from the decline of capitalism. Its focus, since 2011 has been supporting the emerging revolutions everywhere.
A lot has happened in CyberSpace since the FCC last addressed the questions of Net Neutrality and it's authority to regulate the Internet. It will do so again today. For month's now, the advocates of Net Neutrality have been demanding that the FCC assert unprecedented authority over the Internet for the purpose of protecting Net Neutrality. Now they will be shocked, shocked to find that the FCC has seized unprecedented authority over the Internet and then did little to insure Net Neutrality. While FCC Chairman Genachowski has kept the exact wording of the proposed new Internet regulations from the public, what has been leaked sounds as though they offer even less protection for network neutrality than the legislative proposal Google/Verizon made in August. However that is besides the point. It is my thesis that the current U.S. debate about the exact nature of FCC regulations around Net Neutrality misses and even obscures the much more fundamental question of jurisdiction: What right does the U.S. government, or any government for that matter, have to regulate the Internet? Another important question: Where does the main threat to Internet freedom come from?
While the commercial interests of corporations do pose a long term threat to our Internet freedoms, including the principle that all data is treated the same without regards to source or destination, i.e., network neutrality, those companies are neither the most powerful nor the most immediate threat to our Internet freedom. That is what the FCC lobbyists that have turned Net Neutrality into a fetish, would have you believe. That is because in a period in which increasing economic hardship will necessarily leads to greater social upheaval and growing political unrest, the greatest and most immediate threat to our freedom on the Internet comes from the authoritarian state. At a time when we are being lied to like never before, the free Internet allows us to get at the truth. At a time when we are being controlled as never before, the free Internet allows us to organize a collective resistance. This is why the government needs to bring the Internet under its control now.
Most likely the word "WikiLeaks" won't even be spoken at the FCC hearings today, but you can be sure that it will the represented by an antonym in any regulations proposed by the FCC. That antonym is "lawful" as in these laws give the Federal government the power to protect "lawful" Internet content which also means giving it the power to ban 'un-lawful' Internet content. The problem arises because it is the same government that determined that the cold blooded mass-murder of a group of civilians in Baghdad, including 2 Reuters journalists, as revealed in the WikiLeaks released video "Collateral Murder", was a lawful killing. That same government will determine that the WikiLeaks exposure of it's crimes constitutes 'un-lawful' Internet content and will ban it as they are already trying to do now outside the law.
The U.S. government has been demanding and taking greater and greater control over the World Wide Web in 2010. In April the Federal Court of Appeals strong response from the hacker community, WikiLeaks stayed up, Mastercard went down and a new form of the old struggle was born on the Internet.
The Internet has always operated as an file a complaint here. The Chinese didn't even try and neither did the U.S. government.
And there's the rub. This is where the U.S. government has had an unfair advantage as compared to the Chinese government or the House of Saud. For historical reasons, the root name servers are located here in the U.S. The Internet first came alive in 1969 as a network between 3 U.S. based computers. In the past, ICANN has always let the contract to run the root name servers to American companies, but it has always been the World Wide Web. The fact that some of the vital Internet infrastructure is located in the U.S. doesn't give us ownership of the Internet, any more than the location of the UN headquarters in New York gives us ownership of that international organization. It's location here is a trust. It is a trust which the Obama administration violated by serving court orders on the companies that work for ICANN.
This particular U.S. advantage is likely to be short lived. Just as I 87 Internet engineers predicted in their letter, and as many other knowledgeable observers have predicted, alternatives to the unified, but U.S. based, name server system are already being planned and some websites are taking steps now to end their dependence on what is looking more and more like a U.S. government controlled DNS system. This is the disaster that is facing the Internet now. This is what is ending the Internet as we have known it now. It is the attempt by the U.S. government to take unprecedented control of the Internet that is the greatest threat of our freedom in that media.
Those that think the main issue for the Internet now is "Net Neutrality" have turned the phrase into a fetish. They have a very narrow and limited view of how the Internet works and the freedom and domination issues it is really facing.
Those that call for the FCC to declare it has authority to regulate the World Wide Web under the Communications Act of 1934 are feeding our Internet freedoms to the jackals.
I just thought it should be noted somewhere that yesterday there was a pretty big anti-war demonstration in front of the Whitehouse led by Veterans for Peace. 131 people were arrested including a number already well known to the MSM including Daniel Ellsberg and Ray McGovern, two-thirds of those arrested were veterans and I couldn't find any TV News mention of this event.
Also yesterday, the Obama administration released it's review of the war in Afghanistan, which meant that every national TV news program ran an Afghan war segment yesterday.
OLBERMANN: The president‘s report is released. We‘re right on track to achieve our goals in Vietnam—Afghanistan. Sorry, sorry. Afghanistan.
Olbermann then goes on to say "According to the “Washington Post”/ABC News poll, released today, a record 60 percent of Americans believe the war in Afghanistan is, quote, not worth fighting." Of course that doesn't mean that he will say word one about the opposition expressed by a major veterans group outside of the Whitehouse that very day or the mass arrests that resulted. Which brings me to my poll question: Is Keith in on the fix?
I saw no such coverage on ABC Evening News with Diane Sawyer and NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams last night. No mention of the VFP demonstration or the arrests, just as there was no mention of Afghan civilian casualties in their discussions of the war. Ditto with Keith Olbermann on Countdown last night or the Morning Joe podcast this morning. I didn't catch CBS last night and thanks to our glorious economy, I can no longer afford cable so no CNN or Fox News (they should pay me!).
So I'm asking other Kossacks to fill me in on the coverage I missed, because at this point I'm beginning to believe that the American MSM is involved in a criminal conspiracy of silence to cover up not only the true costs of our wars, but the very real opposition to them.
There's a YouTube video David Swanson did of the event:
My graphic from last Christmas is still good for another year:
This Just In: Sunday Morning and Mastercard is down again.
Guess they picked the wrong season to screw with the Internet.
The notice at the top of the new Anonymous web page says,
11 dec - We have moved to anonops.eu
The host for AnonOps.net shut us down and told us to "prove we used legal money".
Bring the PAIN!
This means one of the main communications hubs for Operation Payback has been forced to move again and the company that is hosting it at the new address is already coming under pressure to drop the site. Website owner Maksims Sadovskis explains in this post that his hosting company has already received a complaint from Mastercard lawyers demanding that they delete this page, claiming that it is "cyber crime targeting the financial services industry."
"Bring the PAIN!" is a call for supporters to aim their Low [Earth] Orbit Ion Cannons or LOICs at the hosting company for AnonOps.net and bring it's operations to a standstill.
This was posted from the old address:
LOIC is the current weapon of choice in the hackers offensive being lead by Anonymous against WikiLeak censorship. According to this Guardian blog it has been downloaded more than 32 thousand times and the graph of the downloads looks like a hockey stick laying down. But the much more reliable SourceForge statistics show it has been downloaded 68,619 times from that site alone, 27,686 times on Dec. 9th. Downloads have been sharply upward in the past week.
It is a fairly simple computer program that it designed to be aimed at a specific web address and then bombard that site with a lot of bogus traffic. This is small caliber by hacker's standards. One observer commented:
I was surprised though to see such an old technology put to use at such a crucial time. I was expecting the "big guns" to go into action, and "boot & nuke".
Like many weapons, it has a legitimate use as a tool for stress testing websites. It is rumored to have first been developed as a way of punishing lawyers who were suing thepiratebay.org and it is rumored to have been very good at it.
While the Linux and Java versions of LOIC have to be loaded with the target IP addresses by the user manually and this information is available on a specific IRC [Internet Relay Chat] Channel, the more popular Windows version that is now being download in the tens of thousands, uses Hivemind to allow it to be automatically controlled through an IRC channel. When the output of thousands of computers running LOIC is turned on to a single Internet host, that host is toast!
This battle represents something very new in the historic struggle for freedom and justice. It is a new form of class struggle between the workers and the owners. Most of those that are carrying out the Anonymous campaign are or will be worker bees in the giant corporate infrastructures that monetize the Internet. They are taking up what may be the most strategic battle of our time: Our right to freely use the Internet to access all of humanity's knowledge and communicate with people anywhere without being censored or stifled by governments.
In A Letter from Anonymous publish on an Indymedia website, the group warns "The recent news of our campaigns has been, at best, misinformed." and then goes on to say:
At this time Anonymous is a consciousness focused on campaigning peacefully for Freedom of Speech. We ask the world to support us, not for our sake, but for your own. When governments control freedom they control you. The Internet is the last bastion of freedom in this evolving technical world. The Internet is capable of connecting us all. When we are connected we are strong. When we are strong we have power. When we have power we are able to do the impossible. This is why the government is moving on Wikileaks. This is what they fear. They fear our power when we unite. Do not forget this.
...
Anonymous‘ intentions are to change the current way the governments of the world and the people view true Freedom of Speech and The Internet. Anonymous is willing, ready, and able to campaign for the freedom for all. We are campaigning right now as you read the news, watch the television, fight with your significant other, love your children, hate your neighbor, criticize the man or woman next to you. We are campaigning. The goal is simple: Win the right to keep the Internet free of any control from any entity, corporation, or government. We will do this until our, proverbial, dying breath. We do this not only for our selves, but for the world and its people at large.
Anonymous has also posted this video statement on line:
The Low Orbit Ion Cannon is actually pretty mild stuff. It makes no attempt to keep the user anonymous by using well known techniques like IP spoofing to hide the identity of the attacker. Your IP address will show up in the target's log. It also doesn't destroy data or do any permanent damage. It merely blocks a website by flooding it with traffic. LOIC may actually be the least offensive of the dozens of Internet weapons in the now widely circulated Dangerous Kitten hacker toolkit. For all these reasons, some have called this action a digital sit-in. Anonymous has many ways to up the ante and up it's game. What has happened so far is more like a warning shot across the bow than a desperate fight.
Also it is widely believed that Anonymous is composed of teenage hackers and as one Guardian commenter points out, the big dogs on the Internet have yet to weigh in:
it's the core group of admins at the moment - the 1337 ("elite") group if you like - they're the ones who can cause serious havoc. You only have to look at the experiences of Mary Bale (the woman filmed placing a cat in a bin earlier this year). Within several hours they'd ID'd her, then went on to find her facebook profile, email, employer, her bank, address, the lot. Their computer skills shouldn't be estimated and right now they're a lot more upset about Julian Assange than they ever were about Mary Bale.
and suggests that the U.S. government should try to make a deal:
If the US government had any sense, it would try to strike a deal with Wikileaks - accept the publication of most of the leaks in exchange for keeping back the most damaging of all. Anonymous would back off then.
and another places high hopes on Anonymous, saying:
Those who lie and manipulate, sorry, practise diplomacy' are generally doing so not for the benefit of their populations in the mass but rather to serve the narrow self-interest of other members of their transnational elite. Wikileaks is but the first shot in the ongoing war to take management of the world and its resources into the hands of those who are and have ever been excluded.
A group like Anonymous will evolve and develop into something we've never really seen before - a highly effective, hierarchy-free amorphous and transnational counterweight to the entrenched power interests who exploit us all.
While another commenter in the know warns that not everything can be discussed in open forums:
A quick tip - if you need to ask, don't go there. You will get more than your fingers burnt. The darkweb is where most of the stuff is going on anyhow. It's not far off walking through Detroit with some new Nikes and a bag of weed; if the gangs don't get you the police will.
And what are darknets? Let me just put it this way. If the Internet you know is the Matrix, then a darknet is like Morpheus, Neo and the Nebuchadnezzer operating invisibly beneath the surface of the Internet, but coming up every once and a while to raise hell.
UPDATE! UPDATE! BREAKING! TURD EXPOSED!!
A so-called "hacktivist" by the name of Gregg Housh has been widely quoted in the MSM as a former member of and expert on Anonymous. This piece from the Christian Science Monitor is typical:
One of the earliest followers of Anonymous, Gregg Housh, is intimately aware of, but claims no participation in, the latest Anonymous offensive, titled "Operation Payback." It managed this week to take down the websites of MasterCard, Visa, and the Swedish government over their refusal to support WikiLeaks or Mr. Assange.
Mr. Housh sat with the Monitor on Dec. 10 – in what he said was his 37th interview of the day – to explain how, and why, a couple thousand kids have crippled some of the world's most prominent companies' websites. They have done so with an unprecedented voluntary botnet, a network of thousands of computers working in tandem to simultaneously bombard a website with hits.
But his credentials to speak for anyone but the U.S. gov't are seriously questioned by information and documentation exposed on http://hacker.us/. It seems that Gregg Housh got busted by the Feds for his Internet activities and has traded co-operation for a reduced sentence, the perfect person to explain Anonymous to us. Since these are hackers, they provide both the proof and the art work.
Proof? We got proof - its public record:
His (Gregg Housh's) plea agreement - in writing (and signed by him [Gregg Housh]) that he (Gregg Housh) will cooperate for reduced sentence.
Government's 5K1 motion - they file this after you've helped them, and they get you a reduced sentence. (1)
His (Gregg Housh's) Booker motion - he (Gregg Housh) didn't feel he (Gregg Housh) got enough time off, so he (Gregg Housh) files asking for probation, whine whine whine this, i don't deserve it that.
Anonymous claimed responsibility for the MasterCard attack in Web messages and, according to one activist associated with the group, conducted waves of attacks on other companies during the day. The group said the actions were part of an effort called Operation Payback, which began as a way of punishing companies that attempted to stop Internet file-sharing and movie downloads.
The activist, Gregg Housh, who disavows a personal role in any illegal online activity, said that 1,500 supporters had been in online forums and chat rooms organizing the mass “denial of service” attacks.
Are you aware that in 2005 Gregg Housh was prosecuted for Internet crime and traded co-operation for a reduced sentence as documented here? He is widely considered to be a snitch in the hacker community. Don't you think this is something your readers should know if you are going to use him as a source on Anonymous?
The Internet may already be starting to break apart. IT World writes two days ago:
Regardless of the supposed criminal intent of the affected systems, the seizure without notice of these domain names by US authorities sent shock-waves around the Internet world. It got people's attention in a much stronger way than version 1 of this enforcement operation had — the first iteration late last June seized the names of nine sites selling pirated first-run movies. Many people woke up to the reality of how vulnerable the DNS is to government meddling.
(More recently, the uproar caused by the WikiLeaks publication of US diplomatic cables — and subsequent attempts to censor the site and/or to hound it off the Internet — have resulted in what developer Dave Winer calls "a human DNS" implemented "in a weird sneaker-net sort of way," via Twitter and ad hoc bulletin-board sites.)
Within days of the ICE/DHS seizures, at least three separate initiatives to work around the DNS had been announced, and several existing alternatives were highlighted in the ensuing discussion.
The article then goes on to discuss the details of the various new substitutes for the single unified international, but U.S. based, domain name system that has served the Internet for 25 years.
Back in August, after Google & Verizon announced a joint legislative proposal on network neutrality, certain people predicted disaster for the Internet. One cause, Net Neutrality, was substituted for the many aspects of Internet freedom and one phrase seemed to be on everyone's lips:
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 problems will be enough to ensure that alternative name-lookup infrastructures will come into widespread use, outside the control of US service providers but easily used by American citizens. Errors and divergences will appear between these new services and the current global DNS, and contradictory addresses will confuse browsers and frustrate the people using them. These problems will be widespread and will affect sites other than those blacklisted by the American government.
Now this is exactly what is happening!
The cliché is coming true and we just may be witnessing the end of the single unified Internet we have known. Obama just may give Bush his Internets! Soon we may be saying: The Internet is Dead, Long Live the Internets!
I also wrote in that diary:
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!
The opening shot of the First Cyber War was fired when the Obama administration informed a number of Internet companies that had business relationships with WikiLeaks that the whistle blower website was to be boycotted. In short order Pay Pal, Visa and Mastercard ended their relationships with the group, EasyDNS turned hard and Amazon was singing "Hey, You, get off of my cloud!"
At the same time a mysterious series of Denial of Services attacks began to plague the various WikiLeaks websites. These attacks, in which a website is flooded with bogus traffic to block it up, is the kind of thing the government has called cyber terrorism, but given the circumstances and the target, it is hard not to conclude that the government is ultimately behind it. At the same time, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was hounded and ultimately arrested in an 'unrelated' rape change that, excuse my language, doesn't past the sniff test. And Senator Diane Feinstein called for this un-American to be prosecuted for espionage because he has done what the Washington Post did with the Pentagon Papers.
In the latest counter attack the hacker group Anonymous has organized Operation Payback as a hacker respond to those companies that figured the easiest thing to do under the circumstance was to throw WikiLeaks under the bus. Think again! In it's opening salvo, Operation Payback brought the Mastercard and Visa servers to their knees today. In response, Facebook and Twitter shut down Operation Payback's accounts. That'll stop them! As if those accounts were at all important to the groups operations.
Today a new WikiLeaks release went out on schedule and a representative said that the only way the gov't could stop further releases was to shut down the whole Internet, but they can't even do that!
So they thought shutting down WikiLeaks would be easy did they? I know my people. Visa and Mastercard are going to have a very interesting Christmas season. Pay Pal too. Especially Pay Pal. This begins the first serious Cyber War. The Internet will never be the same.
Welcome to the Matrix!
Here is a recap of my other DKos diaries on this subject:
