Preserve Internet Freedom: Oppose Cybersecurity Legislation & Presidential Kill-switch

John Birch Society

“To amend the Homeland Security Act of 2002 and other laws to enhance the security and resiliency of the cyber and communications infrastructure of the United States.”  These are the words used to describe the latest cybersecurity bill, S. 3480 “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010,” introduced on June 10 and cosponsored by Senators Susan Collins (R-Maine), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Tom Carper (D-Del.)

Not content with establishing a gigantic framework for the federal government to control private sector Internet companies and those who use the World Wide Web, the new legislation, under the cosponsors’ claims of building a “public/private partnership” to increase “economic security, national security and public safety,” there is a most disturbing allocation of authority to the Executive Branch.

Emergency response authority would be granted to the President to protect critical infrastructure if any level of cyber vulnerability is detected by the federal government. Congress is supposed to be notified in advance of the exercise of the emergency powers and any emergency measures are also supposed to be the least disruptive as possible, expiring in 30 days unless re-extended. But a President could keep extending the measures indefinitely.

There are several acknowledgements given to international partners of the United States, and international agreements as well. If a declaration of emergency is declared by the President, then the Director of the Office of Cyber Security has the authority to coordinate responses with certain international partners to protect the critical infrastructure, and even international standards may be relied upon for use as cyber guidelines.

The 197-page bill that creates a super-sized bureaucratic agency with incredible power over private enterprise and private information sources and means of communication containing all sorts of hidden dictates is just another in a list of similar bills that keeps coming to the fore. The Senate Commerce Committee had previously approved a bill in March cosponsored by Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W. Va.) and Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine.) that also contained a presidential “kill-switch” provision.

Whether it’s S. 3480, the Lieberman/Collins/Carper caper that gets the nod, or the Rockefeller/Snowe job, S. 773, the American people need to loudly and strongly voice their opposition to government monitoring and control of this country’s Information Technology systems and the infrastructure these systems run on.

The U.S. already possesses a very healthy and capable private IT security industry. Government interference would only destroy private protection initiatives and efforts, and allow faulty security and intelligence agencies and the Executive Branch to hold sway over the liberties of the people. Help stop this unconstitutional power grab and oppose any government intervention or interference in the private communications network by contacting your representatives in Washington D.C. as soon as possible.

Thank you,

Your friends at the John Birch Society

Qbit now on Facebook

Qbit.cc posts now feed into facebook.  You could among the first to “friend” qbit on facebook!

Add qbit.cc as a friend on facebook.

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Yes I know facebook has connections to DARPA and CIA venture capital.  But their network is a way to reach people.  A lot of readers come here from stumbleupon.com, for example.  I have mixed feelings about social networking in general but even though big media corporations own many popular social media sites, they have to compete to create the best applications because users still have a choice.   If one social media site censors (many do) we focus our efforts on other sites, sending new users there and benefiting the start-ups over the corporate media applications.

Qwest CEO imprisoned in retaliation for failure to cut surveillance deal with NSA

(WMR) — WMR has learned from sources who worked in senior positions for the telecommunications company Qwest that its former chairman and CEO, Joseph Nacchio, was threatened with retaliation after he refused to participate in an unconstitutional and illegal National Security Agency (NSA) wiretapping program after he met with NSA officials on February 27, 2001, some six months before the 9/11 attacks. Nacchio refused to turn over customer records without a court order — something NSA did not possess at the time it made its request.

After Nacchio refused NSA’s request on the grounds that it was illegal, sources close to Nacchio reported his legal problems with the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission began in earnest. First, Qwest lost out on several lucrative federal government contracts and second, Nacchio was indicted and convicted in 2007 of 19 counts of insider stock trading. Nacchio was sentenced to six years in the Schuykill federal prison camp in Minersville, Pennsylvania, where he is now assigned prisoner number 33973-013.

In January, US District Judge Marcia Krieger of the 10th Circuit Court in Denver denied Nacchio’s motion for a new trial. Krieger was nominated for the federal bench by President George W. Bush on September 10, 2001. The September 10 date is significant – it was then clear that Nacchio was not going to be a player in the NSA and FBI illegal surveillance programs and it was the day before the Bush administration would sweep aside the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Qwest is headquartered in Denver.

The illegal NSA surveillance program, once known by its highly-classified code-name STELLAR WIND, was revealed by AT&T employee Mark Klein, who divulged NSA’s “secret room” on the 6th floor at AT&T’s central office on Folsom Street in San Francisco. The “secret room” was next door to the 4ESS phone switch. According to AT&T documents, NSA had direct wiretaps on key Internet circuits on the floor above. NSA’s operation conducted vacuum-cleaner copying of the data stream of the Internet, which included e-mail, web browsing, VOIP phone calls (e.g., Skype) and all the other common Internet services. There is informed speculation that because of an aggressive AT&T internal campaign to transfer all its old long-distance traffic to fiber lines, traditional phone calls that passed through the 4ESS switch were likely transferred to the Internet circuits, making phone calls also very likely subject to NSA eavesdropping.

AT&T and Verizon agreed to participate in the STELLAR WIND program.

Even though there is ample evidence that the federal government engaged in massive prosecutorial misconduct in retaliation for Nacchio’s refusal to participate in STELLAR WIND and associated FBI surveillance programs, the Supreme Court refused to review the case against the former Qwest chief. The Supreme Court also denied Nacchio bail pending his appeal, a clear attempt by the most corrupt Supreme Court in American history to prevent Nacchio from airing the NSA’s dirty laundry about domestic wiretapping and pressure on telecommunication firms’ senior corporate officials.

Qwest shareholders and retirees blamed Nacchio for their financial losses, however, it is now clear that the NSA and the Bush administration targeted Qwest for retribution after its top boss refused to cooperate in the illegal domestic wiretap programs of the NSA and FBI.

Qwest founder, railroad and oil magnate Philip Anschutz, a conservative Christian who owns The Examiner chain of metro region newspapers and several entertainment firms and professional sports teams, testified on Nacchio’s behalf.

The news of NSA’s threats of retaliation against Nacchio will come as little comfort to those NSA employees, including the jailed ex-NSA analyst Ken Ford, Jr., on similar trumped up charges. If someone as wealthy and powerful as Nacchio could be brought down by the illegal domestic joint targeting operations carried out by the NSA, FBI, and corrupt Justice Department prosecutors, those rank-and-file NSA employees who have blown the whistle on NSA’s illegal operations stand little chance of having their “day in court.”

WMR has been told by NSA insiders that if the full extent of NSA’s illegal operations became public, the American people would go into a “state of shock.”

Whistleblower site Cryptome.org shut down by Microsoft over leaked surveillance doc

boingboing

By Xeni Jardin at 5:15 PM February 24, 2010

John Young and Deborah Natsios’ whistleblower archive Cryptome has long been a thorn in the flesh of US government agencies. But if my memory serves correctly, none of them ever managed to do what Microsoft did today: shut the site down.

Network Solutions shut off the lights in response to a DMCA notice, after Cryptome published a 22-page Microsoft document outlining how the company stores private user data in its web-connected servers. The document also explains how government agencies can access that personal data.

More at Wired News, and you can download the disputed PDF here. More at ReadWriteWeb, with comments from the EFF.

[ Photo: John Young of Cryptome, shot by Declan McCullagh, NYC, 2001.]

Three Google employees convicted in Italian court for user-uploaded content

In late 2006, students at a school in Turin, Italy filmed and then uploaded a video to Google Video that showed them bullying an autistic schoolmate. The video was totally reprehensible and we took it down within hours of being notified by the Italian police. We also worked with the local police to help identify the person responsible for uploading it and she was subsequently sentenced to 10 months community service by a court in Turin, as were several other classmates who were also involved. In these rare but unpleasant cases, that’s where our involvement would normally end.

But in this instance, a public prosecutor in Milan decided to indict four Google employees —David Drummond, Arvind Desikan, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes (who left the company in 2008). The charges brought against them were criminal defamation and a failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. To be clear, none of the four Googlers charged had anything to do with this video. They did not appear in it, film it, upload it or review it. None of them know the people involved or were even aware of the video’s existence until after it was removed.

Nevertheless, a judge in Milan today convicted 3 of the 4 defendants — David Drummond, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes — for failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. All 4 were found not guilty of criminal defamation. In essence this ruling means that employees of hosting platforms like Google Video are criminally responsible for content that users upload. We will appeal this astonishing decision because the Google employees on trial had nothing to do with the video in question. Throughout this long process, they have displayed admirable grace and fortitude. It is outrageous that they have been subjected to a trial at all.

But we are deeply troubled by this conviction for another equally important reason. It attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built. Common sense dictates that only the person who films and uploads a video to a hosting platform could take the steps necessary to protect the privacy and obtain the consent of the people they are filming. European Union law was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The belief, rightly in our opinion, was that a notice and take down regime of this kind would help creativity flourish and support free speech while protecting personal privacy. If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.

These are important points of principle, which is why we and our employees will vigorously appeal this decision.

Obama: We Need To Bailout Newspapers To Stop New Media Taking Over

President says preserving “mutual understanding” is critical to democracy

Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Monday, Sept 21, 2009

President Obama has stated that he is happy to consider bailing out the corporate media, expressing concerns that alternative internet based news outlets will grow in popularity as a result of the downfall of newspapers.

Obama told editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Toledo Blade that preserving the print media is “critical to the health of our democracy”.

“I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding,” Obama said.

He also indicated that readers should be made to pay for online news content in the near future:

“What I hope is that people start understanding if you’re getting your newspaper over the Internet, that’s not free and there’s got to be a way to find a business model that supports that.” he said.

Over the past year, scores of newspapers have gone out of business or shifted to online only output, due to the rise of the alternative media and the resulting loss of ad revenue. Several large newspaper corporations have filed for bankruptcy, including the Tribune Co., owner of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times.

Obama said he “would be happy to look at” legislation aimed at providing newspapers tax-breaks if they were to restructure as 50 (c) (3) educational corporations. Democratic Senator Ben Cardin has introduced a bill in this vain titled “The Newspaper Revitalization Act.”

Critics may point out that, far from being “critical” to democracy, a bailed out government subsidized media is the very antithesis of a “free press”.

Government Banking and Government Motors would effectively be joined by the Government Press if bailouts were to be granted.

Bailing out the corporate media would once again constitute rewarding outdated and failing monopolies with more taxpayer dollars, thus punishing innovative forward thinking competition.

Furthermore, there is absolutely no basis for bailing out the newspapers, given that they employ less than one percent of the labor force in the United States.

The dinosaur corporate media is dying because it has proven itself to be almost wholly untrustworthy, acting as an unquestioning mouthpiece for the establishment.

Denouncing all blog based media as unreliable or without context is laughable in the face of the mainstream media’s recent track record.

Hal Turner a Trained FBI Agent Provocateur

I’ve been saying this for a year or more.  Only an agent of the government would be allowed to stay on the airwaves inciting violence without prosecution for that long.  And that elaborate amero hoax, with real fabricated coins– it was too high budget for some lone nut blogger.

Beware patriots, they internet is crawling with pr agents, racist provocateurs, fake bloggers, and software for manipulating social bookmark sites.

Radio talk show host and blogger Hal Turner was an FBI trained agent provocateur, his attorney told reporters in Hartford today. The supposed white supremacist worked for the agency from 2002 until 2007. “His job was basically to publish information which would cause other parties to act in a manner which would lead to their arrest,” Michael Orozco told the Associated Press.

Earlier this year Turner told his blog readers to “take up arms” against Connecticut lawmakers. He also said government officials should “obey the Constitution or die.” In June he wrote that the Illinois federal appeals judges “deserve to be killed” because they issued a ruling that upheld ordinances in Chicago and suburban Oak Park banning handguns. Turner included photos of the judges and the room numbers of their chambers at the courthouse.

Orozco said he plans First Amendment defenses in both the Connecticut and Illinois cases.

Under COINTELPRO in the 1960s and early 70s, the FBI used a variety of dirty tricks against its targets including wiretapping and assassination — as well as the use of agents provocateurs — in coordination with state and local police.

As the case against Turner and the revelations of his attorney reveal, the government did not abandon its COINTELPRO tactics, as it claimed in the mid 1970s. The FBI, acting as the establishment’s political secret police, continues to undermine political movements the elite consider dangerous and a threat to their control and influence.

Members of the patriot movement in particular should take note of Turner’s revelations. The government is not interested in subverting the globalist foundation comprised and neutered so-called left but rather a growing patriot movement that demands an end to the Federal Reserve, a return to a constitutional republic, and resistance to predatory globalism and world government.

Hal Turner specifically attempted to appeal to the patriot movement and the constitutionalists. It should serve as a wake-up call that the FBI trained him as an agent provocateur.

China to to Require Web Filtering Software on All PCs

Via: Wall Street Journal:

China plans to require that all personal computers sold in the country as of July 1 be shipped with software that blocks access to certain Web sites, a move that could give government censors unprecedented control over how Chinese users access the Internet.

The government, which has told global PC makers of the requirement but has yet to announce it to the public, says the effort is aimed at protecting young people from “harmful” content. The primary target is pornography, says the main developer of the software, a company that has ties to China’s security ministry and military.

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The Chinese government has a history of censoring a broad range of Web content. The new requirement could force PC manufacturers to choose between refusing a government order in a major market or opening themselves to charges of abetting censorship.

The software needn’t be preinstalled on each new PC — it may instead be shipped on a compact disc — giving users some choice. But if installed, foreign industry officials who have examined the software say, it could transmit personal information, cause PCs to malfunction, and make them more vulnerable to hacking. It also makes it difficult for users to tell what exactly is being blocked, officials say.

A spokeswoman for Hewlett-Packard Co., which has the largest PC market share of any U.S. vendor in China, said the company is “working with the government authorities and evaluating the best way to approach this. Obviously we will focus on delivering the best customer experience while ensuring that we meet necessary regulatory requirements.”