Every Click You Make

By Kevin Drum

August 13, 2010 "Mother Jones" -- Last week the Wall Street
Journal ran a terrific series of stories called "What They Know."
The general subject was personal privacy—or the lack of it—in the
digital world, and the first article in the series explained how
websites routinely track your movements on the web and collect
a genuinely astonishing amount of personal information about you
in the process. The Journal examined 50 sites using a test
computer and discovered that these sites collectively installed a
total of 3,180 tracking files—an average of 63 tracking files per
site:

The state of the art is growing increasingly intrusive, the Journal

found. Some tracking files can record a person's keystrokes online
and then transmit the text to a data-gathering company that
analyzes it for content, tone and clues to a person's social
connections. Other tracking files can re-spawn trackers that a
person may have deleted.

....Some of the tracking files identified by the Journal were so

detailed that they verged on being anonymous in name only. They
enabled data-gathering companies to build personal profiles that
could include age, gender, race, zip code, income, marital status
and health concerns, along with recent purchases and favorite TV
shows and movies.

A full list of the sites they examined is here. The most intrusive
were dictionary.com and msn.com, which installed over 200
tracking files each. The least intrusive were craigslist.org and
wikipedia.org.

What to do about this? Europe, which generally has better rules

than the U.S. regarding the collection and use of personal data,
actually has tighter regulations about how long online data should
be stored. After all, the local police might want to use it someday.
The Christian Science Monitor reports that this is finally provoking
a reaction:
Across Europe, a backlash against the storage of private data is
growing. Civil society groups like the European Federation of
Journalists have criticized the practice, and in Germany almost
35,000 people, including Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-
Schnarrenberger, sued their own government over the issue.

"There is a real problem in Europe today. It is a breach of the

European Convention on Human Rights, which says that everyone
has the right to a private life. That fundamental right has to
extend into digital life," says Christian Engström, a member of the
European Parliament for Sweden's controversial Pirate Party,
elected on a platform of digital rights.

This tension means that governments aren't always eager to

restrict the collection of personal data online. Beyond that, though,
there are technical difficulties for those who want to prohibit the
practice. When Congress passed the Do Not Call law in 2003, their
job was easy: everyone has a telephone number, and all you have
to do is put those numbers into a database and tell solicitors not
to call them. But there's no equivalent of a phone number in the
digital world. Your computer's ID is its IP address, but most IP
addresses change regularly. There's no way of creating a "Do Not
Track" database and telling online solicitors to keep their tracking
files away from everyone who signs up.

Alternatively, as Harlan Yu wrote recently, we could adopt the

opposite approach: instead of asking users to register, we could
require solicitors to register and then rely on browser settings that
would prevent their domains from installing tracking files.
Unfortunately, this has technical drawbacks as well, so Yu
suggests instead a new standard that would allow your browser to
notify every site you visit that you don't wish to be tracked:

The browser could enable x-notrack for every HTTP connection, or

for connections to only third party sites, or for connections to
some set of user-specified sites. Upon receiving the signal not to
track, the site would be prevented, by FTC regulation, from setting
any persistent identifiers on the user’s machine or using any other
side-channel mechanism to uniquely identify the browser and track
the interaction.
This would, of course, require legislation that requires online sites
to honor the x-notrack request. That's the bad news. The good
news is that whatever the eventual solution, the problem itself is
finally getting some attention on Capitol Hill: Politico reported last
week that Sen. Mark Pryor (D–AR) is writing a bill "aiming to give
consumers more control over their online data....The focus of the
bill, which is still in rough draft form, will be giving consumers the
ability to opt out of being tracked across the Web." So stay tuned.

In the meantime, the Journal's full package of privacy articles is

here, and they're well worth browsing through. It includes pieces
that explain web tracking, cell phone monitoring, how much these
tracking services know about you, the role of big companies like
Google and Microsoft, and even advice on how to avoid tracking.
You can't avoid it all, but there are things you can do to minimize
it.

Kevin Drum is a political blogger for Mother Jones. For more of his
stories, click here.
The Ministry of Truth
Obama's War on the Internet
By Philip Giraldi

July 20, 2010 "Campaign for Liberty " -- The Ministry of

Truth was how George Orwell described the mechanism used by
government to control information in his seminal novel 1984. A
recent trip to Europe has convinced me that the governments of
the world have been rocked by the power of the internet and are
seeking to gain control of it so that they will have a virtual
monopoly on information that the public is able to access. In Italy,
Germany, and Britain the anonymous internet that most Americans
are still familiar with is slowly being modified. If one goes into an
internet café it is now legally required in most countries in the
European Union to present a government issued form of
identification. When I used an internet connection at a Venice
hotel, my passport was demanded as a precondition and the inner
page, containing all my personal information, was scanned and a
copy made for the Ministry of the Interior -- which controls the
police force. The copy is retained and linked to the transaction. For
home computers, the IP address of the service used is similarly
recorded for identification purposes. All records of each and every
internet usage, to include credit information and keystrokes that
register everything that is written or sent, is accessible to the
government authorities on demand, not through the action of a
court or an independent authority. That means that there is de
facto no right to privacy and a government bureaucrat decides
what can and cannot be "reviewed" by the authorities. Currently,
the records are maintained for a period of six months but there is
a drive to make the retention period even longer.

The excuses being given for the increasing government

intervention into the internet are essentially two: first, that the
anonymity of the internet has permitted criminal behavior, fraud,
pornography, and libel. Second is the security argument, that
managing the internet is an integral part of the "global war on
terror" in that it is used by terrorists to plan their attacks requiring
governments to control those who use it. The United States
government takes the latter argument one step farther, claiming
that the internet itself is a vulnerable "natural asset" that could be
seized or damaged by terrorists and must be protected, making
the case for a massive $100 billion program of cyberwarfare.
Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) argues that "violent Islamist
extremists" rely on the internet to communicate and recruit and he
has introduced a bill in the Senate that will empower the president
to "kill" the internet in case of a national emergency.

But all of the arguments for intervention are essentially themselves

fraudulent and are in reality being exploited by those who favor
big government and state control. The anonymity and low cost
nature of the internet means that it can be used to express views
that are unpopular or unconventional, which is its strength. It is
sometimes used for criminal behavior because it is a mechanism,
not because there is something intrinsic in it that makes it a choice
of wrongdoers. Before it existed, fraud was carried out through
the postal service and over the telephone. Pornography circulated
freely by other means. As for the security argument, the tiny
number of actual terrorists who use the internet do so because it
is there and it is accessible. If it did not exist, they would find
other ways to communicate, just as they did in pre-internet days.
In fact, intelligence sources report that internet use by terrorists is
rare because of persistent government monitoring of the websites.

The real reason for controlling the internet is to restrict access to

information, something every government seeks to do. If the
American Departments of Defense and Homeland Security and
Senator Lieberman have their way, new cybersecurity laws will
enable Obama's administration to take control of the internet in
the event of a national crisis. How that national crisis might be
defined would be up to the White House but there have been
some precedents that suggest that the response would hardly be
respectful of the Bill of Rights. Many countries already monitor and
censor the internet on a regular basis, forbidding access to
numerous sites that they consider to be subversive or immoral.
During recent unrest, the governments of both Iran and China
effectively shut down the internet by taking control of or blocking
servers. Combined with switching off of cell phone transmitters,
the steps proved effective in isolating dissidents. Could it happen
here? Undoubtedly. Once the laws are in place a terrorist incident
or something that could be plausibly described in those terms
would be all that is needed to have government officials issue the
order to bring the internet to a halt.

But the ability to control the internet technically is only part of the
story. Laws are being passed that criminalize expressing one's
views on the internet, including both "hate crime" legislation and
broadly drafted laws that make it a crime to support what the
government describes loosely as terrorism in any way shape or
form. Regular extra-legal government intrusion in the private lives
of citizens is already a reality, particularly in the so-called Western
Democracies that have the necessary technology and tech-savvy
manpower to tap phones and invade computers. In Europe,
draconian anti-terrorism laws enable security agencies to monitor
phone calls and e-mails, in many cases without any judicial
oversight. In Britain, the monitoring includes access to detailed
internet records that are available for inspection by no less that
653 government agencies, most of which have nothing whatsoever
to do with security or intelligence, all without any judicial review.
In the United States, the Pentagon recently sought an internet and
news "instant response capability" which it dubbed the Office of
Strategic Influence and it has also seeded a number of retired
military analysts into the major news networks to provide a pro-
government slant on the war news. The State Department is also
in the game, tasking young officers to engage presumed radicals
in debate on their websites while the growing use of national
security letters means that private communications sent through
the internet can be accessed by Federal law enforcement
agencies. The Patriot Act created national security letter does not
require judicial oversight. More than 35,000 were issued by the
FBI last year and the recipient of a letter commits a felony if he or
she reveals the receipt of the document. In a recent case involving
an internet provider in Philadelphia, a national security letter
demanded all details of internet messages sent on a certain date,
to include account information on clients with social security
numbers and credit card references.

The danger is real. Most Americans who are critical of the actions
of their own government rely on the internet for information that
is uncensored and often provocative, including sites like Campaign
for Liberty. As this article was being written, a story broke
reporting that Wordpress host Blogetery had been shut down by
United States authorities along with all 73,000 Blogetery-hosted
blogs. The company's ISP is claiming that it had to terminate
Blogetery's account immediately after being ordered to do so by
law enforcement officials "due to material hosted on the server."
The extreme response implies a possible presumed terrorist
connection, but it is important to note that no one was charged
with any actual offense, revealing that the government can close
down sites based only on suspicion. It is also likely only a matter
of time before Obama's internet warfare teams surface either at
the Defense Department or at State. Deliberately overloading and
attacking the internet to damage its credibility, witness the
numerous sites that have been "hacked" and have had to cease or
restrict their activities. But the moves afoot to create a legal
framework to completely shut the internet down and thereby
control the "message" are far more dangerous. American citizens
who are concerned about maintaining their few remaining liberties
should sound the alarm and tell the politicians that we don't need
more government abridgement of our First Amendment rights.

Philip M. Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and

military intelligence officer who served 19 years overseas in
Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was Chief of Base in
Barcelona from 1989 to 1992, was designated as senior Agency
officer for support at the Olympic Games, and served as official
liaison to the Spanish Security and Intelligence services. He has
been designated by the General Accountability Office as an expert
on the impact of illegal immigration on terrorism.

Phil Giraldi is now the Francis Walsingham Fellow at The American

Conservative Defense Alliance and provides security consulting for
a number of Fortune 500 corporate clients.

Copyright © 2010 Campaign for Liberty

US Ban on Arab Satellite TV Channels

By YUSRA ALVI 

April 20, 2010 "Dawn" -- THE United States claims that one of its
top foreign policy initiatives is to spread democracy and freedom
around the world. But a recent bill in the US Congress has led
many to wonder whether the US wants to become one of the
world’s biggest hindrances to media freedom.

Early December the US House of Representatives voted by an

overwhelming majority to pass a bill in order to stop satellite TV
channels from 17 Arab nations from being transmitted to American
audiences due to their engagement in ‘anti-American incitement to
violence’.

In a Congress that cannot seem to agree on many burning issues

— whether fixing the broken healthcare system or ways of dealing
with the turbulent economic situation — the bill passed with 395
‘yes’ votes, and only three dissenters.

The bill — known as House Resolution 2278 — has to pass many

stages before it becomes a law, but it has shocked many for
contradicting American support for free speech.

Airing of respectful disagreement with the policies of the US

government is a part of the development process, which should be
taken positively the US.

YUSRA ALVI
Karachi
Draft of Secretive International Copyright Treaty
Leaked -- 
Confirms Fears About Internet Freedom

On the table: losing internet access due to

infringement allegations, and widespread data
sharing across national borders. 

By Michael Geist

April 20, 2010 "The Tyee" -- Negotiations on the Anti-

Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) resumed last week in
Wellington, New Zealand, with Canada, the United States, the
European Union, and a handful of other countries launching the
eighth round of talks. While even the most optimistic ACTA
supporters do not expect to conclude an agreement before the
end of the year, the next five days may prove to be a pivotal point
in the negotiations since over the past several weeks, there have
been two major leaks that could dramatically alter the still-secret
discussions.

The first leak was an internal Dutch government document

chronicling the positions of each ACTA participant on treaty
transparency. The level of ACTA secrecy is highly unusual for an
agreement focused on intellectual property issues, leading to a
steady stream of parliamentary resolutions and political demands
for transparency coming from around the globe.

US insists on keeping treaty secret

The standard response to transparency criticisms from many

governments (including Canada) was to claim that they favored
releasing the ACTA text to the public, but that other unnamed
countries did not. Since there was no consensus, the text could
not be released.

The Dutch leak succeeded in blowing the issue wide open by

identifying precisely which countries posed barriers to
transparency. The document identified the U.S., Singapore, South
Korea, and a trio of European countries as the remaining holdouts.
Once publicly identified, the European countries quickly reversed
their positions. The E.U. now unanimously supports the releasing
of the text alongside Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and
Switzerland. With the outing of the transparency issue, it will fall
to the U.S., which is widely viewed as the critical stumbling block,
to justify its insistence on keeping the treaty secret.

Maintaining support for secrecy also faces a second pressure point

-- the second major leak was a copy of the draft agreement itself.
In other words, while countries maintain official positions of treaty
secrecy, a draft is readily available for anyone with Internet
access. Because the text has not been officially released, however,
government officials have refused to comment on substantive
provisions revealed by the leaked document.

Identifying the opposition to transparency may have been

welcome news, but the availability of the leaked text was more
bittersweet. On the one hand, ACTA watchers were grateful for
the opportunity to see first-hand what has been discussed behind
closed doors for the past three years.

Three strikes and you're out?

On the other, the text confirmed many fears about the substance
of ACTA. If adopted in its current form, the treaty would have a
significant impact on the Internet, leading some countries to adopt
three-strikes-and-you're-out policies that terminate subscriber
access due to infringement allegations, increasing legal protection
for digital locks, mandating new injunction powers, implementing
statutory damages provisions worldwide, and engaging in
widespread data sharing across national borders.

Moreover, ACTA may live as an institution that potentially replaces

some of the responsibilities currently performed by the United
Nations' World Intellectual Property Organization. Canada drafted
the institutional chapter, which envisions an oversight council,
secretariat, dispute resolution, and technical assistance to
developing countries.

While some countries insist ACTA will not change their domestic
laws, the leaked text suggests that this is very unlikely since there
remains considerable disagreement on some provisions. In fact,
the New Zealand round of talks may mark the first time countries
seriously begin to bargain on key provisions, setting up a week
that may go a long way to determine the future scope of the
treaty.
Michael Geist, whose column on digital policy and law runs every
Tuesday on The Tyee, holds the Canada Research Chair in
Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, Faculty
of Law. He can reached [email protected] or online
at www.michaelgeist.ca.
Beyond Orwell: 

The Electronic Police State, 2010

By Antifascist Calling

March 19, 2010 "Antifascist Calling" -- Mar. 14, 2010 -- A

truism perhaps, but before resorting to brute force and open
repression to halt the "barbarians at the gates," that would be us,
the masters of declining empires (and the chattering classes who
polish their boots) regale us with tales of "democracy on the
march," "hope" and other banalities before the mailed fist comes
crashing down.

Putting it another way, as the late, great Situationist malcontent,

Guy Debord did decades ago in his relentless call for revolt, The
Society of the Spectacle:

"The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its

technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute to that
same isolation. From automobiles to television, the goods that the
spectacular systemchooses to produce also serve it as weapons for
constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender 'lonely crowds.'
With ever-increasing concreteness the spectacle recreates its own
presuppositions."

And when those "presuppositions" reproduce ever-more wretched

clichés promulgated by true believers or rank opportunists, take
your pick, market "democracy," the "freedom to choose" (the
length of one's chains), or even quaint notions of national
"sovereignty" (a sure fire way to get, and keep, the masses at
each others' throats!) we're left with a fraud, a gigantic swindle, a
"postmodern" refinement of tried and true methods that would do
Orwell proud!

Ponder Debord's rigorous theorem and substitute "cell phone" and

"GPS" for "automobile," and "Internet" for "television" and you're
soon left with the nauseating sense that the old "infobahn" isn't all
its cracked up to be. As a seamless means for effecting control on
the other hand, of our thoughts, our actions, even our
whereabouts; well, that's another story entirely!
In this light, a new report published by Cryptohippie, The
Electronic Police State: 2010 National Rankings, delivers the goods
and rips away the veil from the smirking visage of well-heeled
corporate crooks and media apologists of America's burgeoning
police state.

"When we produced our first Electronic Police State report"

Cryptohippie's analysts write, "the top ten nations were of two
types:
 
1. Those that had the will to spy on every citizen, but
lacked ability.
2. Those who had the ability, but were restrained in will.

But as they reveal in new national rankings, "This is changing: The

able have become willing and their traditional restraints have
failed." The key developments driving the global panopticon
forward are the following:
 
● The USA has negated their Constitution's fourth amendment in
the name of protection and in the name of "wars" against terror,
drugs and cyber attacks.
● The UK is aggressively building the world of 1984 in the name of
stopping "anti-social" activities. Their populace seems unable or
unwilling to restrain the government.
● France and the EU have given themselves over to central
bureaucratic control.

In France, the German newsmagazine Spiegel reported that a new

law passed by the lower house of Parliament in February "conjures
up the specter of Big Brother and the surveillance state."

Similar to legislation signed into law by German president Horst

Köhler last month, police and security forces in France would be
granted authority to surreptitiously install malware known as a
"Trojan horse" to spy on private computers. Remote access to a
user's personal data would be made possible under a judge's
supervision.

While French parliamentarians aligned with right-wing President

Nicolas Sarkozy insist the measure is intended to filter and block
web sites with criminal content or to halt allegedly "illegal" file
sharing, civil libertarians have denounced the legislation.

Sandrine Béllier, a member of the European Parliament for the

Green Party, said that "when it comes to restrictions, this text is
preparing us for hell."

Additionally, the new law will include measures that will further
integrate police files and private data kept by banks and other
financial institutions. French securocrats cynically insist this is a
wholly innocent move to "maintain the level and quality of service
provided by domestic security forces," Interior Minister Brice
Hortefeux told Spiegel.

Generalized political measures such as these that hinder free

speech and expression, whilst enhancing the surveillance
capabilities of the state, also indicate that so-called "Western
democracies" are not far behind beacons of freedom such as
China, North Korea, Belarus and Russia when it comes to
repressive police measures. Indeed, Cryptohippie's rankings place
the United States a mere 2/100ths of a point behind Russia when
it comes to Internet and other forms of electronic spying.

The top ten scofflaws in 2010 are: 1. North Korea; 2. China; 3.

Belarus; 4. Russia; 5. United States; 6. United Kingdom; 7. France;
8. Israel; 9. Singapore and, 10. Germany.

A Profit-Driven Panopticon

In a capitalist "democracy" such as ours where the business of

government is always business and individual liberties be damned,
grifting North American and European telecommunications and
security firms, with much encouragement and great fanfare from
their national security establishments and a lap-dog media blaze
the path for Western versions of the sinister "Golden Shield."

Recently in the United States, whistleblowing web sites such

as Cryptome and Slight Paranoia have come under attack. Both
sites have been hit by take down notices under the onerous Digital
Millennium Copyright Act for posting documents and files that
exposed the close, and very profitable arrangements, made by
giant telecommunications firms and ISPs with the American secret
state.

In Cryptome's case, administrator John Young had his site

shuttered for a day when the giant software firm, Microsoft,
demanded that its so-called "lawful spying guide" be removed by
Young. All five files are currently back on-line as Zipped files at
Cryptome and make for a very enlightening read.

But the harassment didn't stop there. When Young published

PayPal's "lawful spying guide," the firm froze Cryptome's account,
in all likelihood at the behest of America's spy agencies, allegedly
for "illegal activities," i.e., offering Cryptome's entire archive for
sale on two DVDs!

Why would the secret state's corporate partners target Young?

Perhaps because since 1996, "Cryptome welcomes documents for
publication that are prohibited by governments worldwide, in
particular material on freedom of expression, privacy, cryptology,
dual-use technologies, national security, intelligence, and secret
governance--open, secret and classified documents--but not
limited to those. Documents are removed from this site only by
order served directly by a US court having jurisdiction. No court
order has ever been served; any order served will be published
here--or elsewhere if gagged by order. Bluffs will be published if
comical but otherwise ignored."

In previous reports, Cryptohippie characterized an electronic police

state thusly:
 
1. It is criminal evidence, ready for use in a trial.
2. It is gathered universally ("preventively") and only later
organized for use in prosecutions.

Silent and seamless, our political minders have every intention of

deploying such formidable technological resources as a
preeminent--and preemptive--means for effecting social control.
Indeed, what has been characterized by corporate and media
elites as an "acceptable," i.e. managed political discourse, respect
neither national boundaries, the laws and customs of nations, nor
a population's right to abolish institutions, indeed entire social
systems when the governed are reduced to the level of a
pauperized herd ripe for plunder.

How then, does this repressive metasystem work? What are the
essential characteristics that differentiate an Electronic Police State
from previous forms of oppressive governance? Cryptohippie
avers:

"In an Electronic Police State, every surveillance camera recording,

every email sent, every Internet site surfed, every post made,
every check written, every credit card swipe, every cell phone
ping... are all criminal evidence, and all are held in searchable
databases. The individual can be prosecuted whenever the
government wishes."

"Long term" Cryptohippie writes, the secret state (definitionally

expanded here to encompass "private" matters such as workplace
surveillance, union busting, persecution of whistleblowers,
corporate political blacklisting, etc.), "the Electronic Police State
destroys free speech, the right to petition the government for
redress of grievances, and other liberties. Worse, it does so in a
way that is difficult to identify."

As Antifascist Calling and others have pointed out, beside the

usual ruses deployed by ruling class elites to suppress general
knowledge of driftnet spying and wholesale database indexing of
entire populations, e.g., "national security" exemptions to the
Freedom of Information Act, outright subversion of the rule of law
through the expansion of "state secrets" exceptions that prohibit
Courts from examining a state's specious claims, one can add the
opaque, bureaucratic violence of corporations who guard, by any
means necessary, what have euphemistically been christened
"proprietary business information."

In a state such as ours characterized by wholesale corruption,

e.g., generalized financial swindles, insider trading, sweetheart
deals brokered with suborned politicians, dangerous
pharmaceuticals or other commodities "tested" and then certified
"safe" by the marketeers themselves, the protection of trade
secrets, formulas, production processes and marketing plans are
jealously guarded by judicial pit bulls.

Those who spill the beans and have the temerity to reveal that
various products are harmful to the public health or have
deleterious effects on the environment (off-loaded onto the public
who foot the bill as so-called "external" costs of production) are
hounded, slandered or otherwise persecuted, if not imprisoned, by
the legal lackeys who serve the corporatist state.

How does this play out in the real world? According to

Cryptohippie, the objective signs that an electronic net has closed
in to ensure working class compliance with our wretched order of
things, are the following:

Daily Documents: Requirement of state-issued identity

documents and registration.

Border Issues: Inspections at borders, searching computers,

demanding decryption of data.

Financial Tracking: State's ability to search and record all

financial transactions: Checks, credit card use, wires, etc.

Gag Orders: Criminal penalties if you tell someone the state is

searching their records.

Anti-Crypto Laws: Outlawing or restricting cryptography.

Constitutional Protection: A lack of constitutional protections

for the individual, or the overriding of such protections.

Data Storage Ability: The ability of the state to store the data

they gather.

Data Search Ability: The ability to search the data they gather.

ISP Data Retention: States forcing Internet Service Providers to

save detailed records of all their customers' Internet usage.

Telephone Data Retention: States forcing telephone companies

to record and save records of all their customers' telephone usage.
Cell Phone Records: States forcing cellular telephone companies
to record and save records of all their customers' usage, including
location.

Medical records: States demanding records from all medical

service providers and retaining the same.

Enforcement Ability: The state's ability to use overwhelming

force (exemplified by SWAT Teams) to seize anyone they want,
whenever they want.

Habeas Corpus: Lack of habeas corpus, which is the right not to

be held in jail without prompt due process. Or, the overriding of
such protections.

Police-Intel Barrier: The lack of a barrier between police

organizations and intelligence organizations. Or, the overriding of
such barriers.

Covert Hacking: State operatives copying digital evidence from

private computers covertly. Covert hacking can make anyone
appear as any kind of criminal desired, if combined with the
removing and/or adding of digital evidence.

Loose Warrants: Warrants issued without careful examination of

police statements and other justifications by a truly independent
judge.

Sound familiar? It should, since this is the warped reality

manufactured for us, or, as Debord would have it: "The spectacle
cannot be understood as a mere visual excess produced by mass-
media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been
materialized, a view of a world that has become objective."

That such a state of affairs is monstrous is of course, an

understatement. Yet despite America's preeminent position as a
militarist "hyperpower," the realization that it is
a collapsing Empire is a cliché only for those who ignore history's
episodic convulsions.
 If, as bourgeois historian Niall Ferguson suggests in the
March/April 2010 issue of Foreign Affairs, the American Empire
may "quite abruptly ... collapse," and that this "complex adaptive
system is in big trouble when its component parts lose faith in its
viability," what does this say about the efficacy of an Electronic
Police State to keep the lid on?

Despite the state's overwhelming firepower, at the level

of ideology as much as on the social battlefield where truncheons
meet flesh and bullets fly, Marx's "old mole" is returning with a
vengeance, the "specter" once again haunting "rich men dwelling
at peace within their habitations," as Churchill described the
West's system of organized plunder.

Against this loss of "faith" in the system's "viability," Debord points

out, although the working class "has lost its ability to assert its
own independent perspective," in a more fundamental sense "it
has also lost its illusions." In this regard, "no quantitative
amelioration of its impoverishment, no illusory participation in a
hierarchized system, can provide a lasting cure for its
dissatisfaction."

Forty years on from Debord, sooner rather later, an historical

settling of accounts with the system of global piracy called
capitalism will confront the working class with the prospect of
"righting the absolute wrong of being excluded from any real life."

As that process accelerates and deepens, it will then be the

"watchers" who tremble...

August 28, 2009 12:34 AM PDT

Bill would give president emergency control of Internet
by Declan McCullagh
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Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this
spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White
House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the
Internet.
They're not much happier about a revised version that aides to
Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent
months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a
copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears
to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector
networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.

The new version would allow the president to "declare a

cybersecurity emergency" relating to "non-governmental"
computer networks and do what's necessary to respond to the
threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification
program for "cybersecurity professionals," and a requirement that
certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be
managed by people who have been awarded that license.
"I think the redraft, while improved, remains troubling due to its
vagueness," said Larry Clinton, president of the Internet
Security Alliance, which counts representatives of Verizon,
Verisign, Nortel, and Carnegie Mellon University on its board. "It is
unclear what authority Sen. Rockefeller thinks is necessary over
the private sector. Unless this is clarified, we cannot properly
analyze, let alone support the bill."

Representatives of other large Internet and telecommunications

companies expressed concerns about the bill in a teleconference
with Rockefeller's aides this week, but were not immediately
available for interviews on Thursday.
A spokesman for Rockefeller also declined to comment on the
record Thursday, saying that many people were unavailable
because of the summer recess. A Senate source familiar with the
bill compared the president's power to take control of portions of
the Internet to what President Bush did when grounding all aircraft
on Sept. 11, 2001. The source said that one primary concern was
the electrical grid, and what would happen if it were attacked from
a broadband connection.
When Rockefeller, the chairman of the Senate Commerce
committee, and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) introduced the original
bill in April, they claimed it was vital to protect national
cybersecurity. "We must protect our critical infrastructure at all
costs--from our water to our electricity, to banking, traffic lights
and electronic health records," Rockefeller said.
The Rockefeller proposal plays out against a broader concern in
Washington, D.C., about the government's role in cybersecurity. In
May, President Obama acknowledged that the government is
"not as prepared" as it should be to respond to disruptions and
announced that a new cybersecurity coordinator position would be
created inside the White House staff. Three months later, that post
remains empty, one top cybersecurity aide has quit, and some
wags have begun to wonder why a government that receives
failing marks on cybersecurity should be trusted to instruct the
private sector what to do.

Rockefeller's revised legislation seeks to reshuffle the way the

federal government addresses the topic. It requires a
"cybersecurity workforce plan" from every federal agency, a
"dashboard" pilot project, measurements of hiring effectiveness,
and the implementation of a "comprehensive national
cybersecurity strategy" in six months--even though its mandatory
legal review will take a year to complete.
The privacy implications of sweeping changes implemented before
the legal review is finished worry Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney
with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. "As
soon as you're saying that the federal government is going to be
exercising this kind of power over private networks, it's going to
be a really big issue," he says.

Probably the most controversial language begins in Section 201,

which permits the president to "direct the national response to the
cyber threat" if necessary for "the national defense and security."
The White House is supposed to engage in "periodic mapping" of
private networks deemed to be critical, and those companies "shall
share" requested information with the federal government.
("Cyber" is defined as anything having to do with the Internet,
telecommunications, computers, or computer networks.)

"The language has changed but it doesn't contain any real

additional limits," EFF's Tien says. "It simply switches the more
direct and obvious language they had originally to the more
ambiguous (version)...The designation of what is a critical
infrastructure system or network as far as I can tell has no specific
process. There's no provision for any administrative process or
review. That's where the problems seem to start. And then you
have the amorphous powers that go along with it."

Translation: If your company is deemed "critical," a new set of

regulations kick in involving who you can hire, what information
you must disclose, and when the government would exercise
control over your computers or network.

The Internet Security Alliance's Clinton adds that his group is

"supportive of increased federal involvement to enhance cyber
security, but we believe that the wrong approach, as embodied in
this bill as introduced, will be counterproductive both from an
national economic and national secuity perspective."

Update at 3:14 p.m. PDT: I just talked to Jena Longo, deputy

communications director for the Senate Commerce committee, on
the phone. She sent me e-mail with this statement:
 The president of the United States has always had the
constitutional authority, and duty, to protect the American people
and direct the national response to any emergency that threatens
the security and safety of the United States. The Rockefeller-
Snowe Cybersecurity bill makes it clear that the president's
authority includes securing our national cyber infrastructure from
attack. The section of the bill that addresses this issue, applies
specifically to the national response to a severe attack or natural
disaster. This particular legislative language is based on
longstanding statutory authorities for wartime use of
communications networks. To be very clear, the Rockefeller-Snowe
bill will not empower a "government shutdown or takeover of the
Internet" and any suggestion otherwise is misleading and false.
The purpose of this language is to clarify how the president directs
the public-private response to a crisis, secure our economy and
safeguard our financial networks, protect the American people,
their privacy and civil liberties, and coordinate the government's
response.
Unfortunately, I'm still waiting for an on-the-record answer
to these four questions that I asked her colleague on
Wednesday. I'll let you know if and when I get a response.

Declan McCullagh is a contributor to CNET News and a

correspondent for CBSNews.com who has covered the intersection
of politics and technology for over a decade. Declan writes a
regular feature called Taking Liberties, focused on individual and
economic rights; you can bookmark his CBS News Taking Liberties
site, or subscribe to the RSS feed. You can e-mail Declan
[email protected].
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