Thread: Death Of The Internet: Censorship Bills In UK, Australia, U.S. Aim To Block “Undesira

Internet censorship bills currently working their way into law in the UK, Australia and the U.S. legislate for government powers to restrict and filter any website that it deems to be undesirable for public consumption.

In the UK, legislation slated as the “Digital Economy Bill“, currently being debated in the House of Lords, would allow the Home Secretary to place “a technical obligation on internet service providers� to block whichever sites it wishes.

Under clause 11 of the proposed legislation “technical obligation� is defined as follows:

A “technical obligation�, in relation to an internet service provider, is an obligation for the provider to take a technical measure against particular subscribers to its service.

A “technical measure� is a measure that — (a) limits the speed or other capacity of the service provided to a subscriber; (b) prevents a subscriber from using the service to gain access to particular material, or limits such use; (c) suspends the service provided to a subscriber; or (d) limits the service provided to a subscriber in another way.

In other words, the government will have the power to force ISPs to downgrade and even block your internet access to certain websites or altogether if it wishes.

The legislation comes in the wake of amplified UK government efforts to seize more power over the internet and those who use it.

For months now unelected “Secretary of State� Lord Mandelson has overseen government efforts to challenge the independence of the of UK’s internet infrastructure.

Mandelson also wants to impose harsh policies, via the Digital Economy Bill, that would see users’ broadband access cut off indefinitely, in addition to a fine of up to £50,000 without evidence or trial, if they download copyrighted music and films. The plan has been identified as “potentially illegal� by experts.

The legislation would impose a duty on ISPs to effectively spy on all their customers by keeping records of the websites they have visited and the material they have downloaded. ISPs who refuse to cooperate could be fined £250,000.

As Journalist and copyright law expert Cory Doctrow has noted, the bill also gives the Secretary of State the power to make up as many new penalties and enforcement systems as he likes, without Parliamentary oversight or debate.

This could include the authority to appoint private militias, who will have the power to kick you off the internet, spy on your use of the network, demand the removal of files in addition to the blocking of websites.

Mandelson and his successors will have the power to invent any penalty, including jail time, for any digital transgression he deems Britons to be guilty of.

Despite being named the Digital Economy Bill, the legislation contains nothing that will actually stimulate the economy and is largely based on shifting control over the internet into government hands, allowing unaccountable bureaucrats to arbitrarily hide information from the public should they wish to do so.

Mandelson began the onslaught on the free internet in the UK after spending a luxury two week holiday at Nat Rothschild’s Corfu mansion with multi-millionaire record company executive David Geffen.

The Digital Economy Bill is intrinsically linked to long term plans by the UK government to carry out an unprecedented extension of state powers by claiming the authority to monitor all emails, phone calls and internet activity nationwide.

Last year the government announced its intention to create a massive central database, gathering details on every text sent, e-mail sent, phone call made and website visited by everyone in the UK.

The programme, known as the “Interception Modernisation Programme�, would allow spy chiefs at GCHQ, the government’s secret eavesdropping agency, the centre for Signal Intelligence (SIGINT) activities (pictured above), to effectively place a “live tap� on every electronic communication in Britain in the name of preventing terrorism.

Following outcry over the announcement, the government suggested last April that it was scaling down the plans, with then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith stating that there were “absolutely no plans for a single central store� of communications data.

However, as the “climbdown� was celebrated by civil liberties advocates and the plan was “replaced� by new laws requiring ISPs to store details of emails and internet telephony for just 12 months, fresh details emerged indicating the government was implementing a big brother spy system that far outstrips the original public announcement.

The London Times published leaked details of a secret mass internet surveillance project known as “Mastering the Internet� (MTI).

Costing hundreds of millions in public funds, the system is already being implemented by GCHQ with the aid of American defence giant Lockheed Martin and British IT firm Detica, which has close ties to the intelligence agencies.

A group of over 300 internet service providers and telecommunications firms has attempted to fight back over the radical plans, describing the proposals as an unwarranted invasion of people’s privacy.

Currently, any interception of a communication in Britain must be authorised by a warrant signed by the home secretary or a minister of equivalent rank. Only individuals who are the subject of police or security service investigations may be subject to surveillance.

If the GCHQ’s MTI project is completed, black-box probes would be placed at critical traffic junctions with internet service providers and telephone companies, allowing eavesdroppers to instantly monitor the communications of every person in the country without the need for a warrant.

* A d v e r t i s e m e n t
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Even if you believe GCHQ’s denial that it has any plans to create a huge monitoring system, the current law under the RIPA (the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act) allows hundreds of government agencies access to the records of every internet provider in the country.

In publicly announced proposals to extend these powers, firms will be asked to collect and store even more vast amounts of data, including from social networking sites such as Facebook.

If the plans go ahead, every internet user will be given a unique ID code and all their data will be stored in one place. Government agencies such as the police and security services will have access to the data should they request it with respect to criminal or terrorist investigations.

This is clearly the next step in an incremental program to implement an already exposed full scale big brother spy system designed to completely obliterate privacy, a fundamental right under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Similar efforts to place restrictions on the internet are unfolding in Australia where the government is implementing a mandatory and wide-ranging internet filter modeled on that of the Communist Chinese government.

Australian communication minister Stephen Conroy said the government would be the final arbiter on what sites would be blacklisted under “refused classification.�

The official justification for the filter is to block child pornography, however, as the watchdog group Electronic Frontiers Australia has pointed out, the law will also allow the government to block any website it desires while the pornographers can relatively easily skirt around the filters.

Earlier this year, the Wikileaks website published a leaked secret list of sites slated to be blocked by Australia’s state-sponsored parental filter.

The list revealed that blacklisted sites included “online poker sites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight porn sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanic sites, fetish sites, Christian sites, the website of a tour operator and even a Queensland dentist.�

The filter will even block web-based games deemed unsuitable for anyone over the age of fifteen, according to the Australian government.

The broad attack on the free internet is not only restricted to the UK and Australia.

The European Union, Finland, Denmark, Germany and other countries in Europe have all proposed blocking or limiting access to the internet and using filters like those used in Iran, Syria, China, and other repressive regimes.

In 2008 in the U.S., The Motion Picture Association of America asked president Obama to introduce laws that would allow the federal government to effectively spy on the entire Internet, establishing a system where being accused of copyright infringement would result in loss of your Internet connection.

In 2009 the Cybersecurity Act was introduced, proposing to allow the federal government to tap into any digital aspect of every citizen’s information without a warrant. Banking, business and medical records would be wide open to inspection, as well as personal instant message and e mail communications.

The legislation, introduced by Senators John Rockefeller (D-W. Va.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) in April, gives the president the ability to “declare a cybersecurity emergency� and shut down or limit Internet traffic in any “critical� information network “in the interest of national security.� The bill does not define a critical information network or a cybersecurity emergency. That definition would be left to the president, according to a Mother Jones report.

During a hearing on the bill, Senator John Rockefeller betrayed the true intent behind the legislation when he stated, “Would it have been better if we’d have never invented the Internet,� while fearmongering about cyber attacks on the U.S. government and how the country could be shut down.

YouTube- Jay Rockefeller "Internet should have never been invented"

The Obama White House has also sought a private contractor to “crawl and archive� data such as comments, tag lines, e-mail, audio and video from any place online where the White House “maintains a presence� – for a period of up to eight years.

Obama has also proposed scaling back a long-standing ban on tracking how people use government Internet sites with “cookies� and other technologies.

Recent disclosures under the Freedom Of Information Act also reveal that the federal government has several contracts with social media outlets such as Youtube (Google), Facebook, Myspace and Flickr (Yahoo) that waive rules on monitoring users and permit companies to track visitors to government web sites for advertising purposes.

The U.S. military also has some $30 Billion invested in it’s own mastering the internet projects.

We have extensively covered efforts to scrap the internet as we know it and move toward a greatly restricted “internet 2″ system. All of the above represents stepping stones toward the realisation of that agenda.

The free internet is under attack the world over, only by exposing the true intentions of our governments to restrict the flow of data can we defeat such efforts and preserve the last vestige of independent information.

Well, at the very least: expect a 'Hacker War' of Internet freedom fighters if centralisation of the World Wide Web were to occur. There is no way the NWO would be able to counter them. Digital warfare against these centralists/corporatists would last for a long time.

In other words: freedom-loving hackers possess perseverance, tenacity, and purpose for liberty.

Question: can the New World Order sustain its first 'DWWI?' (First Digital World War?).