Politics
Not that this is a shock but hope springs eternal . . . but yes the Senate has renewed the Patriot Act. With 16 provisions of the act set to expire next week, the bill would make 14 of them permanent and extend two others by four years. … on the way to the Presidents desk.
Blogs and their cooperative identity known as the “blogosphere” have become an extraordinary method for global information sharing. Moreover, no matter what topics they discuss or what political inclination they advocate they are threatened.
The threat involves the issue of “net neutrality”. Net neutrality is an idea that information networks ought to be as neutral as possible between competing content, applications and services and not discriminate as to who uses them.
Major cable and telecommunications companies lobbying Congress want to abolish net neutrality and set up the virtual equivalent of toll fees on the Internet. The idea would be to set up separate tiers of Internet access. If you want to access the superhighway, you would have to pay extra fees – a virtual toll for that access. Great if you can afford the high-speed but if you cannot then you are stuck with low band thus limiting poorer users access to multimedia content.
AT&T’s Ed Whitacre wants consumers and content providers to pay for use of his network. “”Now they might pass it on to their customers who are looking at a movie, for example. But that ought to be a cost of doing business for them. They shouldn’t get on [the network] and expect a free ride.” I think the content providers should be paying for the use of the network- obviously not the piece from the customer to the network,which has already been paid for by the customer in Internet access fees- but for accessng the so-called Internet cloud” Financial Times
BellSouth’s William Smith told reporters that he would like to turn the Internet into a “pay-for-performance marketplace” where his company could charge for the “right” to have certain services load faster than others. Washington Post
Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg says that Web applications need to “share the cost” of the broadband services already paid for by consumers. “We need to pay for the pipe.” Tech Web
Here is the problem for bloggers and other alternative and independent media producers who distribute media via the Internet: Those who cannot afford that privileged access will far outnumber those who can. This may discourage online postings of up and coming musicians, poets, writers, and it will strike a blow to the blogoshere’s diversity and variety. Limited upload speeds make it difficult for a young person in an impoverished area to post a picture to demonstrate a point.
Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, is introducing new legislation today that would stop Internet network operators from charging companies for faster delivery of their content or to consumers.
What do you think?
President Bush Signed the Nanotechnology Research and Development Act s189 in Dec., 2004 authorizing funding for nanotechnology research and development over four years and implementation of a National Nanotechnology Program. The President’s 2007 Budget provides over $1.2 billion for the multi-agency National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI). The hope is that the research will channel towards medical and energy projects.
It can also lead to the mass production of weapons with terrible consequences. Federal agencies that participate in the National Nanotechnology Initiative under the auspices of the Nanoscale Science, Engineering and Technology (NSET) Subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council include Department of Homeland Security ( includes Transportation Security Administration ), Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Defense.
At an address at the 1995 Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology, Admiral David E. Jeremiah, Vice-Chairman (ret.), U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said: “Military applications of molecular manufacturing have even greater potential than nuclear weapons to radically change the balance of power.”
A Nano, by definition is a Billionth (10 to the -9th power) (0.000 000 001), a small insect is about 200 microns (10 to the –6th power) ( 0.000 001).
“…this creates a plausible size estimate for a nanotech-built antipersonnel weapon capable of seeking and injecting toxin into unprotected humans. The human lethal dose of botulism toxin is about 100 nanograms, or about 1/100 the volume of the weapon. As many as 50 billion toxin-carrying devices—theoretically enough to kill every human on earth—could be packed into a single suitcase. Guns of all sizes would be far more powerful, and their bullets could be self-guided. Aerospace hardware would be far lighter and higher performance; built with minimal or no metal, it would be much harder to spot on radar. Embedded computers would allow remote activation of any weapon, and more compact power handling would allow greatly improved robotics. These ideas barely scratch the surface of what’s possible.” CRN (Center for Responsible Nanotechnology)
“The future cannot be predicted, but it can be invented.
-Hungarian scientist and author Dennis Gabor
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The Bush administration responded to the Sept. 11th, 2001 attacks by pushing the Patriot Act and other legislation through congress to fight terrorism. His agenda was backed by U.N. Security Council Resolution 1373. and the economic and military power of our country. (Res. 1373 pdf file) Other countries joined our country and soon the combined efforts of the “Coalition” brought about an unprecedented suppression of civil rights and liberties.
We are sacrificing our privacy and freedoms for the cause of National Security while our President demands extraordinary powers (see post here) The legal protections that are essential to our democratic society; due process, presumption of innocence and rights against unreasonable search and seizure, arbitrary detention and punishment, interception of personal communications without warrant are being ignored. (example link to for each) Infrastructures for strategic mass surveillance and dissemination of propaganda are in place to support governmental agendas. (See Govt. pdf docs: Information Operations Roadmap, Information Operations: Doctrine, Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures)
InfraGuard is Federal Bureau of Investigation program “that began in the Cleveland Field Office in 1996. It was a local effort to gain support from the information technology industry and academia for the FBI’s investigative efforts in the cyber arena. The program expanded to other FBI Field Offices, and in 1998 the FBI assigned national program responsibility for InfraGuard to the former National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) and to the Cyber Division in 2003. InfraGard and the FBI have developed a relationship of trust and credibility in the exchange of information concerning various terrorism, intelligence, criminal, and security matters.” Info Businesses are surrendering their databases to government agencies. Among them are commercial airlines, Universities, driving schools, Double Click, and Choice Point. Major Internet companies have started to deal with this problem also.
CALEA gives law enforcement officials a back door that can be used to wiretap systems. Read my previous post on this subject here.
In Orwell’s 1984 Four, the hero says:
“It was inconceivable that they watched
everybody all the time. But at any rate,
they could plug in your wire whenever
they wanted to. You had to live – did
live from the habit that became instinct
– in the assumption that every sound
you made was overheard.”
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949 (London,
Penguin Classics: 2000), p. 5.
In its May 2004 report on federal data mining efforts, Federal Efforts Cover a Wide Range of Uses, GAO-04-548,May 2004. . The U.S. General Accounting Office(now called the Government Accountability Office) revealed projects that use personal information from the private sector. The Defense Intelligence Agency, mines data “to identify foreign terrorists or U.S. citizens connected to foreign terrorism activities”. The National Security Agency program called Novel Intelligence from Massive Data, extracts information from databases including text, audio, video, graphs, images, maps, equations, and chemical formulas. The C.I.A. reportedly has a data-mining program called “Quantum Leap” which “enables an analyst to get quick access to all the information available – classified and unclassified – about virtually anyone”.
“Are we beginning, as a society to accept inhumane and extraordinary practices of social control? The majority of American’s have become apathetic and sheepishly have accepted the infringements of their rights and the rights of others. If you are not with us your against us. If you have nothing to hide, why worry. A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess of the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s great civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependency; from dependency back again to bondage.”
–Sir Alex Fraser Tytler (1742-1813) Scottish historian