Tag Archives: Net Neutrality

The War On Reality

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By Wayne Janis

Source: OpEdNews

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden, (Publisher Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company). is recommended to anyone wishing to understand the world in which we live.

The most dangerous war currently being fought is the “war on reality”. Of course this was Orwell’s greatest fear as expressed in 1984 – that reality itself would be appropriated, manipulated and obliterated at will by powerful forces. His original title for 1984 was “The Last Man In Europe” – i.e., the last man connected to reality.

We live in a world in which spurious realities are being manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups, all of which are filtered through major media conglomerates that are attached to the globalist ether (let’s call it the “globalist cloud”). This globalist cloud is controlled and manipulated by a globalist Intelligence Community for political/economic/social purposes.

The bombardment of pseudo-realities will produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. We need to detach the now essential and probably irrevocable social media matrix from this globalist ether and reign it in to do the good work of humanity at large. Net neutrality is one major initiative that must be pursued and won.

Net neutrality is the concept that all traffic on the Internet should be given equal treatment by Internet providers with little to no censorship, manipulation, interference, prioritization, discrimination or preference given based on user, content, website, platform, application, type of equipment, source address, destination address, or method of communication. Any rules of conduct must be determined democratically and implemented equally.

In addition the globalist cloud has misappropriated, stored, monetized and misused the entirety of our personal digital data for corporate profit and social control. We will only reclaim our privacy by exerting the highest level political pressure.

“Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Or that you don’t care about freedom of the press because you don’t like to read…Just because this or that freedom might not have meaning to you today doesn’t mean that it doesn’t or won’t have meaning tomorrow, to you, or to your neighbor or to the crowds of principled dissidents I was following on my phone who were protesting halfway across the planet, hoping to gain just a fraction of the freedoms that my country was busily dismantling.” – Snowden, Edward. Permanent Record (p. 208-209). Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition.

And we, the people, need a powerful reality motto. I have found no better one than:

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away..Philip K. Dick

Only the courage and implacable resistance of authentic human beings to powerful corruptors of truth and reality will save us from a world much like that depicted in 1984. It is unknown whether there are enough such authentic human beings or whether the battle can be won no matter the number.

As Reinhold Niebuhr said, it takes a “sublime madness of the soul” to fight against the “malignant powers of the world”.

And Chris Hedges:

“There is nothing that’s going to rationally justify it. You can know that everything around you points to the fact that your struggle for justice, maybe your entire life, has been futile. But this knowledge doesn’t invalidate what you’ve done.”– Hedges, Chris. Unspeakable: Talks with David Talbot about the Most Forbidden Topics in America . Skyhorse Publishing. Kindle Edition.

People like Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Daniel Ellsberg, Chris Hedges, John Kiriakou and others are examples of these brave and implacable martyrs who have paid the price for what is at its core a battle for the soul of humanity.

Historically, Galileo is a martyr in the war on reality even though his trial ended with an abjuration which allowed him to avoid execution and remain under house arrest for life. But I personally like the raw testicularity of Bruno Giordano (PC police be damned). He defended his astronomical beliefs to the end and refused to recant his rejection of certain dogmas of the Catholic Church. Knowing he would be burned at the stake (he was first hung naked upside down in a public square in Rome) he made a disdainful gesture to the judges and said:

“You pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it.”

Technology giants hold censorship meeting with US intelligence agencies

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By Will Morrow

Source: WSWS.org

The New York Times and Washington Post this week published reports of a private meeting last month between eight major technology and social media corporations and the US intelligence agencies, to discuss their censorship operations in the lead-up to the November 2018 mid-term elections.

The meeting was convened at Facebook’s Menlo Park, California, headquarters on May 23, and was attended by representatives from Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Snap, Twitter and Oath, which owns Yahoo and the telecommunications network Verizon, along with agents from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.

The Post described the meeting, organized at the request of Facebook, as a “new overture by the technology industry to develop closer ties to law enforcement.” Both articles were based on anonymous statements by individuals who attended. One attendee told the Post that the conversation was a “back-and-forth, with both sides talking about how they were thinking about the problem and how we were looking for opportunities to work together.”

The meeting is yet another testament to the increasing integration of the technology giants with the US military/intelligence apparatus. These companies, which provide a growing share of the technical infrastructure for the repressive apparatus of the state, increasingly see the censorship of left-wing, anti-war, and progressive viewpoints as an integral part of their business strategy.

Amazon, Microsoft and Google are competing to secure control over a $10 billion project to host the Pentagon’s Cloud infrastructure, a position that will literally mean hosting the communications between military units engaged in battle. Employees at the three companies have also written letters in recent months denouncing their provision of artificial intelligence technology to improve drone targeting (Google), facial recognition of civilians by police agencies (Amazon), and assisting in the operations of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Microsoft).

The Times and the Post are the main media voices for the campaign by the Democratic Party and intelligence agencies for Internet censorship, under the guise of opposing the spread of “misinformation” by the Russian government. This McCarthyite campaign is based on the totally unsubstantiated allegation that Russian “fake news” led to popular disillusionment with Hillary Clinton in the 2016 vote, and the subsequent election of Donald Trump. The newspapers’ synchronized reports therefore present last month’s meeting as aimed at preventing Russian interference in the mid-term elections.

But the real target of the censorship campaign is popular access to left-wing news sources not controlled by the corporate media, and the proliferation of oppositional social media content, such as videos of police killings, mass roundups of immigrants, military interventions, protests and exposures of corporate malfeasance and government criminality.

Since the beginning of the year, Facebook has rolled out a series of changes to its News Feed, including demoting political content in favor of so-called “personal moments,” and prioritizing content from so-called “trustworthy sources”—in reality pro-establishment propaganda outlets—including the Times and the Wall Street Journal. The social media giant has also changed its algorithms to reduce the spread of “viral videos,” which CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared are “not good for people’s well-being and society.”

Last Thursday, Facebook published an announcement by its Head of News Integrity Tessa Lyons, announcing a further expansion of these measures, including the introduction of “fact-checking” for videos and photos. The post also stated that Facebook is introducing “machine learning to help identify and demote foreign Pages that are likely to spread financially-motivated hoaxes to people in other countries.” These will work alongside Facebook’s army of “fact checkers”—i.e., censors—many of them former security and intelligence agents, who belong to the 20,000 people employed in its “security” and “moderation” department.

The “demotion” of what Facebook calls “false news” was codified in “community guidelines” published by the company in April. The guidelines state that because the suppression of “false news” is a “sensitive issue,” the company does not openly remove news stories, which would be easily detected by publishers and their followers, but does the same thing secretly: “significantly reduc[ing] its distribution by showing it lower on the News Feed.” (See: “Facebook codifies its censorship regime”)

Lyons repeated this line of argument in an interview with PBS’ Miles O’Brien on May 16. Admitting that “censoring and fully removing information unless it violates our community standards is not the expectation from our community,” Lyons explained that instead “we work to reduce the damage it can do” by restricting its proliferation. The Washington Post reported yesterday that while speaking at the International Fact Checkers Network conference last week, Lyons “told attendees that … [Facebook] will soon use machine learning to predict pages that are more likely to share misinformation.”

With the official ending of net neutrality this month, the financial oligarchy that controls both the search and social media monopolies and internet service providers has further tightened its grip over the freedom of expression on the internet, with ISPs given the prerogative to block and throttle internet content at will.

The expansion of internet censorship takes place amidst mounting pressure on whistleblower Julian Assange, the Wikileaks journalist who has been effectively imprisoned in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012, where he was forced to take refuge to avoid being extradited to the US and charged for publishing evidence of US government crimes. The persecution of Assange for the “crime” of publishing the truth is aimed at intimidating whistleblowers and honest journalists all around the world.

Google , which attended last month’s meeting with the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, has altered its search engine algorithms to censor left-wing and anti-war websites, including the World Socialist Web Site, whose Google search traffic fell by three quarters in response to changes by the search engine in April 2017. There are indications that Google has recently intensified its censorship of the World Socialist Web Site, with search impressions falling by as much as one third over the past month.

In August 2017, the World Socialist Web Site published an open letter to Google demanding that it end its censorship of the internet, declaring, “Censorship on this scale is political blacklisting. The obvious intent of Google’s censorship algorithm is to block news that your company does not want reported and to suppress opinions with which you do not agree.”

We urge all readers of the World Socialist Web Site seeking to defend the freedom of expression online to contact us and join the struggle against internet censorship.

Upper 1 Percent Plan Total Control of Internet News

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internet-censorship

By Wayne Madsen

Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.

With the impending demise of World Wide Web “net neutrality,” which has afforded equal access for website operators to the Internet, the one percent of billionaire investors are busy positioning themselves to take over total control of news reporting on the Internet.

In the latest move by billionaires to monopolize the Internet, Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington and billionaire Nick Berggruen announced the creation of World Post, a news and views website that will be officially launched at the World Economic Forum conclave of one percenters in Davos, Switzerland.

Among the announced contributors to World Post are Microsoft owner Bill Gates, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The move by Huffington and Berggruen follows the creation of the “investigative” news website First Look, Inc. by PayPal’s billionaire founder Pierre Omidyar. First Look plans to distribute the remaining cache of National Security Agency (NSA) documents originally leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to journalist and lawyer Glenn Greenwald.

Another billionaire who has joined the rush to seize part of the Internet is hedge fund tycoon George Soros. Soros has backed two media operations, Pro Publica, which promised to disclose many Snowden documents but has not followed through, and Project Syndicate, which paves the Internet with editorials backing all of Soros’s global initiatives.

Greenwald and his associates have published only one percent of the estimated 50,000 documents downloaded by Snowden from classified NSA databases. In a recent interview by Israel’s Channel Ten, Greenwald made it very clear that he would release more documents concerning NSA surveillance of Israeli leaders based on what the Obama administration does with regard to convicted and jailed Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard. There are increasing calls for Pollard’s release from prison and permission for him to move to Israel.

Greenwald stated to Israeli television that the slow pace of document release would continue and that he agreed with Israel on the issue of Pollard: “I think you are absolutely right to contrast the Jonathan Pollard case with revelations of American spying on their closest allies within the Israeli government, because it does underlie, underscore exactly the hypocrisy that lies at the center of so much of what the U.S. government does.”

Pollard is serving a life sentence in the Butner, North Carolina, federal penitentiary for disclosing a cache of documents that resulted in a number of U.S. intelligence assets in the Middle East being compromised to Mossad. The Mossad approached the U.S. assets and offered them a deal: cooperate with Mossad or risk being outed to their governments as CIA assets. In either case, the assets faced a certain death sentence: disclosure of work for Israel or the United States would have been met with the same fate of execution as spies.

A number of American journalists are now coming out in support of clemency for Pollard to placate Israel over the NSA spying reports leaked by Greenwald. First Look’s initial operating budget is $250 million. Along with Greenwald, journalists such as The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill; Dan Froomkin, formerly with The Washington Post; and Entertainment Weekly.com’s Bill Gannon jumped ship to sign on to First Look. The hiring of an entertainment editor who once worked for Lucas Films, the producer of Star Wars movies, raised eyebrows among those who believed Greenwald and Omidyar intended First Look to be a no-nonsense news operation. It now seems certain that First Look will be no different than Disney Corporation’s running of ABC News.

There have been some outrageous examples of corporate parents spiking stories by their news divisions in order to avoid bad publicity. In 2006, ABC News was pressured by Disney and its then-CEO Michael Eisner to kill an investigation of pedophiles being employed by Disney World in Orlando. The end of net neutrality will stymie and possibly eliminate investigative reporting on the Internet as we now know it.

The formation of the two newest media companies follows Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ acquisition of The Washington Post. It is believed that Bezos will begin to streamline the newspaper with more focus on Internet distribution than the print run.

Under President Obama, the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission have done little to advance the cause of net neutrality. In fact, the regulatory agencies have gone the other way in order to facilitate the creation of a multi-tiered Internet that will permit high bandwidth access in a “pay to play” scheme. In other words, only billionaires like Omidyar, Berggruen, Bezos, and others will have access to the top tier of the Internet to distribute varnished “news” reports.

Those media organizations without deep pockets will be relegated to the slower tiers of the Internet, sharing limited bandwidth with pornography, quack medicine, and get-rich-quick scam operators.

Rupert Murdoch’s British Sky Broadcasting and Virgin Media, formerly owned by Sir Richard Branson, have been at the forefront of establishing a “two-speed Internet.”

It is painfully clear that the top one percent are feverishly engaged in an orgy of carving up the Internet after the collapse of net neutrality for the benefit of corporatism and oligarchic control over news dissemination.

It is noteworthy that Obama’ old friend from Columbia and Harvard and his first FCC chairman, Julius Genachowski, has just joined a new firm after offering only lukewarm support for net neutrality. Genachowski now works for the eternally dubious Carlyle Group.

There is little wonder why one of World Post’s first contributors will be Google’s Schmidt, the frequent habitué of the Davos and Bilderberg secret conclaves of financial and political vipers who run the world. The journalists who have joined the frenzy to climb into the one percenters’ Internet top tier deserve nothing but condemnation from their peers.

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report.