Friday, January 20, 2012

The Great Internet Wars Have Begun

The Great Internet Wars Have Begun

http://www.prisonplanet.com/the-great-internet-wars-have-begun.html



In the video below, we note that the massive protest this week against SOPA and PIPA should not merely be about government and corporate curtailment of freedom of expression on the internet.

It also crucial that it be about resistance against an all-out effort by the elite and their technocrats to turn the internet into an all-encompassing panopticon surveillance and control grid. Contrary to common belief, the internet was not built to be a networked computer system designed to withstand a nuclear war, but as a surveillance and control grid. It was not happenstance that the platform found its way into public use.

In addition to a master networked surveillance tool, the internet is now a weaponized system that will be used to take out enemies of the state, as the Pentagon made abundantly clear following a concerted propaganda campaign hyping the dubious threat of cyber attacks on the power grid and national infrastructure. The system is not designed to attack remote cave dwelling terrorists, as the government would have us believe, but those of us designated as domestic terrorists.

Following the introduction of the internet and more specifically the world wide web in the early 1990s, the technocrats began engineering aspects of the surveillance and control grid that are now increasingly embedded in much of our everyday technology – from “smart phones” that use GPS to track and trace our every move to home appliances networked across the internet and televisions with onboard cameras and microphones in TiVo DVRs and other devices that surreptitiously record our conversations and movement.

GPS is also now a standard “feature” in our cars. So-called black boxes” recording our driving habits will soon be mandatory under the pretense of gathering information for car accident investigations.

Other surveillance tools include so-called smart meters on our homes that monitor electrical usage and provide this data not only to the government but that will be given or sold to a vast array of third parties for commercial purposes.

As previously noted, Google has repeatedly deleted videos unacceptable to the government from its YouTube service and has methodically de-listed alternative news sites from Google News. As a further example of how new technologies facilitate an Orwellian memory hole process where information may disappear without warning, consider Amazon’s arbitrary deletion of purchased books on the Kindle devices of customers. (Significantly, the book in question was Orwell’s classic Nineteen Eighty Four.)

From license plate reading technology to RFID tags embedded in clothes to proposals to have fusion centers track and trace our email (the NSA has done the latter now for years), the surveillance state is already here and growing at an alarming rate. We are quickly entering the world portrayed in Minority Report where an array of devices monitor and surveil our every move.

In March of 2011, Mike Adams described a plan by the Department of Homeland Security “to roll out a new wave of mobile surveillance technologies at train stations, stadiums and streets. These new technologies will track your eye movements, capture and record your facial dimensions for face-recognition processing, bathe you in X-rays to look under your clothes, and even image your naked body using whole-body infrared images.”

All of the efforts of government and corporations to turn the world into a high-tech panopticon – literary, a prison where the inmates are continuously surveilled without their knowledge or consent – is now rolling along at a brisk clip. The internet is at the forefront of that insidious effort.

We are not attempting to dismiss commendable efforts to prevent SOPA and PIPA from becoming law. However, we must realize that the battle to maintain and restore our liberty is like playing a game of Spock’s three-dimensional chess.

It is active and in motion on multiple levels. We must ensure that the technology we consent to use is not weaponized or employed to track and trace our every move. At the same time, it is critical that we work to restore liberties the government has robbed from us under the pretense of saving us from not only phantom terrorists but also from the banker imported scourge of drugs and other invented dangers like man-made global warming.

The great internet wars have begun. It is our responsibility to confront each one decisively and not allow the controllers to divert us down a single path. We must realize that the battle to defeat SOPA and PIPA is part of a larger, more comprehensive fight to resist tyranny in all forms, not simply in Congress where the most obvious efforts appear with theatrical media fanfare.