the self-promoting turbogeeks at wired magazine have a story about leaked swedish police documents describing the lurid sexual allegations about julian assange... the most damning of these, i suppose, are those that refer to his low standard of personal hygiene: apparently he did not flush the toilet after use, or bathe regularly. this confirms mr. keller's reminiscences about his encounters with assange in the new york times(-up!). i don't know about assange's alleged victims' personal habits, either, seeings how they collected used condoms and provided investigators with sexual performance evaluations of mr. assange.
as one friend of mine remarked many years ago, by the time they find out you have a small dick, it's already too late!
frankly, i get more tired than wired these days, but they do have a report of some interest about the latest developments in the ongoing government campaign to repeal freedom of speech, thought and expression.
it's blandly presented as a bipartisan legislative effort to enact laws mandating the US ISPs provide a "kill switch" for internet communications in the event of a "national emergency". our favorite moral retard, joe lieberman is one of the co-sponsors, along with susan collins, the so-called moderate GOPper from maine.
in the story, the legislative solons explain that the "bill is designed to protect against “significant” cyber threats before they cause damage," which sounds good and reasonable -- until you consider the status quo's definition of a threat: anything that challenges its grip on power.
it's certainly no accident that egypt's dictatorship killed access to the internet during the protests against the regime, as the web proved to be the mechanism by which the revolutionaries organized themselves into an effective movement -- all without a organizational hierarchy that could be attacked and decapitated by the state. the internet is the public's secret weapon for seizing the initiative against the same old, predictable methods of repression that dictatorial regimes have relied upon for the past century.
(it's interesting, by the way, how the "pro-mubarak" forces -- which were plainclothes government police and their armed goons -- came riding to the rescue on horseback, and employing the same tired anti-demonstrator tactics that so characterize the mubarak dictatorship.)
speaking of julian assange, he's a case in point of governments employing the more traditional forms of reprisal and attack against critics and foes of their regimes: good, old-fashioned character assassination. assange himself predicted that his organization would face the prospect of decapitation of the leadership -- and pentagon papers from 2008 lay out the strategy the pentagon would employ to silence wikileaks.
but the old dogs have some new tricks, too. the military has made control of land, sea and air it's objective into the 20th century; in the current era, however, they have added to their agenda control of space -- both outer and cyber. while we in the public are just beginning to consider the many avenues for manipulation and control over the information highway that our government can employ on behalf of its patrons, they have been hard and work -- and working hard at spending your tax dollars -- to foreclose any possibility that a free flow of information can potentially damage them and thwart their agenda for complete global control.
i've always been kind of amused at the government's meticulous attention to giving a legal facade to their brazenly unconstitutional evisceration of our freedoms, but i've come to learn that even the nazis in their most heinous projects always operated under the fiction of "rule of law".
yesterday morning, at a time when mubarak had made his statement to the egyptian people and sent his hired muscle into the crowds to sow terror, it just so happened that al-jazeera suddenly and completely vanished off the internet where i was at work. there were no al-jazeera stories to be seen on google news, and no link anywhere to an al-jazeera site worked. there were still youtube videos available, and pages were cached on google, but otherwise it was astonishing how quickly and totally any content provider could be "disappeared" from the internet.
a technical glitch, no doubt. i neither read no heard of anyone else having observed this blackout, but that doesn't surprise me, either. the site returned after a while, and apparently no one really cared to make the obvious inference, but the point was made anyway.
political hacks will insist their laws are for the "protection" of our internet and our country against criminals or terrorists, but we have ample evidence that US policy is driven not by the threat of terrorism, but rather the preservation and enlargement of the plutocratic status quo. the US invaded iraq not out of concern for terrorism or WMD, but to stifle political change that might negatively affect US interests in the great game of geopolitics. likewise, these proposed laws are not aimed at preventing hackers from opening the floodgates of the hoover dam, which sounds like a disaster-flick too far-out even for hollywood, but to slience non-corporate voices of dissent, and to eliminate the threat that protesters could use social media to organize protests.
during the latter years of the bush administration, when then new york times(-up!) printed their stories about how phone companies abetted the government's program of vacuum-cleaner surveillance on their customers, the magnitude of the elites' program of total control over the population came into sharp relief. the government set up shop in the phone companies' control rooms, essentially tapping into the main line that carries all communications through their networks, so that every shred of your private communications was an open book for government goons.
when this became public knowledge, congress rushed to give the phone companies retroactive immunity from prosecution and civil suits, in a full-court press to prevent lawsuits from unearthing the scale and scope of the government's program of surveillance against its citizens. had these suits come to trial, the government would have been completely exposed for the orwellian conspiracy that it is -- as the phone companies could not cloak its complicity under the rubric of "national security," which is the government's favored tactic for short-circuiting transparency in courtroom proceedings.
the government has amply proved on issue after issue its complete dedication to the evisceration of citizens' rights when they come into conflict with the government's own program of acting as the enablers of corporate control over the economy, to promote the welfare of the few at the expense of the many. we see the model in nations such as egypt, where the neo-liberal project of privatization and monetization of the public sector, and the wholesale extraction of the nation's assets, and transfer to the investor class, is given to stewards like mubarak, who rules with brutality over a population whose well-being and aspirations are slowly being asphyxiated by the world's corporate overlords.
the internet is too important for commerce to be allowed to be an open community of all the people of the planet. it is gradually, relentlessly being monetized and converted into a platform for commercial transactions, and instead of becoming a medium for the unlimited sharing of news and views, it's being regulated and circumscribed to carry only messages and content that reinforce the party line.
when the revolution comes to the USA, the internet will be no more a threat to the government than all those supposed left-wing conspiracies that glenn beck is always ranting about...
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