government interference internet

The Internet (posts relating to)

4/25/09 (By Travis)

Senate Proposal Could Put Heavy Restrictions on Internet Freedoms
FoxNews ^ | Tuesday, April 21, 2009 | James Osborne

A proposed bill that would give the president widespread power to shut down the Internet in the event of a cyberattack could have sweeping implications on civil liberties. The days of an open, largely unregulated Internet may soon come to an end.

A bill making its way through Congress proposes to give the U.S. government authority over all networks considered part of the nation's critical infrastructure. Under the proposed Cybersecurity Act of 2009, the president would have the authority to shut down Internet traffic to protect national security.

The government also would have access to digital data from a vast array of industries including banking, telecommunications and energy. A second bill, meanwhile, would create a national cybersecurity adviser -- commonly referred to as the cybersecurity czar -- within the White House to coordinate strategy with a wide range of federal agencies involved.

4/25/09 (By Travis)

Internet purchases soon to include sales tax
Wallet Pop ^ | Apr 20th 2009 | Tom Barlow

If you're planning a major purchase via the Internet, you might want to do it quickly. Congress is expected to introduce a bill this week that would require Amazon.com, L.L. Bean, Cabela's and other online merchants to collect sales tax on all online purchases and return that money to the state in which the purchaser resides.

Posted 1/18/09 (By Travis)

Stimulus for Tax Collectors -- Internet consumers beware
Wall Street Journal ^ | January 15, 2009

America's state and local governments have a new proposal for the Obama stimulus plan: Slip in an Internet sales tax. The National Conference of State Legislatures estimates that states could wring another $30 billion out of consumers if Washington will allow them to force out-of-state Web merchants to collect sales taxes.

Posted 8/17/06 (By Travis)

Did you know that 'Jimmy Wales', founder of Wikipedia, is an Ayn Rand loving Libertarian?

He has since criticized Wales's approach to the project, describing Wales as "decidedly anti-elitist". Wales later took issue with this description in a C-SPAN interview, describing himself as not anti-elitist but "perhaps anti-credentialist. To me the key thing is getting it right. And if a person's really smart and they're doing fantastic work, I don't care if they're a high school kid or a Harvard professor."

The setup of Wikipedia is quite interesting. Anyone can change just about any entry, yet the people police themselves, and the work is remarkably accurate and proliferate. As James Madison said:

"If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself."

The fact that Wikipedia, a reflection itself of the Internet, is able to function with little external control is, perhaps, a vindication of Wale's philosophy and an attest to the goodness of our fellow man.

Posted 5/7/06

The Bureaucrat in your Internet phone (not the real title)

5/6/06 Fox News In the current case, Edwards appeared especially skeptical over the FCC's decision to require that providers of Internet phone service and broadband services must ensure their equipment can accommodate police wiretaps under the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, known as CALEA.

Harry Browne said:

If government had taken over the auto industry in 1920, today we'd all be driving Model-T cars -- and saying, 'If it weren't for the government, we'd have no cars at all.'

In this case, it is because of government and their stupid, silly, asinine regulations and meddlings that we do not have free internet phones at the present time.

The technology is there and has been there, but then again, so has government. Expand this across nearly every industry and you can begin to realize the harm our own government propogates on society in the name of 'protecting us'.

(Added to 'The Internet' and 'The Bureaucrat In Your...')

(Posted 6/28/05)

Bloggers Fighting Government regulation

6/28/05 Associated Press Speaking of big, bloated, tyrannical government (eminent domain), here we have government trying, or at least setting the ground rules, to make sure we citizens don't become too influential in the blogosphere. The problem lies in the original campaign finance reform laws. McCain-Fingold, lauded by the press and acquiesced to by spineless Republicans was a complete failure. More money than ever before is being spent in politics. So why was the original law even passed? Because it sounded good, made some great headlines, and gave some politicians good press. All campaign finance reform laws need to be abolished and government needs to get out of the Internet. And you can guess which side might be in favor of more regulation:

Bloggers plead freedom from election laws

6/28/05 CNET news Carol Darr of the Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet warned that the so-called media exception would be abused. If the FEC veered in that direction, Darr said, you'd see "the campaign finance laws that we've operated under for 50 years just crumble." Larry Noble of the Center for Responsive Politics added: "I don't think you can just make everybody the press." (Both of these are hidden Liberal organizations and front organizations for the Left)

But what should that limit be? John Morris of the Center for Democracy & Technology (Another hidden Lib organization) suggested $500. FEC Chairman Scott Thomas, a Democrat, said $1,000 was "a little low" and "if Congress would help us on that, it would alleviate some of the concerns."

Republican Commissioner Bradley Smith indicated that a hybrid approach might work. "I think the press exemption may be more helpful than people think," Smith said. "Republicans clearly believe in a broader press exemption than Democrats do."

Online politicking should not be subject to onerous federal rules, Democratic FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub said. "We're all agreed about that." But, Weintraub added, "What is the best way for us to regulate bloggers?"

Through their various phony and fake front organizations, the Democratic party/and/or their liberal base, is, again, attempting to again stifle free speech and the press is, again, not reporting it. The headline of this story should be: 'Democrats battle to limit bloggers'. Why isn't it?

The Democratic party is fearful that the media monopoly they have held since the 1930s is crumbling. Indeed, it was their last Presidential candidate who first voiced his 'concerns' (documented in this post):

"We learned," Kerry said to the gathering, "that the mainstream media, over the course of the last year, did a pretty good job of discerning. But there's a subculture and a sub-media that talks and keeps things going for entertainment purposes rather than for the flow of information. And that has a profound impact and undermines what we call the mainstream media of the country. And so the decision-making ability of the American electorate has been profoundly impacted as a consequence of that. The question is, what are we going to do about it?"

(posted 6/30/05)

Internet Phones Given 911 Deadline

5/19/05 Associated Press A look at some more hurtful government meddling in the Internet: Federal regulators voted Thursday to require that Internet phone service providers connect their customers to the same emergency 911 capabilities as callers with traditional service within four months. The 4-0 vote came after FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin invited families impacted by the inability to reach emergency response centers over Internet phones to tell their stories. A Florida woman described how her infant daughter died while she was unable to reach an emergency dispatcher through her Internet phone. This burdensome regulation will severely limit this new technology and hurt economic growth. What if I don't want 911 service on my phone? Too bad. Government believes you have to have it and are too stupid to decide otherwise.

"By moving quickly, we will save lives," said Commissioner Michael J. Copps. The purpose of government is not to save lives! The purpose of government is not to 'get higher tax revenues' to spend on social programs as the liberal judges who decided the Keto property decision reasoned. The purpose of government is to protect the liberties of the people of the United States. A nanny state that 'saves lives' does not protect our liberty and more likely then not, doesn't even save lives.

Senate Approves Anti-Gmail bill

5/27/05 Zdnet Gmail scans emails for key words and offers custom personal advertisements on the side. Yet, Google's development of Gmail was delayed because of meddling government regulators and politicians who were fraught with worry that consumers might choose something they shouldn't. The California state Senate on Thursday approved a bill that takes aim at Google's new Gmail service, placing strict limits on e-mail providers seeking to scan customer messages for advertising and other purposes. "My legislation guarantees that our most private communications will remain just that--private," said Sen. Liz Figueroa, D-Fremont, the bill's author, according to a statement. But why don't you leave this to the companies and their consumers. People will choose what is acceptable to them.

Down to the Wire

May/June Foreign Affairs Summary: Once a leader in Internet innovation, the United States has fallen far behind Japan and other Asian states in deploying broadband and the latest mobile-phone technology. This lag will cost it dearly. By outdoing the United States, Japan and its neighbors are positioning themselves to be the first states to reap the benefits of the broadband era: economic growth, increased productivity, and a better quality of life. Maybe this problem would be rectified if these 'feel good', 'life saving' regulators would stop regulating the Internet to death...

Entrepreneurs Pitch "Code Boat" For Near-Shore IT Outsourcing

5/7/05 Outsourcingpipline.com But not all is lost. The American people are doing their best to get around the government's best attempts to stifle and restrict them: Two California entrepreneurs are developing an IT services business plan that reads like a CIO's paradise: sharply lower IT prices coupled with easy access to software and engineering outsourcing developers just a short boat ride away. It's the "Code Boat," a plan by David Cook and Roger Green, the founders of SeaCode. Their venture calls for staffing a cruise ship three miles off the Southern California coast with customer IT specialists and then making the ship available to IT headquarters staffers through a short water taxi ride.

Blogosphere Politics Update 28/3/05

2/21/05 US News World Report. Michael Barone writes a piece comparing the leftist and rightist blogs. On the left there is one large dominating blog, which is operated by a Democratic consultant who received money (which he disclosed) from the Dean campaign. The Democratic Internet constituency was and is motivated by one thing more than anything else: hatred of George W. Bush. <..> But the right blogosphere was different from the left. There was no one dominant website and no one orthodoxy. <..> The focus of hatred in the right blogosphere is not Kerry or the Democrats but what these bloggers call Mainstream Media, or MSM. They argue, correctly in my view, that the New York Times, CBS News, and others distorted the news in an attempt to defeat Bush in 2004. I wonder if it is a coincidence that the blog structure seems to match ideology (top down versus bottom up)...

These blogs are playing an increasingly influential roll in elections. According to a recent poll: Reliance on the Internet for political news during presidential campaigns grew from 3 percent in 1996 to 18 percent in 2004. Although only 24% of those using the Internet for political news used blogs, this number is rapidly growing. James Miller from Tech Station writes in The coming War on Blogs that elements of the political elite and the media are likely to make attempts to use government to squash their competition and further their political agendas. There is already talk of applying the totally failed and unconstitutional Campaign Finance reform laws to the Internet.

It is easy to determine which side is being hurt by an increase in freedom of choice and the disintegration of the Mainstream Media monopoly. Here is Democratic Presidential Candidate John Kerry:

So the stupid American public need to be protected from influences outside the liberal mainstream press. What are you going to do about it Senator?

Maybe Kerry is upset because people like me will continue to call him out on his continuing contradictory and revisionist statements:

THEN

(9/30/04) (First Presidential Debate)

There's only 25 percent of the people in there. They can't have an election right now. The president's not getting the job done.

(10/8/04) (Second Presidential Debate)

There's chaos in Iraq. King Abdullah of Jordan said just yesterday or the day before you can't hold elections in Iraq with the chaos that's going on today.

(1/30/05 on Iraqi election day) (Meet the Press)

"It is hard to say that something is legitimate when whole portions of the country can't vote and doesn't vote," <..> "No one in the United States should try to overhype this election."

NOW

(3/16/05) (CNN)

JUDY WOODRUFF: Is the situation in Iraq better now than what you had predicted during the campaign, given on the recent elections there and moves toward democracy?
KERRY: No, I think it's what I said it would be. In fact, when I came back from Iraq about a month and a half ago before the elections, I said that that we ought to have the elections that the Iraqi people want a vote and they're going to turn out in significant numbers.

Or perhaps Kerry doesn't appreciate attention being brought to his Senate activities, such as his recent sponsorship of a statement honoring W.E.B. Du Bois, a former socialist presidential candidate who renounced his American citizenship and joined the communist party. Human Events reports: After the outbreak of the Korean War (in which 54,000 US troops died to liberate South Korea), Du Bois contended in 1950 that "the North Koreans are fighting exactly the things for which Americans fought in 1776." (in the past decade an estimated 12% of their population has died of starvation as the dictatorship built nuclear weapons) Three years later, he eulogized Stalin (the greatest mass murder and enslaver in the history of the world) as a "great" and "courageous" man, "attacked and slandered as few men of power have been." Not surprisingly, The Soviet Union awarded W.E.B. Du Bois the Lenin Peace Prize. Maoist China staged a national holiday in his honor in 1959. Du Bois was also (twice) kicked out of the NAACP (which he helped found) for advocating racial segregation and was critical of Martin Luther King's nonviolent approach to civil rights. The Maoist International Movement still celebrates Du Bois's birthday stating:

Shortly before death, Du Bois said, "Today my resentment at the doctrine of race superiority, as preached and practiced by the white world for the last 250 years, has been pointed to with sharp criticism and contrasted with the charity of Gandhi and of the colored minister [Dr. Martin Luther King] who led the recent boycott in Alabama. I am quite frank: I do not pretend to 'love' white people. I think that as a race they are the most selfish of any on earth. . . . I refer to the white world as a whole. We are come to a time when the sins and mistakes of the whole group must be considered and judged, not simply small localities or single individuals.

Or maybe Senator Kerry believes the Mainstream Media is right not to point our that what he constantly claimed was a "a dream based on illusion, but one which could have real and terrible consequences" (14), is no longer a 'dream' or an 'illusion' and could now have the 'terrible' consequence of protecting us from a North Korean nuclear missile attack. Kerry spent his career attacking missile defense on the absurd grounds that it would never work and/or fuel an arms race. He was wrong on both counts, and it is now operational:

U.S. 'can shoot down N. Korea missiles now'

3/16/05 World Net Daily: If nuclear missiles were suddenly fired at the United States from North Korea, the U.S. is ready to shoot them down. That's the opinion of Major Gen. John Holly, head of the missile-shield program for the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency. "If directed, we could provide a limited defense against an attack out of Northeast Asia," Holly told Alaska lawmakers, according to the Associated Press.

I guess the last thing Senator Kerry would want is to have any of these bothersome facts impacting the "decision-making ability of the American electorate"...