British students are unable to concentrate on reading an academicbook for study, because the internet is ‘”rewiring” their brains, a newdocumentary claims.
Experts say the internet encourages users to dart between pagesinstead of concentrating on one source such as a book, the traditionalstaple of student research.
This new ‘associative’ thinking leaves the majority incapable of‘linear’ disciplines like reading and writing at length because theirminds have been remoulded to function differently.
And within three years, hundreds of thousands of British teenagerswill require medication or hospital treatment for mental illnessescaused by excessive web use, psychologists warn.
The claims will be made on the final episode of BBC2’s The Virtual Revolution on Saturday, February 20.
U.S. To Be Hit By Massive Cyber Attack On Feb. 16. Asterisk.
OnFebruary 16, at about 10:00 am ET, the U.S. will be hit by a massive,crippling cyber attack from an unknown entity. Key players will convenein the White House situation room and plan the response, frommitigation to (possibly) retaliation. It’ll be live on television –G.N.N.
Of course, my knowledge of this attack will not add me tothe radar screens of the FBI — they know about it too. The reason Ifelt compelled to write a pseudo-serious lead to this post is because,for the first time, a cyber attack is going to be war-gamed, in public,for all the country to see. It will be quite realistic, featuringsenior intelligence and national security officials, including formerdirectors of intelligence agencies and combatant commands and homelandsecurity advisers. A production company has been hired to re-create aWhite House Sit Room in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, and professionalscriptwriters have been working with experts to create a real-lifescenario.
The sponsors of the event include companies with financial stakes inthe future of cyber defense — General Dynamics is one — but alsocompanies whose transactions are the lifeblood to the American economy,and who want to foster a greater sense of urgency among the public andpolicymakers. (PayPal has joined as a sponsor.)
Actual participants don’t know what’s going to happen. I have a generalidea, but I have been sworn to keep the scenario a secret until itunfolds. It will be, I can say, dynamic — runners with cards willenter the “Sit Room” with new information. It is not obvious. And itwill not be easy to mitigate.
At the end, participants will step out of their roles for a hotwash — open to the press and the experts.
At least three times this year, the U.S. government has held privateversions of cyber wargames. This will be open to the press. CNN hasagreed to record the event for broadcast later in the week.
Participants include John Negroponte, the first DNI, who will be thefictional Secretary of State. (Intel insiders will enjoy this rolechange.) Ex-DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff will be the NationalSecurity Adviser. Fran Townsend, the former White House HomelandSecurity Adviser, will be the secretary of DHS. Former CIA deputydirector John McLaughlin will be the Director of NationalIntelligence. Other big-name participants include Jamie Gorelick,Stewart Baker, Joe Lockhart and Bennet Johnson.
TheBipartisan Policy Center, which has ported over the 9/11 Commissionco-chairs, Lee Hamilton and Tom Keane, is coordinating the event.
Hackers protesting government censorship of theInternet have shut down several Australian government websites in ademonstration against the announcement that filters would be imposed toblock access to websites deemed offensive by the authorities.
The campaign was launched by the anti-Scientology group Anonymousin response to plans to implement a mandatory and wide-ranging internetfilter modeled on that of the Communist Chinese government.
“The main government website, www.australia.gov.au, andparliament’s www.aph.gov.au were both affected along with the sites forPrime Minister Kevin Rudd and Communications Minister Stephen Conroy,” reports AFP.
“No one messes with our access to perfectly legal (or illegal) content for any reason,” said a statement released by the group.
The Australian government attacked the campaign as “not a legitimate form of political statement.” Despite the Australian government promising that the Internet filterwould only be used to block access to child pornography and otherillegal websites, the watchdog group Electronic Frontiers Australia warned that the law will also allow the government to block any website it desires under vague definitions.
The list revealed that blacklisted sites included “online pokersites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight porn sites, Wikipediaentries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanicsites, fetish sites, Christian sites, the website of a tour operatorand even a Queensland dentist.”
The filter will even block web-based games deemed unsuitable for anyone over the age of fifteen, according to the Australian government.
Calls to mandate Internet users to obtain licenses, in other wordsgovernment permission, before they can post to the web have grown inrecent weeks, with top Microsoft executive Craig Mundie insisting at the recent Davos Economic Forum that the Internet should be policed.
Within days, Time Magazine enthusiastically jumped on the bandwagonto back Mundie’s proposal, as authorities push for a system even morestifling than in Communist China, where only people who have beenapproved by the authorities would be allowed to express free speech.
ISPs across the world, including in supposed democratic countries like the UK, the US and New Zealand, have periodically blocked access to Alex Jones’ websites without justification and only restored access after a barrage of complaints.
As we have highlighted before, although the merits ofhacking as a form of protest can be debated, what seems certain tohappen is that governments will launch a false flag cyber attack whichwill cause a major catastrophe that can then be blamed on the freeInternet, acting as a pretext to tighten the screws on plans forcentralized regulation and censorship which are already in place.
Watch the video below in which Alex Jones exposes theincremental deployment of Chinese style Internet censorship across theworld.
Time Magazine Pushes Draconian Internet Licensing Plan
Norbert Schneider is a Hitler wannabe who wants to require licenses for all internet transmissions of YouTube-like materials.No sooner had I receive the article copied further below than I found, through a search of the German internet, the following:
So, folks, it is happening. It is no longer in the talking stage. Neo-Nazii Germany is taking the lead.
Don Hank.
Shortly after Time Magazine started peddling the proposal, the New York Times soon followed suit with a blog this morning entitled Driver’s Licenses for the Internet? which merely parrots Kiviat’s talking points.
Of course there’s a very good reason for Time Magazine and the New York Times to be pushing for measures that would undoubtedly lead to a chilling effect on free speech which would in turn eviscerate the blogosphere.
Like the rest of the mainstream print dinosaurs, physical sales of Time Magazine have been plummeting, partly as a result of more people getting their news for free on the web from independent sources that don’t feed at the trough of the military-industrial complex. Ad sales for the New York Timessunk by no less than 28 per cent last year with subscriptions and street sales also falling.
“The Internet, where newspapers are generally free, has siphoned off circulation and advertising,” conceded an October 2009 NY Times article, which is precisely why establishment publications like the Old Gray Lady and Time are pushing proposals that would strangle the blogosphere and in turn eliminate their competition – while devastating free speech all in one foul swoop.
Child spies will be encouraged to report their neighbours as part of the latest drive to cut thuggery and anti-social behaviour on estates.
As part of a campaign launched yesterday, youngsters will look for residents with untidy or litter-strewn surroundings and then try to persuade them to clean up their homes.
Children involved should also write to authorities to demand action against those whose houses are labelled anti-social, ministers recommended.
Using young people to target residents identified as letting the neighbourhood down ‘teaches the children a sense of pride’ and shows them they have the power to get things done, the Department of Communities and Local Government said.
But critics warned that anti-social behaviour on estates is routinely committed by children and recruiting school-age youngsters to report their neighbours is a recipe for intimidation.
‘A plan like this can easily be milked by young people,’ criminologist Dr David Green of the Civitas think-tank said. ‘I worry that it would become a licence for children to harass people.’
The child spy scheme was launched by Communities Secretary John Denham and Home Secretary Alan Johnson, who called for ‘an army of community champions to challenge anti-social behaviour’.
The plan is to be backed by leaflet drops to ten million householders across 130 areas of the country affected by violence, vandalism and gang activity. It follows growing disillusion with Labour’s decade of campaigns to reduce anti-social behaviour and a widespread perception that Asbos have been ineffective in deterring youngsters from crime.
Ministers said the child spies idea had been tested in Nottingham, where volunteers had ‘got young people themselves involved in challenging anti-social behaviour and learning that they do have the power to get things done’.
The Communities Department said that under the system children ‘spotted problems’ in their neighbourhood and then wrote letters to the authorities to demand action.
In one instance, it said young people identified untidy gardens, these residents received letters from the housing manager and ‘as a result these gardens have been tidied by residents’.
Mr Denham said neighbourhoods had been transformed by volunteers and hoped ‘their example can inspire many others to get involved’.
But Dr Green said: ‘There is a risk here that the same people who break up your car will then complain that you have left a wreck outside your house.’
● Snoopers could be given cash rewards for identifying benefit cheats under controversial plans being drawn up by ministers. They are considering whether informers should be given a share of the money saved.
Ministers believe offering incentives for reporting cheats will be a powerful tool in the battle to tackle benefit fraud, which costs taxpayers around £1billion a year.
But privacy campaigners called the idea ‘immoral and dangerous’.
With influential proponents recently calling for a newly regulated world wide web, we got a preview of how that might look this past weekend after both Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com were completely blocked to many Internet users in New Zealand.
The block was only removed early this morning following a raft of complaints after both websites were unavailable on many ISP’s since Friday.
As the New Zealand based InfoNews website reported yesterday, both of Alex Jones’ flagship websites were blocked by ISPs using Asia Netcom for their international internet traffic.
“An avid fan of Infowars.com and a 9/11 truth activist, Jeff Mitchell, reported on Saturday that he contacted his ISP, Orcon, to establish what was causing the block, and was advised by a computer technician who did a trace route, that the break in traffic to the two websites was found to be occurring at Asia Netcom’s router in Sydney,” stated the report.
The websites were blocked on every ISP that relied on Asia Netcom as its upstream provider, including Woosh, Telecom, Slingshot and Orcon.
According to Duncan Blair, Head of Brand and Communications at Orcon, access to content hosted on the Limelight content distribution network, including Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com, was blocked as a result of a “technical issue”.
“I’m the person who half-made this story possible by calling my ISP,” wrote Jeff Mitchell in a comment on Prison Planet. “Just want to report that infowars.com is now working for me, even though it was down all weekend! We complained to ISPs and they were “very concerned” about censorship; that, combined with this article on prisonplanet could very well have been the reason for us regaining access.”
Whether the problem was down to technical issues or deliberate censorship, the fact that ISP’s can selectively block certain websites at the flick of a switch gives us a frightening preview of what a Chinese-style government regulated Internet would look like, which is exactly what influential insiders are calling for.
It is important to stress that we receive emails on a weekly basis informing us that our websites have been blocked as “hate speech” or “offensive material” at Internet cafes, libraries, transport hubs, workplaces, and numerous other buildings not only in the United States but across the world.
As we reported in 2008, London’s St. Pancras International, which millions of people traveling across mainland Europe pass through every year, completely blocks Prison Planet, Infowars and even more mainstream political websites as a matter of course.
The move to impose centralized government control and regulation of the free Internet has accelerated over the past 12 months.
Last week, Time Magazine enthusiastically jumped on the bandwagon to back Microsoft executive Craig Mundie’s call for Internet licensing, as authorities push for a system even more stifling than in Communist China, where only people with government permission would be allowed to express free speech.
During a recent conference at the Davos Economic Forum, Mundie, chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft, told fellow globalists at the summit that the Internet needed to be policed by means of introducing licenses similar to drivers licenses – in other words government permission to use the web.
Internet censorship bills currently working their way into law in the UK, Australia and the U.S. legislate for government powers to restrict and filter any website that it deems to be undesirable for public consumption. In Italy, new rules to be imposed by government decree force anyone who wishes to upload a video to the web to get permission from the government’s Communications Ministry.
Power brokers in the White House have openly declared war on free speech and targeted Internet “conspiracy theorists” as the main threat to their agenda.
On page 14 of Sunstein’s January 2008 white paper entitled “Conspiracy Theories,” the man who is now Obama’s head of information technology in the White House proposed that each of the following measures “will have a place under imaginable conditions” according to the strategy detailed in the essay.
1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing. 2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories.
The ominous spectacle of major free speech websites going dark in supposedly democratic countries is a shocking portend of what the establishment wants to impose on a widespread basis. Only by screaming bloody murder in defense of the last true outpost of free speech – the Internet – and threatening boycotts and aggressive public relations campaigns can we counter the insidious move to silence the only remaining open forum of lawful dissent.
A most intriguing report authored by Minister AlinaLevitskaya, who heads the Department of State Policy Concerning Youth, Education and the Social Protection of Children of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, warns that the Motherland should not adopt (in any form) the educational polices of the United States as they pertain to computer and digital education of children as new research is showing that young American adults and children are in “grave danger” of becoming “techno-slaves” who will soon be unable to “fully function” in any “normal world” interaction with other human beings.
The greatest danger posed by this rising class of “techno-slaves” in America, this report states, is their having been deliberately cut-off from the knowledge of the ancients contained in our World’s oldest religious manuscripts that warned of a time when “no man might buy or sell save he that had the mark”, that refers to what is commonly called the “Mark of the Beast”.
[Note: The Greek word used for “mark” (as in Mark of the Beast) is “charagma” and was the seal stamped with the name and date of the emperor and attached to commercial documents used by the Roman Empire.]
So insidious has the indoctrination of these “techno-slaves” become in the United States that for the past 30 years virtually all knowledge of the ancients has been wiped from their memory and the teaching to them of any religious subject has been outlawed, including a US Supreme Court ruling this past month that forbade a mother from reading a Bible verse in her son’s kindergarten class during “show and tell” time.
Important to note is that during the creation of these American “techno-slaves” over these past 30 years the wealth of the United States has shifted from its once admired, and staunchly Christian, middle classes to the top 1% of its elite classes leaving this once great nation on the verge of moral and economic collapse.
Equally important to note is that while the United States has embarked upon this path of self destruction, the Motherland, after having broken free from the bonds of Communist rule, and in seeing the deliberate annihilation of American children by their elite rulers, has made it mandatory for all Russian students to study the ancient religion and by Presidential decree ordered Orthodox priests to serve in all army units.
This move by Russia to protect its children and young adults from succumbing to the false moral doctrines of the West was (of course) condemned by American rights group who warned that religious minorities might be prosecuted, with the irony being lost upon them that just 30 years ago these same groups were condemning the Soviet Union for not allowing any religion at all to be taught to the masses and have nothing to say at all about the destruction of religious teaching in their country at all.
The most frightful part of this report, however, is contained in the section headed by the words “Nightmare Scenario” warning that with the Internet giant Google’s announcement this week of their “partnership” with the United States National Security Agency (NSA), and when combined with the coming US police forces new Internet system allowing “backdoor access” to American citizens private data (email, phone calls, websites visited, Internet purchases, etc.), their entire population will soon come under a “white space digital blanket” so pervasive that nothing these “techno-slaves” can do will escape the notice of their new masters.
[Note: The term “white space” refers to the analog television airwaves the American people were forced by their government to abandon for it to be used to saturate their country with high-speed wireless Internet signals able to penetrate into their most rural regions and which (according to this report) when combined with the World's fastest graphene transistor created by IBM for the U.S. Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will allow the tagging and monitoring of every single American citizen.]
To the need of the elite classes in the United States to create these “techno-slaves” is evidenced by their entire national economy nearing its final collapse, and has become so dire that new reports are now showing that aside from the 20 million middle class Americans who have lost their homes, another 18 million are warned are nearing default this year.
Even worse for these Americans is their also being warned that a complete national bankruptcy is upon them as during this coming year they must finance over $3.5 Trillion of short-term government debt (equal to nearly 30% of their entire Gross Domestic Product) that no other country in the World will buy and leading them to default and causing a catastrophic devaluing of their currency.
To if the American people can awaken in time to avert their destruction there continues to be no evidence seen as they continue to remain enslaved to their propaganda media sources for information and which has essentially rendered them all incapable of understanding true things.
It was instructional though, for us this past week to read the rants of the US economist and New York University Professor NourielRoubini, who during an interview on the CNBC News Service stated that a “crisis” would be needed to change Russia’s economic system for the long term, and which gives a clear insight into how these Americans deal with complex issues rather than being honest with their peoples and working towards honest solutions….just create a crisis.
And to the great crisis coming for these Americans they can never say that they weren’t warned, only that they didn’t believe.
Has Chinese-style internet censorship arrived in New Zealand this year? The question is posed because two major news websites, Infowars.com and Prisonplanet.com, both of which are run by documentary maker and radio show host Alex Jones, who is renowned for exposing the truths the mainstream media attempts to conceal, were found to be have been selectively blocked on Friday evening and were still unavailable at the time of writing.
Thankfully, this draconian measure does not effect all internet users in New Zealand however. It appears to be confined to those whose internet server providers, (ISPs), use Asia Netcom for their international internet traffic. Telstraclear, Vodafone and Worldxchange Communications users are not effected, while Woosh, Orcon, Slingshot, Telecom and Ihug users are.
An avid fan of Infowars.com and a 9/11 truth activist, Jeff Mitchell, reported on Saturday that he contacted his ISP, Orcon, to establish what was causing the block, and was advised by a computer technician who did a traceroute, that the break in traffic to the two websites was found to be occurring at Asia Netcom’s router in Sydney. This technician also advised that as Telstraclear used a different route, their customers were still able to access the two sites.
There have been calls for the Internet to be censored and controlled – and for an Internet 2 by proponents of a one world government, or “New World Order.” This is because the internet as it is, is impeding the global elites’ ability to push their tyrannical, self-serving agendas through.
A clear indicator that the internet is regarded as a serious threat to global elite was evident when on March the 18th, 2009 Senator Jay Rockefeller of the Rockefeller dynasty, a family pivotal in the push for a one world government, [1,2] went so far as to suggest that it might have been better if the internet had never been invented and we went back to using pencils and paper, [3]. While it may have seemed like a ridiculous statement to make at the time, it was an indicator of what the global elite are aiming for and a warning. They want to make it increasingly difficult to get to the truth and they want to regain control of all media.
Consequently, it is of no surprise that Infowars.com and Prisonplanet.com appear to have been selectively targeted, as these two sites present a huge threat to the global elites’ operation. They provide access to credible information, from a wide range of contributors, which has been crippling the elites’ agendas. They have been providing updates on what has been happening around the world, including access to the Alex Jones radio show, which is now the most popular radio show on the internet worldwide. They expose that 9/11, the bombings of 7/7 and Oklahoma City, and the underwear bomber, were inside jobs and that, in fact, many terror-related events are government-sponsored. Plus, they have been pivotal in exposing that man-made global warming and the H1N1 pandemic were hoaxes, and that the Federal Reserve bank is taking money from the taxpayers and putting it in the pockets of bankers, and that it should be shut down.
Hopefully, this block is merely a temporary problem. If not, action may be necessary. In the meantime, you can still pick the radio show up at GCNLive.com by proxy, and read some of the Infowars.com/Prisonplanet.com articles on Alex Jones’ other sites which are still available, including Infowars.net, Propaganda Matrix and JonesReport.com. Also, you can usewww.ninjaproxy.com to read Infowars and Prisonplanet.com articles. Plus, Prisonplanet.tv is still accessible and you can still access the shop which sells his documentaries via the link here: http://infowars-shop.stores.yahoo.net/faofreprofba.html.
The FBI is pressing Internet service providers to record which Web sites customers visit and retain those logs for two years, a requirement that law enforcement believes could help it in investigations of child pornography and other serious crimes.
FBI Director Robert Mueller supports storing Internet users’ “origin and destination information,” a bureau attorney said at a federal task force meeting on Thursday.
As far back as a 2006 speech, Mueller had called for data retention on the part of Internet providers, and emphasized the point two years later when explicitly asking Congress to enact a law making it mandatory. But it had not been clear before that the FBI was asking companies to begin to keep logs of what Web sites are visited, which few if any currently do.
The FBI is not alone in renewing its push for data retention. As CNET reported earlier this week, a survey of state computer crime investigators found them to be nearly unanimous in supporting the idea. Matt Dunn, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in the Department of Homeland Security, also expressed support for the idea during the task force meeting.
Greg Motta, the chief of the FBI’s digital evidence section, said that the bureau was trying to preserve its existing ability to conduct criminal investigations. Federal regulations in place since at least 1986 require phone companies that offer toll service to “retain for a period of 18 months” records including “the name, address, and telephone number of the caller, telephone number called, date, time and length of the call.”
At Thursday’s meeting (PDF) of the Online Safety and Technology Working Group, which was created by Congress and organized by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Motta stressed that the bureau was not asking that content data, such as the text of e-mail messages, be retained.
“The question at least for the bureau has been about non-content transactional data to be preserved: transmission records, non-content records…addressing, routing, signaling of the communication,” Motta said. Director Mueller recognizes, he added “there’s going to be a balance of what industry can bear…He recommends origin and destination information for non-content data.”
Motta pointed to a 2006 resolution from the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which called for the “retention of customer subscriber information, and source and destination information for a minimum specified reasonable period of time so that it will be available to the law enforcement community.”
Recording what Web sites are visited, though, is likely to draw both practical and privacy objections.
“We’re not set up to keep URL information anywhere in the network,” said Drew Arena, Verizon’s vice president and associate general counsel for law enforcement compliance.
And, Arena added, “if you were do to deep packet inspection to see all the URLs, you would arguably violate the Wiretap Act.”
Another industry representative with knowledge of how Internet service providers work was unaware of any company keeping logs of what Web sites its customers visit.
If logs of Web sites visited began to be kept, they would be available only to local, state, and federal police with legal authorization such as a subpoena or search warrant.
What remains unclear are the details of what the FBI is proposing. The possibilities include requiring an Internet provider to log the Internet protocol (IP) address of a Web site visited, or the domain name such as cnet.com, a host name such as news.cnet.com, or the actual URL such as http://reviews.cnet.com/Music/2001-6450_7-0.html.
While the first three categories could be logged without doing deep packet inspection, the fourth category would require it. That could run up against opposition in Congress, which lambasted the concept in a series of hearings in 2008, causing the demise of a company, NebuAd, which pioneered it inside the United States.
The technical challenges also may be formidable. John Seiver, an attorney at Davis Wright Tremaine who represents cable providers, said one of his clients had experience with a law enforcement request that required the logging of outbound URLs.
“Eighteen million hits an hour would have to have been logged,” a staggering amount of data to sort through, Seiver said. The purpose of the FBI’s request was to identify visitors to two URLs, “to try to find out…who’s going to them.”
A Justice Department representative said the department does not have an official position on data retention.
Google is set to establish a working relationship with the National Security Agency, the government spy force responsible for warrantless monitoring of Americans’ phone calls and e-mails in the wake of 9/11.
The announcement comes in response to recent cyber attacks on the search engine company, which it says emanated from China.
Anonymous sources tell theWashington Post that “the alliance is being designed to allow the two organizations to share critical information”, adding that the agreement will not allow the NSA access to users’ search details or e-mails.
The sources also said that the NSA, the largest intelligence agency in the country, may also involve the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security in the project.
“The critical question is: At what level will the American public be comfortable with Google sharing information with NSA?” said Ellen McCarthy, president of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, an organization of current and former intelligence and national security officials that seeks ways to foster greater sharing of information between government and industry.
Greg Nojeim, senior counsel for the Center for Democracy & Technology, a privacy advocacy group, told the Post that companies have statutory authority to share information with the government to protect their rights and property.
In 2008, Google denied that it had any role in the NSA’s “terrorist” surveillance program, after first refusing to say if they have provided users private data to the federal government under the warrantless wiretapping initiative.
However, it is clear where Google’s interests lie given that the company is supplying the software, hardware and tech support to US intelligence agencies in the process of creating a vast closed source database for global spy networks to share information.
The government supply arm of Google has also reportedly entered into a number of other contracts, details of which it says it cannot share.
Google’s partnership with the intelligence network is not new. As we reported in late 2006, An ex-CIA agent Robert David Steele has claimed sources told him that CIA seed money helped get the company off the ground
Speaking to the Alex Jones Show, Steele elaborated on previous revelations by making it known that the CIA helped bankroll Google at its very inception. Steele named Google’s CIA point man as Dr. Rick Steinheiser, of the Office of Research and Development.
“I think Google took money from the CIA when it was poor and it was starting up and unfortunately our system right now floods money into spying and other illegal and largely unethical activities, and it doesn’t fund what I call the open source world,” said Steele, citing “trusted individuals” as his sources for the claim.
“They’ve been together for quite a while,” added Steele.
Recent disclosures under the Freedom Of Information Act have also revealed that the federal government has several contracts with social media outlets, including Youtube which is owned by Google. The contracts are said to waive rules on monitoring users and permit companies to track visitors to government web sites for advertising purposes.
The NSA’s involvement with Google should be treated as highly suspect, given the agency’s recent track record and its blatant disregard for the Fourth Amendment.
A set of documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in June 2007 showed that US telco AT&T allowed the NSA to set up a ’secret room’ in its offices to monitor internet traffic.
The discovering prompted a lawyer for an AT&T engineer to allege that “within two weeks of taking office, the Bush administration was planning a comprehensive effort of spying on Americans” That is BEFORE 9/11, before the nation was embroiled in the freedom stripping exercise commonly known as the “war on terror” had even begun.
In late 2007, reports circulated that the NSA has increasing control over SSL, now called Transport Layer Security, the cryptographic protocol that provides secure communications on the internet for web browsing, e-mail, instant messaging, and other data transfers.
In other words the agency is capable of intercepting and reading your emails and instant messages in real time. It is now beyond doubt that the NSA’s “terrorist surveillance program” now extends to this.
In 2008, the ACLU also uncovered details pertaining to a secret Justice Department memo from October 2001 that reveals the Bush administration effectively suspended the Fourth Amendment where domestic counter terrorism operations are concerned.
It is almost certain that the memo was written to provide a legal basis for the NSA to begin its warrantless wiretapping program, which was initiated in the same month.
Two years ago, the US National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell announced that plans were been drawn up for a cyberspace spying program that would make the current debate on warrantless wiretaps look like a “walk in the park”.
The plan involved giving the government the authority to examine the content of any e-mail, file transfer or Web search. The message is clear – government spies want unfettered access to the web searches and emails of Americans. Any relationship between the government and Google must be considered with this in mind.
After 9/11 the work of 16 different intelligence agencies, including the CIA and the giant National Security Agency, which eavesdrops on international communications, as well as the Energy Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration was centralized under the office of theDirector of National Intelligence.
The latest marriage between Google and the intelligence community also comes in the wake of increased calls to introduce a global licensing system to police the Internet in the name of preventing cyber warfare.
