Source: Corbett Report and Global Research
James Corbett
TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES:
James Corbett
TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES:
When legislators in the US abandoned their support
of SOPA and PIPA in the wake of mass popular protest earlier this
month, many of those who had been mobilized by the legislation–which
would have granted the US government almost total power to block access
to foreign websites accused of so much as linking to copyrighted
material–did not have long to enjoy their “victory.” The very next day
the New Zealand police swooped in
to the million-dollar estate of MegaUpload.com founder Kim Dotcom,
arresting him and three others at the US government’s request for
alleged racketeering, copyright infringement and money laundering. The
Department of Justice is now seeking the MegaUpload CEO’s extradition to the US.
Some amongst those who had been campaigning against SOPA and PIPA did
not know that the US government already had the authority to shut down
entire websites and in fact has exercised that authority on numerous
occasions. What many are now learning is that, far from some potential
future threat, internet censorship already exists in a variety of
legislation that is already on the books in the United States and in
nations around the world.
Although most commonly associated with China, which has implemented
strict internet filters that prevent its citizens from finding
politically sensitive material, various internet censorship programs
have already been implemented by countries around the globe.
In 2010, Japan passed amendments
to its copyright law making it illegal to download copyrighted
material. The move has yet to curtail file-sharing in the country, so
the Japanese government recently announced
that they are going to begin putting fake copies of popular tv dramas
on file-sharing websites that, when opened, remind users that it is
illegal to download such material.
In July of 2010, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement seized the domains of 8 websites that it accused of hosting illegal copies of copyrighted material as part of an investigation dubbed Operation In Our Sites.
The seizures came before any trial took place, and six of the websites
did not actually host any of the copyrighted material in question, only
linking to it. That November, ICE acted once again, this time seizing 82 domains. In December of 2011, over one year later, the agency returned one of the domains, Dajaz1.com, to its owner, after admitting that it had not in fact breached any laws.
In May of last year, the US Justice Department began seeking the extradition
of one of the website’s operators, Richard O’Dwyer, from the UK.
O’Dwyer is a British citizen who established TVShack.net in December of
2007. The DOJ is hoping to bring O’Dwyer to the US under the Extradition
Act of 2003 to face charges of copyright infringement in the Southern
District of New York.
Late last year, a number of nations signed a new global copyright agreement known as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement
or ACTA. Signatories include the United States, Canada, Japan,
Australia, South Korea, and, as of this past week, 22 member states of
the European Union.
Purported to be a treaty against counterfeit goods, generic drugs and copyright, it threatens to fundamentally alter the internet as it has so far existed.
When the Polish government announced its intention to sign earlier this month, protests sprang up around the country.
While the public is only beginning to understand the implications of
ACTA, which has already been signed by a number of countries, others are
pointing to these types of agreements as only the thin edge of the
wedge for the implementation of outright totalitarian control over the
internet as a whole. Indeed, perhaps even more worrying than the
existing legislation and agreements for internet censorship are the
numerous proposals for even more restrictive measures that have been
made time and again by political leaders in a variety of contexts.
In October of 2008, the Labor government in Australia proposed a
mandatory filter for the entire Australian internet. The proposal,
dubbed “Clean Feed” would
ostensibly block any content deemed to break Australia’s media
regulations. When a list of the websites supposed to be banned under the
scheme was released in early 2009, it included the websites of numerous
innocuous Australian businesses, as well as overtly political websites
that had no illegal or offending material. The current government has
said they would not vote for any such legislation, and the proposal
would be unlikely to reach parliament until 2013.
In 2010 the UK passed the Digital Economy Act,
which theoretically allows for the UK government to ban copyright
violators from the Internet. In August of 2011, parts of the legislation
proposing the blocking of sites believed to be linking to copyrighted
material was declared to be unenforceable and were dropped from the legislation.
In March of 2009, Senator Jay Rockefeller opined
during a subcommittee hearing that the internet is proving to be such a
threat to America’s national security that it would have been better if
it had never existed.
In June of 2010, Senator Joe Lieberman stated that he believed the US needed the same ability to shut down the internet as China currently has.
While these proposals are sometimes couched in business-friendly
rhetoric about protecting intellectual property, sometimes as a national
security question about defending cyber infrastructure from foreign
enemies and sometimes as attempts to protect children or stop the spread
of child pornography, the proponents of internet censorship are
becoming increasingly honest about their real worry: the free spread of
ideas amongst a public that is allowed to choose for themselves what
information to believe and what to discard.
Last year, Bill Clinton advocated the idea that the US government create an agency for “fact-checking” websites on the internet.
Earlier this month, Evgeny Morozov of Stanford, who previously served as a Fellow of George Soros’ Open Society Institute, wrote an article
calling on Google and other search engines to use banners to warn users
about websites that are deemed to be pseudoscientific or
conspiratorial. Perhaps realizing that the proposal sounds drastic,
Morozov concludes:
“such a move might trigger conspiracy theories of its own—e.g. is
Google shilling for Big Pharma or for Al Gore?—but this is a risk worth
taking as long as it can help thwart the growth of fringe movements.”
Here we see the real danger of the internet for those who seek to
control the spread of information. The internet, like every other medium
that has come before it, changes not just the way in which people
create, distribute and receive information, but the information itself.
Just as the printing press led to the widespread publication of the
Bible in the vernacular and ultimately to the Reformation which forever
transformed the power structure in European society, so too has the
internet allowed the public to receive, correlate and distribute
information that challenges official government narratives in a way that
threatens to transform the power structure of our society. And as the
traditional media has begun to bleed away the remains of its
increasingly dissatisfied customer base, self-immolated on the fantastic
failure to challenge the status quo on issues like Saddam’s WMD or the
growing apparatus of the police state or the never-ending bailouts of
the too-big-to-fails, a new, independent media has arisen to take its
place, empowered by technologies that allow for the instantaneous and
nearly costless transmission of ideas to the farthest corners of the
globe.
When situated in this context, the recent struggle over the SOPA and
PIPA bills are seen for what they are: one battle in a much larger war
for internet freedom, and ultimately, the cognitive liberty of the
American public. But it is possible to win the battle and yet lose the
war, as the millions of MegaUpload users who just had all of their files
seized by the FBI found out the hard way. The only hope is that the
movement that has arisen to face this, the greatest threat to the rise
of this new era of mental independence, does not wane in the wake of the
SOPA and PIPA “victory,” but instead rises to meet the even greater
internet clampdown that awaits. After all, all the authorities are
waiting for is for the public to fall back asleep.
