JP's Note: Look at these articles & the linked articles at the bottom and ask yourself: What is the greater Threat - Hackers & bloggers, or Our own government and it's Agenda to Censor and Regulate the internet?

US State Department under cyberattack for fourth day 

AFP
July 9, 2009

The US State Department said Thursday its website came under cyberattack for a fourth day running as it tried to prevent further attacks.

“I’m just going to speak about our website, the state.gov website. There’s not a high volume of attacks. But we’re still concerned about it. They are continuing,” State Department spokesman Ian Kelly told reporters.

According to computer security experts, a dozen US government websites, including those of the White House, Pentagon and State Department, were targeted in a coordinated cyberattack which also struck sites in South Korea.

South Korean lawmakers were quoted as saying Wednesday that South Korea’s intelligence service believes North Korea or its sympathizers may have staged the attack. READ ARTICLE

Internet Attack Propaganda Increases as Cyber Bill Approaches 

Earlier this week South Korean intelligence (a creation of U.S. military intelligence) blamed the enfeebled Stalinist regime in North Korea for a series of cyber attacks on the U.S. government and commercial websites. As numerous observers have noted since the attacks, it is unlikely North Korea was behind the attacks. “Some analysts have questioned the North’s involvement, saying it may be the work of industrial spies or pranksters,” reports Reuters.

Instead of North Korea, the Korea Communications Commission now claims the original attacks were based in Germany, Austria, Georgia, the United States and South Korea. The location of the hackers behind the attacks is still unknown, according to the KCC.

The cyber attacks will now enter a new phase by attacking personal computers and wiping out hard disks, South Korea claims. South Korean web security firm Ahnlab, which has closely examined the attacks, said the new phase would target data on tens of thousands of infected personal computers. Ahnlab sells antivirus software, online security solutions, and network security appliances such as firewalls.

The new alleged threat and accompanying propaganda comes as Senate Commerce Chairman John (Jay) Rockefeller prepares for a July committee vote on cybersecurity legislation he introduced in April with Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine. One of the bill’s most controversial provisions would give the president the power to effectively shut off the Internet during a cyber crisis similar to the one now threatening PCs, according to South Korea and its U.S. created intelligence agency.

Copyright laws threaten our online freedom 

Christian Engström
Financial Times
July 8, 2009

If you search for Elvis Presley in Wikipedia, you will find a lot of text and a few pictures that have been cleared for distribution. But you will find no music and no film clips, due to copyright restrictions. What we think of as our common cultural heritage is not “ours” at all.

On MySpace and YouTube, creative people post audio and video remixes for others to enjoy, until they are replaced by take-down notices handed out by big film and record companies. Technology opens up possibilities; copyright law shuts them down.

This was never the intent. Copyright was meant to encourage culture, not restrict it. This is reason enough for reform. But the current regime has even more damaging effects. In order to uphold copyright laws, governments are beginning to restrict our right to communicate with each other in private, without being monitored. Read entire article

Judge Says Hyperlinks Should Be Banned to Save Newspapers

Famous and respected New York Judge Richard Posner says maybe we should ban links to save newspapers.

From his blog: Imagine if the New York Times migrated entirely to the World Wide Web. Could it support, out of advertising and subscriber revenues, as large a news-gathering apparatus as it does today? This seems unlikely, because it is much easier to create a web site and free ride on other sites than to create a print newspaper and free ride on other print newspapers, in part because of the lag in print publication; what is staler than last week’s news.

Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion.

Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan, who brought the Judge’s argument to our attention, had this to say about it:

The problem: this is America dude, we say what we fucking want, amirite?

You can copyright a news story, but you can’t copyright the news. “The news” just means “things that happen in the world.” What would it mean, in practice, to make it illegal to paraphrase a copyrighted news story? Summing up, for example, political events, or a sports controversy, or even a fashion trend, could be interpreted as paraphrasing copyrighted material. So let’s ban talking about anything. And banning links will help us make our references even more obscure, by making it impossible for anyone to refer to source materials! Good idea, Posner. This gross oversimplification makes you look none too freedom-loving!

What we want to know is what would the Judge do with TV news, which gets all its reporting, facts and story ideas from newspapers? According to Pew, 60% of Americans get their news from TV. By the Judge’s logic, shouldn’t they be forced to read a newspaper to get their news instead?

NSA Security Officer: We Should Just Kill These People
Richard Volaar
OpEdNews
August 20, 2008

When somebody within your own government calls you out, do you show up? How do you handle it?

Wayne Madsen, always spoiling for a fight with Bush and Cheney, or the chance to show off his undies to minimum wage airport TSA workers, has an executive level NSA staff person on record saying that significant sentiment exists within the NSA to kill troublesome bloggers and journalists.

The NSA executive staffer was, apparently, not the source of the sentiment, but this individual did pass along the context and the precise wording of the “junior G-man” working in the NSA. Prominent names listed in the NSA database of troublemakers?

1. Bill Gertz
2. James Bamford
3. Vernon Loeb
4. Jim Risen
5. Dr. John C. K. Daly
6. Wayne Madsen
7. Seymour Hersh

These were all the names Madsen published, but there are, of course, many others. Possibly you, gentle reader.

If not now, probably later.

As much as Madsen hates Daily Kos, I would think that if Kos was in the database, he would have published his name, too. Markos Moulitsas Zuniga — a name that should just roll off the Hebroid-Russian tongue of George Soros, and frequently does — is he NOT in the NSA’s database of journalists and bloggers to be put out of Cheney’s misery?

Wear nice underwear when you travel, bloggers. The TSA will soon be checking your anal orifice for that extra 3 ounces of shampoo you just can’t live without.

More Evidence of Pentagon War Against the Internet 
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
January 7, 2009

Further evidence has emerged revealing how the Pentagon is in the business of responding to blog posts critical of the U.S. government. Noah Shachtman, writing for Wired, posts an Air Force flowchart used for “counter-blogging” purposes.

“In a twelve-point plan, put together by the emerging technology division of the Air Force’s public affairs arm, airmen are given guidance on how to handle ‘trolls,’ ‘ragers’ — and even well-informed online writers, too. It’s all part of an Air Force push to ‘counter the people out there in the blogosphere who have negative opinions about the U.S. government and the Air Force,’ Captain David Faggard says,” Shachtman writes.

In the case of the Infowars and Prison Planet websites, Centcom operatives do not respond to trolls and ragers. In fact, many of them seem to be the most vociferous trolls and ragers.

On October 16, 2006, Raw Story reported that the United States Central Command sent an email to bloggers on the subject of the GWOT, or so-called “global war on terror,” as part of the Pentagon’s “engagement operations.”

“Now [online readers] have the opportunity to read positive stories. At least the public can go there and see the whole story,” said Maj. Richard J. McNorton. “The public wants to hear these good stories.”

In fact, the public gets these ostensibly “good stories” via the corporate media that acts as a propaganda conduit for the government and the Pentagon.

“I’ve always thought that a military-like process would be a good bridge to connect the services with the blogosphere. There’s a field manual for everything in the military, so this flow-chart presents online communications in a DoD [Department of Defense] friendly format,” former military spokesman Steven Field told Wired.

Mr. Field’s assertion is seriously at odds with Pentagon policy, however. A 2003 Pentagon document entitled the Information Operation Roadmap, released to the public after a FOIA request by the National Security Archive at George Washington University in 2006, characterizes the internet as if it were an enemy “weapons system.”

“We Must Fight the Net. DoD [Department of Defense] is building an information-centric force,” the document states. “Networks are increasingly the operational center of gravity, and the Department must be prepared to ‘fight the net’… DoD’s ‘Defense in Depth’ strategy should operate on the premise that the Department will ‘fight the net’ as it would a weapons system.”

Unleashing trolls and ragers who consider blogs and websites opposed to the government as an enemy “weapons system” is only part of the overall plan to conquer and dominate the internet.

“Part of the Information Operation Roadmap’s plans for the internet are to ‘ensure the graceful degradation of the network rather than its collapse.’ (pg 45) This is presented in “defensive” terms, but presumably, it is as exclusively defensive as the Department of Defense,” notes Brent Jessop for Global Research.

As far as the Pentagon is concerned the internet is not all bad, after all, it was the Department of Defense through DARPA that gave us the internet in the first place. The internet is useful not only as a business tool but also is excellent for monitoring and tracking users, acclimatizing people to a virtual world, and developing detailed psychological profiles of every user, among many other Pentagon positives. But, one problem with the current internet is the potential for the dissemination of ideas and information not consistent with US government themes and messages, commonly known as free speech. Naturally, since the plan was to completely dominate the “infosphere,” the internet would have to be adjusted or replaced with an upgraded and even more Pentagon friendly successor.

A renowned Russian author, Dmitry Glukhovsky, told Russia Today the internet may very well be in decline. “Glukhovsky predicted that the network would become clogged with traffic and may grind to a halt in the near future,” writes Steve Watson. “We have previously warned that the rumors of the internet’s decline have been much exaggerated and used as a pretext for calls to designate of a new form of the internet known as Internet 2.”

Of course, Internet 2 would be greatly regulated and only “appropriate content” would be accepted by an FCC or government bureau. Everything else would be relegated to the “slow lane” internet, the junkyard as it were.

In tandem with broad data retention legislation currently being introduced worldwide, such “clean slate” projects may represent a considerable threat to the freedom of the internet as we know it. EU directives and US proposals for data retention may mean that any normal website or blog would have to fall into line with such new rules and suddenly total web regulation would become a reality.

This “clean slate” and “appropriate content” agenda dovetails with the objectives of the Pentagon as it “fights the net” and strives to disseminate “good stories,” that is to say counter the research of “well-informed online writers” with pro-government propaganda.

Pentagon Secretly Goes To War With The Internet
Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Tuesday, May 6, 2008

The Pentagon is to spend $30 Billion building a super secret "National Cyber Range" in order to prepare for all out cyber warfare by using it to conduct mock online battles with realistic info-warriors.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), previously responsible for the development of electronic surveillance programs such as Total Information Awareness and MATRIX, LifeLog and the Brain Machine Interfaces enterprise, has been ordered by Congress to create what is essentially a new internet as a cyberspace battleground.

Wired.com has reported "According to a defense official familiar with the program: ‘Congress has given DARPA a direct order; that’s only happened once before — with the Sputnik program in the ’50s’"

The NCR will not only allow for defense from electronic attack, but will also allow offensive strikes against "adversaries online". It is rumored to be the keystone of a so called "Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative", created via a secret presidential order in January.

A request for proposals, released by DARPA yesterday outlined how the agency wants the NCR to be able to "realistically replicate human behavior and frailties," and feature "realistic, sophisticated, nation-state quality offensive and defensive opposition forces".

The NCR’s operators should be able to "integrate, replicate, or simulate" military satellite and digital radio communications, mobile ad-hoc networks, physical access control systems, U.S. and foreign "unmanned aerial vehicles, weapons, [and] radar systems" — even "cyber cafes" and "personal digital assistances [sic]." the proposal states.

A previous notice outlined that the NCR would allow the Pentagon to:

• Conduct unbiased, quantitative and qualitative assessment of information assurance and survivability tools in a representative network environment.
• Replicate complex, large-scale, heterogeneous networks and users in current and future Department of Defense (DoD) weapon systems and operations.
• Enable multiple, independent, simultaneous experiments on the same infrastructure.
• Enable realistic testing of Internet/Global-Information-Grid (GIG) scale research.
• Develop and deploy revolutionary cyber testing capabilities.
• Enable the use of the scientific method for rigorous cyber testing.

The project is so secret that it has been referred to as an electronic"Manhattan Project". The Senate Homeland Security committee, a key Senate oversight panel has cited concerns about the secrecy around the project and has been forced to write to the DHS to request basic information on the project.

Commentators have speculated that the entire project may be a huge new part of the federal government’s so called "terrorist surveillance program", which has so far only been shown to constitute cyberwarfare against everyday Americans via warrantless wiretapping and interception of communications.

Wired.com comments:

"Why might citizens be worried about privacy and civil liberties? Consider that the whole initiative appears to have been launched after the Director of National Intelligence told the President Bush that a cyber attack might wreak as much economic havoc as 9/11 did. Consider that the NSA, which currently protects classified networks, wants to expand into protecting all non-classified federal government networks. Consider that Congress is set to legalize the NSA’s monitoring rooms in the nation’s phone and internet infrastructure. For its part, the FBI says it also needs access to the internet’s backbone, while the Air Force is hyping its own efforts at cyber defense and offense. [...]

Now it seems the only question is whether the government will be able to turn the net into a controllable, monitorable and trackable pre-internet AOL-type service or whether the chaotic net will live on as just another frontier for the military-industrial complex to start an arm’s race and rake in billions of government dollars."

Could this be the Pentagon’s ultimate "solution" to counter the internet, an arena of freedom and progress that military strategists now view as a bastard child they let slip from their grasp some twenty or so years ago?

While Homeland Security head Chertoff has denied that the project is part of a vast effort to restrict or "sit on the internet", the Pentagon has previously made it clear that the internet, free of restriction and holding such potential for free speech, is in direct opposition to their goals.

The Pentagon has stressed that the internet needs to be dealt with as if it were an enemy "weapons system".

Recently, a document entitled Information Operation Roadmap (PDF) was declassified by the Pentagon due to a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

One portion of the document states:

“Information, always important in warfare, is now critical to military success and will only become more so in the foreseeable future….. Information operations should be centralized under the Office of the Secretary of Defence and made a core military competency."

"Objective: IO [information operations] becomes a core competency. The importance of dominating the information spectrum explains the objective of transforming IO into a core military competency on a par with air, ground, maritime and special operations. The charge to the IO Roadmap oversight panel was to develop as concrete a set of action recommendations as possible to make IO a core competency, which in turn required identifying the essential prerequisites to become a core military competency."

Another section of the document focuses on what is referred to as "Computer Network Attack":

"When implemented the recommendations of this report will effectively jumpstart a rapid improvement of CNA [Computer Network Attack] capability." - 7

"Enhanced IO [information operations] capabilities for the warfighter, including: … A robust offensive suite of capabilities to include full-range electronic and computer network attack…" - 7

While other sections urge the Department of Defense to "Fight the Net":

"We Must Fight the Net. DoD [Department of Defense] is building an information-centric force. Networks are increasingly the operational center of gravity, and the Department must be prepared to "fight the net." " - 6

"DoD’s "Defense in Depth" strategy should operate on the premise that the Department will "fight the net" as it would a weapons system." - 13

A previous document that echoes such sentiments is the now infamous Rebuilding America’s Defences by The Project for a New American Century (PNAC). In this 2000 document those that would go on to become the nucleus of the Bush administration stated:

"It is now commonly understood that information and other new technologies… are creating a dynamic that may threaten America’s ability to exercise its dominant military power." - 4

"Control of space and cyberspace. Much as control of the high seas - and the protection of international commerce - defined global powers in the past, so will control of the new "international commons" be a key to world power in the future. An America incapable of protecting its interests or that of its allies in space or the "infosphere" will find it difficult to exert global political leadership." - 51

"Although it may take several decades for the process of transformation to unfold, in time, the art of warfare on air, land, and sea will be vastly different than it is today, and "combat" likely will take place in new dimensions: in space, "cyber-space," and perhaps the world of microbes." - 60

The importance of information warfare is clearly laid out in both these documents. Brent Jessop, a regular contributor to Infowars.net and Prisonplanet.com has exhaustively documented the phenomenon of “Full Spectrum Information Warfare” in a four part series of articles.

We have also previously documented the existing moves to kill off the internet as we know it today by the federal government.

Note that the enemy is never specifically named, it is merely whoever uses the net, because the enemy IS the net. The enemy is the freedom the net provides to billions around the globe and the threat to militaristic dominance of information and the ultimate power that affords.

MPAA Asks Obama for More Copyright Surveillance of the Internet

Pentagon Spending Billions on PR to Sway World Opinion 
Associated Press
February 6, 2009

WASHINGTON– As it fights two wars, the Pentagon is steadily and dramatically increasing the money it spends to win what it calls “the human terrain” of world public opinion. In the process, it is raising concerns of spreading propaganda at home in violation of federal law.

An Associated Press investigation found that over the past five years, the money the military spends on winning hearts and minds at home and abroad has grown by 63 percent, to at least $4.7 billion this year, according to Department of Defense budgets and other documents. That’s almost as much as it spent on body armor for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2004 and 2006.

This year, the Pentagon will employ 27,000 people just for recruitment, advertising and public relations — almost as many as the total 30,000-person work force in the State Department.

“We have such a massive apparatus selling the military to us, it has become hard to ask questions about whether this is too much money or if it’s bloated,” says Sheldon Rampton, research director for the Committee on Media and Democracy, which tracks the military’s media operations. “As the war has become less popular, they have felt they need to respond to that more.” Read full article