Do you regard our current internet as the last bastion of

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

Poll question: Do you regard our current internet as the last bastion of

...free speech and idea exchange that can still gain, if not wide, at least some reasonable level of exposure?

And secondly, do you believe our now well entrenched authoritarian government will permit this freedom to continue much longer?

Here's another great piece from our own Warren Pease:

---snip---

The only serious competition threatening corporate media's monopoly on official "truths" -- those pieties designed to narrow acceptable choices and increase social control -- comes from the Internet.

"The news," as it's laughingly known, can tap into a seemingly endless supply of drunken or felonious fools like Jessica and Paris and OJ and Twitany to sedate its viewers. Then there's the occasional gruesome murder to balance the chirpy happy talk on miraculous medical procedures (which most of us will never live to experience because our for-profit insurers won't cover them), an always erroneous look at local weather, followed by 15 uplifting minutes on sports and a recap of the top celebrity screw-ups. The viewer yawns, feels a bit awed by all this technical wizardry and slick showmanship, and heads for bed thinking he's up to date on the stuff that really matters.

Corporate media has a bottomless pool of "on-air talent" -- perfectly coiffed, well-modulated, tastefully made up, arrayed in $5K worth of suits, ties and little flag lapel pins, strident and irritating as a hundred Ross Perots.

We have broadband, YouTube, blogs, forums, actual reporters, search engines, discussion groups, political organizing, access to newspapers published in actual free countries -- all taking place in plain sight.

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2835.shtml

[Demeter]

1. Our Fascist Government Can't Shut Down the Internet

The corporations wouldn't stand for it. And they can't regulate it, either, and god knows they've been trying to. It's like the atmosphere--it can't be herded, fenced or extinguished. And it is self-regulating and cleaning.

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

2. They can alter how it works and who controls it...

...just as they have done with the airwaves. Corporations loyal to the State would still be given free rein.

[fenriswolf]

3. i just cant wait to get an email

"exuse us but we know what sites you have been looking at and for how long, please go down to your local police station for questioning, if you do not comply in 24 hours please wait for the paddywagon that will be rushed to your location."

guess I also gotta get my porn elsewhere ;-)

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

5. I suspect they won't start that kind of campaign...

...until after they've successfully crippled the internet as a tool for political dissidents and real information exchange -- that way word will spread much much slower and organizing opposition will be much more difficult.

[Initech]

4. Corporate news is quite laughable.

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

7. Laughable, yes -- but I'm sure not laughing...

...MSM is the poison needle of lethal injection being administered to our Constitution based representative democracy.

[PetrusMonsFormicarum]

6. It would be foolish

to think that our current access to a world wide web is something that the government could not restrict, and severely.

In its current state, however, it continues to be fragmented, and all the weaker for it. Voices in the wilderness, so to speak. There are numerous voices making all kinds of sense, but it is the very nature of the internet as a device for separating us from each other that works against freedom-loving individuals: it is even easier for misinformation to be propagated, and we cannot afford to think that some cunning weasels in government are already exploiting this weakness.

We have not yet seen the fascist extremes that the current administration has made possible, and we should do everything in our power to make sure those do not come to pass.

[fenriswolf]

8. look at china

google stops people from searching for alot of things. cyber cafes are heavily monitered, etc. facism can happen anywhere.

[happydreams]

9. The strategy that the fascists are using to control the Internet is

the one that for some unknown reason is NEVER mentioned in any of these topics.

It is infiltration and distruption, of any meaningful discussion. DU is full of Psy-ops people that play this place with ease. It's pathetic. What is so hard to understand about this?

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

10. I agree that what you describe is going on...

...but this does not provide them anywhere near the level of control they require. I think they can use these kinds of strategies to collect information, stifle discussion, and sway opinion in some cases, but they cannot expect to prevail in suppressing the truth and disrupting organized opposition indefinitely this way.

As the title of Warren Pease's editorial says: The Internet Must Die.

[happydreams]

15. "Operation Chaos"

It isn't too far of a stretch to say that this type of thing has been adapted to the Internets. The SDS was totally screwed up by these tactics, particularly sowing discord.


Operation CHAOS was the code name for a domestic espionage project conducted by the CIA. A department within the CIA was established in 1967 on orders from President Lyndon Johnson. The department came to be known as the Domestic Operations Division (DOD). The division's main function was to manage the direction, support, and coordination of clandestine operations and activities within the United States.

CIA director John McCone was assigned to the DOD in order to setup espionage operations on the uprising of college student protests against the U.S. government's Vietnam foreign policies. Two new units were set up to target anti-war protestors and organizations: Project RESISTANCE, which worked with college administrators, campus security and local police to identify anti-war activists and political dissidents; and Project MERRIMAC, which monitored any demonstrations being conducted in the Washington D.C. area. Local police departments also worked with the CIA by monitoring student activists and infiltrating anti-war organizations. Some of their assignments involved initiating staged burglaries, illegal entries (black bag jobs), interrogations and electronic surveillance.

When president Nixon came to office in 1969, all of these domestic surveillance activities were consolidated into Operation CHAOS. After the revelation of two former CIA agents’ involvement in the Watergate break-in, the publication of an article about CHAOS in the New York Times and the growing concern about distancing itself from illegal domestic spying activities, led the CIA to shut down Operation CHAOS. But during the life of the project, the Church Committee and the Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States (the Rockefeller Commission) revealed that the CIA had compiled files on over 13,000 individuals, including 7,000 US citizens and 1,000 domestic organizations. (On Jun. 27, 2007, the New York Times asserted that, while conducting Operation Chaos, "The agency compiled a computer index of 300,000 names of American people and organizations, and extensive files on 7,200 citizens."<1>)


CIA operations guidelines
Gather information on their immorality.
Show them as scurrilous and depraved.
Call attention to their habits and living conditions.
Explore every possible embarrassment.
Investigate personal conflicts or animosities between them.
Send articles to newspapers showing their depravity.

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

11. Kick for a larger sample. nt.

[New Earth]

12. I found myself saying about a few weeks ago

that once they take the freedom of the internet away from us, we will be back to the old days of passing on news by going to our neighbors houses in person or sending regular mail to spread news :/

I seriously feel like that's what we will be left with.

[warren pease]

13. Chiming in...

Thanks for the compliment, btw. "Great piece?" I'm not too sure about that. I actually had a tough time getting the thing to flow decently and I'm still not overly nuts about it. I just hope it makes its points well enough to get people thinking and agitating and pestering their alleged representatives.

Anyway, one post mentioned that, absent the Internet, we'd be back to the grapevine, talking with neighbors and friends, probably not wanting to use the phone for anything that could be construed as "seditious" behavior and so forth. I think that's probably true.

I do know that organizing was a hell of a lot tougher in the late '60s and early '70s than it is today. And the Internet is the difference. Back in the day, we had free papers, flyers, broadsheets, word-of-mouth, neighborhood activism, bars and coffee houses, "underground" FM radio (which was a really important organizing tool at the time), and the national college campus network. (This was pretty much an urban model; spreading the word was a lot tougher in the burbs and in rural areas.)

Still, we somehow managed to show up at the right time and place for various marches and other demonstrations of furious dissatisfaction with the Nixonian era. And I think we got better numbers at the protests than we're getting now, for some reason.

Also, media actually reported on demonstrations and gave reasonably believable head counts, unlike these days when a quarter million show up and CNN tells the world a few hundred stragglers were vastly outnumbered by pro-administration counter-protesters.

But the thing about the Internet these days, beyond its power as an organizing tool, is its ability to drag dark secrets -- government, corporate and institutional -- into the light and subject it to the scrutiny of perhaps a billion or more people. Can you imagine what would have happened to the stories on arch-hypocrite Larry Craig or the counter-BushCo national intelligence estimate report on Iran without the Internet? In the era of co-opted, controlled, corporatized, sanitized, pro-status quo and utterly useless mass media, there is no other reliable outlet for this kind of information.

A free press, at least the one envisioned by the First Amendment, was supposed to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. It was supposed to hold people accountable. It was supposed to alert people to the malevolence of the bad guys no matter who they were and without regard to socio-economic status, friends in high places, community influence, or anything else that divides the classes into objects of suspicion and those allowed to operate above the law -- kind of like things are now.

These days, that role has reversed as corporate-vetted-and-approved "journalists" bounce fluffy questions off of "important people," who then completely ignore the question and launch into their scripted spiels. And these are harmless questions designed specifically to create the maximum amount of wiggle-room for the spokesperson. Any tough questions, like the ones Helen Thomas occasionally sneaks in, are not only ignored by the talking head, but often booed and scorned by her fellow "reporters," who value access far more than honor or dignity.

And that's not even looking at the Internet as worldwide communications medium, the best research tool in the galaxy, source of the absolutely weirdest stuff imaginable and safe-house for non-approved, unorthodox, revolutionary ideas.

If the bastards in charge of creating uniformity of thought and consensus opinion manage to figure out how to choke off those irreplaceable parts of the Internet, while leaving it intact for their corporate employers to abuse as just another sales and marketing channel, we're fucked. No two ways about it.

Technical people have told me it's pretty tough to physically cripple the Internet because it's designed with multiple redundancies and the ability to choose alternative data paths on the fly. There's no main router or relay point that, if disabled, would shut that whole thing down. That's within the US; international access is, I think, a bit easier to control.

But user fees, long distance tolls, inflated ISP pop account rate structures and hosting charges, heavy use taxes, multi-tiered quality of service levels with a rate structure that relegates the poor to dial-up speeds -- all those tactics would definitely have a chilling effect on who gets to use it, for how long, at what speed and from where.

So maybe this will be a follow up article. Mainly, I'm looking for reasons to be more optimistic about the Internet's continued survival as it is today. Anybody want to raise my spirits? Or maybe it's a matter of imbibing some spirits of my own and waking up a little better adjusted. I'll begin now.

:beer:

Again, thanks all for reading and commenting.


wp

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

16. You're quite welcome, I don't think I'm the only one...

...that appreciates your insights.

I wish I could offer some optimism about the future of the internet, but free and unrestricted, it is simply too great a threat to despots whose continued hold on the reins of power depend on keeping the masses disorganized, divided, and in the dark.

And speaking of darkness, I'm reminded of this:

Mark Twain - To the Person Sitting in Darkness - Anti War

Most of those people that sit in darkness have been furnished with more light than was good for them or profitable for us..."

http://youtube.com/watch?v=tnn3AGG71yc

[LanternWaste]

14. a book which is not only a vehicle, but also the destination of Free Speech.

1. No. Don't believe it for a second. A can still purchase a book which is not only a vehicle, but also the destination of Free Speech.

2. I reject the premise. Although Authoritarian, the current government is not well entrenched to the point where, even were it possible, they would "control" the internet.

The free market? Another story... but certainly not this incompetent group of boobs currently in office.


And to be honest, I don't blame only the MSM-- I believe they are giving the people exactly the type of news stories that sell SUVS, console games and I-pods. For my part, the majority of the blame of the current state of the news lies on us.