Orwell @ MindSay

Happy New Year: It's 1984

by Jacob Levich

Seventeen years later than expected, 1984 has arrived. In his address to Congress Thursday, George Bush effectively declared permanent war -- war without temporal or geographic limits; war without clear goals; war against a vaguely defined and constantly shifting enemy. Today it's Al-Qaida; tomorrow it may be Afghanistan; next year, it could be Iraq or Cuba or Chechnya. No one who was forced to read 1984 in high school could fail to hear a faint bell tinkling. In George Orwell's dreary classic, the totalitarian state of Oceania is perpetually at war with either Eurasia or Eastasia. Although the enemy changes periodically, the war is permanent; its true purpose is to control dissent and sustain dictatorship by nurturing popular fear and hatred. The permanent war undergirds every aspect of Big Brother's authoritarian program, excusing censorship, propaganda, secret police, and privation. In other words, it's terribly convenient. And conveniently terrible. Bush's alarming speech pointed to a shadowy enemy that lurks in more 60 countries, including the US. He announced a policy of using maximum force against any individuals or nations he designates as our enemies, without color of international law, due process, or democratic debate. He explicitly warned that much of the war will be conducted in secret. He rejected negotiation as a tool of diplomacy. He announced starkly that any country that doesn't knuckle under to US demands will be regarded as an enemy. He heralded the creation of a powerful new cabinet-level police agency called the "Office of Homeland Security." Orwell couldn't have named it better. By turns folksy ("Ya know what?") and chillingly bellicose ("Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists"), Bush stepped comfortably into the role of Big Brother, who needs to be loved as well as feared. Meanwhile, his administration acted swiftly to realize the governing principles of Oceania: WAR IS PEACE. A reckless war that will likely bring about a deadly cycle of retaliation is being sold to us as the means to guarantee our safety. Meanwhile, we've been instructed to accept the permanent war as a fact of daily life. As the inevitable slaughter of innocents unfolds overseas, we are to "live our lives and hug our children." FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. "Freedom itself is under attack," Bush said, and he's right. Americans are about to lose many of their most cherished liberties in a frenzy of paranoid legislation. The government proposes to tap our phones, read our email and seize our credit card records without court order. It seeks authority to detain and deport immigrants without cause or trial. It proposes to use foreign agents to spy on American citizens. To save freedom, the warmongers intend to destroy it. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. America's "new war" against terrorism will be fought with unprecedented secrecy, including heavy press restrictions not seen for years, the Pentagon has advised. Meanwhile, the sorry history of American imperialism -- collaboration with terrorists, bloody proxy wars against civilians, forcible replacement of democratic governments with corrupt dictatorships -- is strictly off-limits to mainstream media. Lest it weaken our resolve, we are not to be allowed to understand the reasons underlying the horrifying crimes of September 11. The defining speech of Bush's presidency points toward an Orwellian future of endless war, expedient lies, and ubiquitous social control. But unlike 1984's doomed protagonist, we've still got plenty of space to maneuver and plenty of ways to resist. It's time to speak and to act. It falls on us now to take to the streets, bearing a clear message for the warmongers: We don't love Big Brother. Published on Saturday, September 22, 2001 The news is what we tell you, dont believe everything you read or see,for what is truth ? Time is only relative....learn enough to be dangerous, and ask better questions..  because the only stupid question there is,  is the question you need to know, not asked.

A baffling proposal to filter the Internet.
By Tim Wu


Chances are that as you read this article,
 it is passing over part of AT&T's network.

That matters, because last week AT&T announced
that it is seriously considering plans to examine
all the traffic it carries for potential violations
 of U.S. intellectual property laws.

The prospect of AT&T, already accused of spying
 on our telephone calls, now scanning every e-mail
 and download for outlawed content is way too
totalitarian for my tastes.

 But the bizarre twist is that the proposal
is such a bad idea that it would be not just
a disservice to the public but probably a
disaster for AT&T itself.

 If I were a shareholder,
 I'd want to know one thing:
 Has AT&T, after 122 years in business,
simply lost its mind?



No one knows exactly what AT&T is proposing
to build. But if the company means what it says,
 we're looking at the beginnings of a private
 police state.

That may sound like hyperbole, but what else
do you call a system designed to monitor millions
 of people's Internet consumption?

That's not just Orwellian; that's Orwell.


The puzzle is how AT&T thinks that its proposal
is anything other than corporate seppuku.

 First, should these proposals be adopted,
 my heart goes out to AT&T's customer
relations staff. Exactly what counts as
copyright infringement can be a tough question
for a Supreme Court justice, let alone whatever
program AT&T writes to detect copyright infringement.

 Inevitably, AT&T will block legitimate materials
(say, home videos it mistakes for Hollywood) and
let some piracy through.

Its filters will also inescapably degrade network
 performance. The filter AT&T will really need will
 be the one that blocks the giant flood of complaints
 and termination-of-service notices coming its way.
 


But the most serious problems for AT&T may be legal.
 Since the beginnings of the phone system, carriers
 have always wanted to avoid liability for what happens
on their lines, be it a bank robbery or someone's divorce.
Hence the grand bargain of common carriage:

The Bell company carried all conversations equally,
 and in exchange bore no liability for what people
used the phone for. Fair deal.



AT&T's new strategy reverses that position and exposes
 it to so much potential liability that adopting it
 would arguably violate AT&T's fiduciary duty to its
 shareholders.

Today, in its daily Internet operations, AT&T is shielded
 by a federal law that provides a powerful immunity
 to copyright infringement.

The Bells know the law well: They wrote and pushed it
through Congress in 1998, collectively spending six
 years and millions of dollars in lobbying fees to
make sure there would be no liability for
"Transitory Digital Network Communications"

—content AT&T carries over the Internet.
 And that's why the recording industry
sued Napster and Grokster, not AT&T or Verizon,
 when the great music wars began in the early 2000s.



Here's the kicker: To maintain that immunity,
AT&T must transmit data
"without selection of the material by the service provider"
 and
"without modification of its content."

Once AT&T gets in the business of picking and
choosing what content travels over its network,
 while the law is not entirely clear,
 it runs a serious risk of losing its
 all-important immunity.

 An Internet provider voluntarily giving up
copyright immunity is like an astronaut on
the moon taking off his space suit.

 As the world's largest gatekeeper, AT&T would
immediately become the world's largest target
for copyright infringement lawsuits.



On the technical side, if I were an AT&T engineer
asked to implement this plan, I would resign
immediately and look for work at Verizon.

 AT&T's engineers are already trying to manage
 the feat of getting trillions of packets around
the world at light speed.

To begin examining those packets for illegal pictures
of Britney Spears would be a nuisance, at best,
and a threat to the whole Internet, at worst.

Imagine if FedEx were forced to examine every parcel
 for drug paraphernalia: Next-day delivery would soon
go up in smoke.

Even China's Internet, whose performance suffers
greatly from its filtering, doesn't go as far as
what AT&T is proposing.



If this idea looks amazingly bad for AT&T,
 does the firm have an ingenious rationale
for blocking content? "It's about," said AT&T
 last week, "making more content available
to more people in more ways going forward."

Huh? That's like saying that the goal of a mousetrap
is producing more mice. If the quote makes any sense
it all, perhaps it means that AT&T, the phone company,
 has aspirations to itself provide Internet content.

 Could it really be that AT&T's master strategy
is to try and become more like AOL circa 1996?



A different theory is that AT&T hopes that filtering
out infringing material will help free up bandwidth
 on its network.

What is so strange about this argument is that it
suggests that AT&T wants people to use its product
less. That's like Exxon-Mobil complaining that SUVs
are just buying up too much gas.

 It suggests that perhaps AT&T should try to improve
its network to handle and charge for consumer demand,
rather than spending money trying to control its consumers.



I just don't get the business aspect, so perhaps
the only explanation that makes any sense is a
political one. It may be that AT&T so hates being
under the current network neutrality mandate that
 it sees fighting piracy as a way to begin treating
 some content differently than others—discriminating
—in a politically acceptable way.

 Or maybe AT&T thinks its new friends in the
content industry will let them into Hollywood
 parties if they help fight piracy.

 Whatever the explanation, AT&T is choosing a scary,
 expensive, and risky way to make a point.

 It is also, so far, alone on this one among Internet
 service providers; the cable industry is probably
 licking its chops in anticipation of new customers.

 That's why if this plan goes any further,
and I were an AT&T shareholder,
 I'd have just one thought: SELL.
 

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

~George Orwell

 

 

Read this article about Fox News trying to smear Ron Paul.

 

Whatever happened to Kings and Queens keeping to their figurehead responsibilities? A Prince  lecturing the public about morality is like Hitler lecturing G-d about redemption.

 In all fairness to Charles, he is the  product of inbreeding so perhaps it's herediary.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4681281.stm

Root out extremists, prince urges

Prince Charles said the attacks had no link to "true faith" Prince Charles has urged "every true Muslim" to root out extremist preachers in the wake of the London bomb attacks. An "evil influence" appeared to have been brought to bear on the suspected bombers, whose "atrocities" must be condemned, he told the Daily Mirror. Others must resist the temptation to condemn the Muslim community for the actions of an evil minority, he added. Tony Blair has said talks will start on new laws to make it easier to deport people trying to "incite hatred". Muslim leaders say they are "shocked" British Muslims may have been behind last Thursday's attacks. 'No link to faith' "Some may think this cause is Islam. It is anything but. It is a perversion of traditional Islam," Prince Charles said. The prince said Muslim leaders were right to point out the attacks had no link to "true faith". "Those who claim to have murdered in the name of Islam have no care for the lives they have so brutally destroyed. "Offended by the good relations between faiths and cultures, the extremists seek to break up the communities that make up our modern, multi-cultural society," the prince wrote He said Britain's tradition of welcoming new communities had to be upheld to prevent the bombers achieving their aim of dividing the community. "We seem to be seeing a cycle, from Bali to Baghdad, from New York to London, of willing recruits sacrificing their young lives to slaughter innocent people in some inhuman cause." But the prince also said the way Londoners had coped with last week's attacks was a cause of "national pride". Two generations or so after the Blitz, the resilience and courage of Londoners have again inspired the world." On Tuesday, the Muslim Council of Britain's secretary general, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, said: "Nothing in Islam can ever justify the evil actions of the bombers. "They happen to be Muslims and it's not that Islam is the problem, it is those individuals, it is the criminality that is there," he said. On Wednesday, Mr Blair met Muslim MPs to discuss how to tackle "this evil within the Muslim community". "In the end, this can only be taken on and defeated by the community itself," he said. The prime minister condemned any attacks on British Muslims, saying the vast majority were decent and law abiding.