Of course, CISPA does not replace SOPA, it is a separate thing altogether. The backroom negotiations to re-introduce SOPA are already underway…
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OpenMedia: Warrantless online spying is back on!
March 8, 2012 — xanthippaFrom an email from OpenMedia:
Instead of listening to you and the other 117,000 Canadians who demanded an end to the Online Spying bill, the government is going on the PR offensive with a one-two punch.
You won’t believe this: With one side of their mouth, they’ve leaked stories1 falsely suggesting that they are standing down. With the other, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews has shot back with op-eds2, misleading mass emails3, and speeches in Parliament that aggressively defend the bill4.
There’s only a small window of opportunity for MPs to put a stop to warrantless online spying.
Will you call on your MP to use our new tool to stand with Canadians today?
Over 117,000 Canadians from across the political spectrum have signed the Stop Online Spying petition, and many of you took to Twitter to raise your voices. Because of your efforts, the opposition parties and several Conservative MPs5 have come out against the costly online spying plan.
Yet Vic Toews has still not apologized for misleading Canadians; he’s even continued to use our children as political cover for this poorly thought-out legislation.
We know from experience that MPs get the message when contacted by local constituents. It makes sense: they’re acutely aware that elections are won riding by riding. This means that together, as a wide-reaching grassroots community, we have power.
Our efforts together have so far forced the government to delay their online spying plan. Let’s take the next step.
For the Internet,
Shea and Lindsey, on behalf of your OpenMedia.ca team
P.S. Thanks to all of you who contributed when we asked for help in scaling up our campaign. The tools and actions we’re offering now are only possible because of your generous support. We’ll send all of you contributors a special report back soon to show what you made possible. If you haven’t chipped in yet, you can still do so here.
Footnotes
[1] See our press release, Government to Stall the Online Spying Bill
[2] Find one of Toews’ more recent op-eds, which he submitted to Postmedia News, here.
[3] See Mythbusting the mythbusting: Our response to Vic Toews’ email to Canadians
[4] Watch Vic Toews’ February 28th speech in the House of Commons here, and our video mash-up debunking his points here.
[5] Source: National Post. Conservative MPs who have expressed concerns with the online spying bill include New Brunswick MP John Williamson, Calgary MP Rob Anders, and Ontario MP David Tilson.
Slashdot: Do You Like Online Privacy? You May Be a Terrorist!
February 3, 2012 — xanthippaHere is another example of the Western governments’ war on its citizens.
Yes, war.
It sickens me that governments are now openly saying that if you shield your screen from the view of others, this makes you a terrorism suspect!
This creates precisely the type of environment where hacker-vigilaties will be not just tolerated, but positively embraced by a population that feels increasingly under attack by the very institutions created to ensure their individual rights.
Let’s not make any mistakes about it: it is not Twitter and Google who are increasingly censoring us, the members of online communities. Even though they facilitate access to the virtual world of the web, they are themselves physical corporations which exist in the real world, very much subject to the whims of real-world governments.
As such, they are subject to the arbitrary rules which various governments impose on corporations operating within their physical boundaries.
It is unreasonable for us to expect that these corporations will put the freedom on the internet above their ability to physically survive…
So, you may blame them for buckling – but don’t blame them for imposing the censorship itself: the blame lies directly with our governments, our regulating bodies, and us, the citizens, who permit this encroachment!
The solution?
We must all fight to prevent all governments from usurping jurisdiction over the internet, the way they have been doing!
How?
I don’t know. Yes, I have been thinking about this for a long time, but there simply is no clear answer.
The easiest solution I suspect would be to continue the efforts to create alternatives to the ‘pipelines’ that ISPs use to deliver internet connections, but the more people try to solve this, the more actual attempts there are to make the web truly uncontrollable and impossible to be regulated by anyone or anything anywhere, the better chance there is of success.
So – keep your elective representatives responsible – and keep hacking!
Pirate Bay founders cannot appeal, change domain name from .org to .se
February 1, 2012 — xanthippaTwo related stories from TorrentFreak update us on what has been happening in Sweden in the Pirate Bay saga.
First, the founders have not been permitted to appeal their case, so their conviction stands. (This should put fear into all of us, because what they were doing was legal under Swedish law – they were only charged and prosecuted because of pressure from the US movie industry.)
Second, now that their court case is concluded, they have changed their domain from .org to .se in order to prevent seisure.
If you don’t know the back story, perhaps you should ‘Steal This Film’:
Justice delayed, justice denied: Gary McHale on Caledonia
January 8, 2012 — xanthippaGary McHale is fighting our fight!
Ezra Levant and Marc Lemire on Section 13
December 17, 2011 — xanthippaA few days ago, I have brought you the reports on these hearings from Free Dominion.
Here is Ezra Levant, interviewing Marc Lemire himself about that same hearing:
SOPA: uniting the internet against collusion by big business and big government
December 15, 2011 — xanthippaSounds so innocuous: Stop Online Piracy Act.
After all, ‘Pirates’ are all ‘bad’, so anything to get them off ‘our internet’ must be ‘good’, right?
We, surely, the Orwellian language is only a part of the trick here.
The SOPA hearings are being held today and it is difficult to believe that anyone who does not directly benefit financially from this legislation would be willing to support it. The effect of this legislation would be to chill free speech in ways to give Richard Warman and his Section 13 co-oppressors wet dreams in perpetuity!
Right now, even with the ‘moderate’, much less draconian legislation in place, the copyright infringement laws are being used to silence critics of big business – or even just independent voices (lest they become critical in the future).
In this example, a DMCA claim was used to censor a daily tech news episode which criticized a big-music corporation: under the law, a mere DMCA claim was enough to force a takedown of the episode for a minimum of 10 days. If you are running a daily news show, 10 days is an eternity… At least, under the DMCA rules, the news show could appeal to a judge…
And, of course, we all know that the US government has been known to censor a blog for over a year, denying them due process of law to get their property restored and name cleared.
Just to add injury to injury: not only are you guilty until proved innocent under SOPA, getting to court to prove your innocence will be much harder. And even if you were victorious and the courts found you innocent of all charges, you would not have a recourse to sue for damages suffered as the result of the false SOPA accusation!
Is this type of legislation even needed?
The Swiss government certainly does not think so: they have gone the opposite route. After studying the data for a long time, these legislators have concluded that downloading music/videos for personal use is not just perfectly legal, they claim it actually channels money away from copyright holders and helps the music/movie industry in the long run.
And what about the people who have been the most vociferous about the need for crippling the internet in the name of copyright protection? Surely, they themselves do not indulge in the very behaviour they wish to stamp out with knee-jerk legislation like ‘three accusations and you are permanently banned from the internet’, right?
“French President Nicholas Sarkozy is a man who has championed some of the most aggressive anti-piracy legislation in Europe. But today it’s revealed that the occupants of his very own office and home are responsible for a nice selection of pirate downloads using BitTorrent. Three strikes? Those with access to the Presidential Palace’s IP addresses have already doubled that quota. “
But, surely, those entertainment legacy industry movers and shakers who have lobbied the legislators for SOPA – the ones who claim that downloading movies and music for free would bankrupt them – surely they are not doing this themselves, are they?
“With increasing lobbying efforts from the entertainment industry against BitTorrent sites and users, we wondered whether these companies hold themselves to the same standards they demand of others. After some initial skimming we’ve discovered BitTorrent pirates at nearly every major entertainment industry company in the US, including Sony Pictures Entertainment, Fox Entertainment and NBC Universal. Busted.”
And those ‘evil Pirates’ – they must be up to even more vile things…
Let’s hope the unanimous screams of protest from the citizens of the internet get heard!
Mark Lemire and Section 13: report from Federal Court hearing on 13th of December, 2011
December 14, 2011 — xanthippaFree Dominion has a discussion with several reports about the Tuesday hearing in Federal Court in Richard Warman’s ongoing case against Mark Lemire, which has run into a snag: the question whether Section 13 of the Human Rights Code (the thought-crime section) is Constitutional or not.
Connie Fournier reports that the cast was large: from CCLA and BCLA to Doug Christie on stage, from BigCityLib to free-speech bloggers in the audience. Here is a little quote from her report:
“During this time, the judge listened intently and didn’t interrupt. His face was inscrutable. The funniest moment of the hearing came when the lawyer for B’nai Brith said that Section 13 is “a ringing endorsement of free speech”. Everyone in the audience snorted and snickered uncontrollably. (Probably only one person in the audience was a censor and the rest were free speech supporters or media).”
An excerpt from Narrow Back’s report:
“At 11:00 we returned to hear from the African Legal Clinic. They talked about “irradicating discrimination” for “deeper social concerns” “improvement of the condition of less fortunate people” blah blah, etc. They also talked about S13 as a “conciliatory process”. I just wrote down: “Ha!” “
And here is a part from Mark Fournier’s post:
“A couple of intervenors in favour of state censorship put in their two cents and then Richard Warman got up and complained that just because the CHRC did a terrible job of administering Section 13 his rights shouldn’t be violated. The irony was breathtaking.”
Read the whole reports – along with what people are saying about it – at Free Dominion!
When can raising charity money for orphans land you in a ‘re-education camp’?
December 14, 2011 — xanthippaWhen you live in a land ruled by Sharia!
Zilla of the Resistance has the story.
(Check it out and have a listen to the music: I rather like the tune I suspect is the ‘swing classic’ ‘Clementine’ done in Indonesian punk – a definite improvement over the original!)
Via: BCF
Quite apart from this story, it is important for us, Westerners, to understand that in lands ruled by Sharia, ‘charity’ does not work the same way it does in our part of the World.
This does not mean that Muslims are not charitable people: not at all!
And it does not mean that in countries with Muslim populations, people do not perform charitable acts for the sake of helping their fellow human beings, regardless of race or creed. They do – and we have many stories of Muslim women helping Westerners (men, women and children) who were in Japanese prison camps during WWII!
Rather, as Sharia rules every single aspect of life of those unfortunate to live under its oppression, so it has very specific and rigid rules for ‘charity’.
Let me illustrate this with an example: following the Tsunami a few years ago, people in Bengal (I refuse to use the new colonial name for the country) were upset that many Western charities got volunteers on the ground and started providing aid. The Bengali fear was that these aid groups were there trying to steal their children…
Many in the West were perplexed by this: why would the people there refuse aid, willingly provided without any strings attached?
Because right now, Bengal is under Sharia. And Sharia strictly differentiates between ‘Muslim charities’ and ‘non-Muslim charities’.
It is forbidden, under Sharia, for Muslim charities to help non-Muslims – and for non-Muslim charities to help Muslims (though, to be honest, non-Muslim charities do face a lot of regulatory interference under Sharia and are thus prevented from being as effective in providing aid as Muslim charities are). Therefore, when non-Muslim charities attempted to aid Muslims in Bengal, the response among the population was confusion and fear – and, ultimately, rejection of much help. The problem was finally resolved by the non-Muslim charities simply giving the money and aid materiel to Muslim charities, who then operated on the ground…
Another ‘perplexing’ example came even more recently, during the terrible flooding in Pakistan. Even as money poured into the county through Red Cross, there were appalling stories of whole non-Muslim families starving – even in regions where food aid was plentiful. Again, people in ‘The West’ could not make heads-or-tails of this and many wrote these stories off as propaganda.
Not so.
The primary channel for the aid funds was The International Red Cross.
In Sharia countries, the Red Cross partners with its affiliated Islamic charity, the Red Crescent, and channels all aid through it.
In Pakistan, which is for all practical purposes governed by Sharia, the Red Crescent operates as an Islamic charity under Sharia does. That means that Mosques are used as the centres from which the aid (from food on down) is distributed.
To most of us, this does not seem particularly odd: Mosques serve as community centres, so they are centrally located and accessible. Plus, they have the room to store the supplies to be distributed, so this would be a logical place to distribute aid from, right?
Plus, under Sharia, the Red Crescent is only permitted to distribute aid through a Mosque. So, it is not just the ‘logical’ course of action, it is the only permitted course of action. And the Red Crescent did make various statements to the effect that everyone who came to them for aid, received aid!
So, what was the problem that caused the non-Muslims to starve?
Under Sharia, a non-Muslim may not enter a Mosque!
Not being permitted to enter the place from which the aid from Western countries was being distributed, non-Muslims could either starve or convert to Islam…
I suspect there is a lot more about ‘charity under Sharia’ we just don’t know…
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