UN wants to ‘regulate’ the internet

February 22, 2012 — xanthippa

As if SOPA, ACTA Bill C-30 were not enough, there is a new threat to the information superhighway – from the United Nations, none the less.  From The Wall Street Journal:

On Feb. 27, a diplomatic process will begin in Geneva that could result in a new treaty giving the United Nations unprecedented powers over the Internet. Dozens of countries, including Russia and China, are pushing hard to reach this goal by year’s end. As Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said last June, his goal and that of his allies is to establish “international control over the Internet” through the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a treaty-based organization under U.N. auspices.

If successful, these new regulatory proposals would upend the Internet’s flourishing regime, which has been in place since 1988. That year, delegates from 114 countries gathered in Australia to agree to a treaty that set the stage for dramatic liberalization of international telecommunications. This insulated the Internet from economic and technical regulation and quickly became the greatest deregulatory success story of all time.

 

Really?

Does this not illustrate that it is:

  • time to leave the UN – iff we cannot de-legitimize and dismantle the organization as a whole
  • time to really push to establish an internet substitute which is diffused, so that there are no pipelines which could be controlled by any regulatory body (the current technology that could be used for this is still under development – and much too slow)

Yeah, I have called for both these things in the past, but perhaps the time is running out faster than we expected…

Posted in freedoms, politics, society, technology. Tags: , , , , . 1 Comment »

Daniel Hannan: Politicians can’t create jobs

February 21, 2012 — xanthippa

This is an important point – and one that all politicians ought to be reminded of, often and firmly.

I am not an economist, so there is no way I am going to articulate this eloquently or even remotely well, but…I would not be myself if I didn’t give it a shot.

There is an old joke – very old – that could get people sent to jail if they said a variation of it back behind the iron curtain, where I grew up:

What is the fastest way to get rid of all the sand in the Sahara desert?

Create a government department with the sole purpose of supplying sand to the Sahara.  Give it a steering committee, a 5 year plan and lots of money and power to enforce policies.  For a little while, nothing will happen.  Then:  BOOM!  Sand will be more scarce in the Sahara than meat is in butcher shops!

(If you are one of the younger readers who does not remember what life behind the iron curtain was like, let me just say that butcher shops usually had very, very little to offer.  If a supply of meat was even rumoured to be coming in, people would stand in lines for hours, sometimes lining up all night just so they may be one of the first few in line in the morning because the supplies were so meager that even with limits per customer, only the first few people in line would get to buy any meat.  Bread and milk were usually available, but again, even with bread, the supply would run out before the demand.  I remember days when the limit would be set at one quarter loaf of bread per customer, so that my mom would go line up and send me to line upseparately, so we’d get half a loaf between us.  No kidding.  We had money – but there was no ‘stuff’ to buy with it.)

‘Governments creating jobs’ is one of those easy to fall into fallacies.  Like ‘the broken window’ fallacy:

The fact is that governments do not just ‘have money’ to spend:  their money comes from taxes, current or future.  Taxes are taken from people who earn it by the threat of force:  these people now no longer have that money to spend to look after themselves and their family.

Ah, say government spending proponents, but what if people want to save their money instead of spending it?  That would be bad for the economy and that is why governments must take it from them and spend it!

Isn’t that just a little oppressive?  And arrogant?

A government is supposed to represent the people and do the people’s bidding – not force people to do the government’s bidding!

The suggestion that governments should spend the people’s money because people don’t want to spend it themselves is illustrative of how the relationship between the citizens and our government has been inverted:  insted of being our servant, the government has become our master, forcing us to do what we do not want to do.

That we are proposing ‘government stimulus spending’ and ‘government creating jobs’ as desirable actions should give us a moment of pause to consider what this implies about our relationship to our governments and the status of our civil liberties!

Posted in freedoms, politics, society. Tags: , , , , , , . 2 Comments »

More thoughts about the issues of ‘privcy’ and ‘presumption of privacy’

February 21, 2012 — xanthippa

Over the weekend, this video, purported to be from ‘Anonymous’, was released.  It demands that the Canadian Minister, Vic Toews, remove bill C-30 (which would permit civil servants unlimited snooping powers on the citizens via the internet without judicial oversight) and that he step down immediately.

The following video also purports to be from ‘Anonymous’.  As I have no connection to that group, I have no idea if it is authentic.  However, I do think it is worth posting because it raises several issues worth further discussion:

This video raises the connection between the desire by various governments to regulate arms and to regulate the internet.

This is a deeper connection that one may think, at first glance.  But, deep down, both are attempts to take away the citizen’s ability to protect themselves – including, if necessary, to resist their government.  Both are ways in which governments make their citizens less secure, more isolated, and more afraid of their government.

Even if you are not as libertarian in your views as I am (I think that monopoly control over infrastructure – even, or perhaps especially, information infrastructure – is perilous to civil liberties), it is easy to see how governments are threatened by citizenry that is difficult to control and willing and able to oppose them.

Firearms are a means of physical self-defense and an equalizer between the strong and the weak.  Even a small woman can protect herself from a rapist with the use of a gun:  her physical safety is no longer dependant solely on the timely response of the state to come to her aid.  This threatens the government monopoly on the enforcement of laws:  as every monopoly’s natural reaction would be, the government’s reaction is to restrict this competition.

Let’s be clear about this:  government ‘regulation’ of firearms is not about increasing public safety by having many well trained, well armed citizens available in public spaces who would be able to stop law-breakers and thus increase public safety.  To the contrary:  it is always specifically designed to restrict gun ownership, use, and the very presence of privately owned guns in public spaces.  This intolerance on the part of government of guns in private hands – even though this increases public safety – is indicative of the government’s disrespect for its citizenry, with the goal to increase government coercive powers at the root of all ‘arms regulations’.

Information is a weapon and a powerful one.

So is anonymous speech.

The internet enables both.

As a matter of principle, anonymous speech is necessary for the preservation of the very freedom of speech.  For example, The Federalist Papers could never have been published had their authors not had absolute anonymity at the time of publication!  The bigger the government is, the more dangerous it is to speak up against it openly.  Without anonymous speech, governments do indeed become more totalitarian and more tyrannical in nature:  this cycle has been repeated so often, it is blatant.

Yet, the ever-growing governments in the formerly-free world now wish to have complete and unfettered access to the information which would identify each and every internet user:  to be able to attach a name to every sentence uttered on the internet, from seeking sensitive advice at an online support group to dissenting political speech!

Of course, the governments are also increasing citizen surveillance on so many fronts…  There will soon be no arena where we do have ‘presumption to privacy’, not even in our homes and certainly not anywhere else.  So, the whole ‘getting a warrant’ might be a mute issue…

Technology is beautiful – but it is a tool, to be used for good or evil.  It is necessary that we understand these tools because our society will need to evolve along with them.  What am I talking about?

For example, drone-based aerial surveillance…

Or this totally awesome ‘bug thech’!  (Do watch the video, it is art and technology combined!)

What is my point?

As new technologies arise, we will need to develop laws to govern their use.  However, these laws (all laws, really) ought to be focused on protecting the civil libeties of individual citizens – not legitimizing the ways that governments and big business can circumvent them!

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Garry McHale arrestted again, because the sight of him ‘provoked’ someone to violence

February 20, 2012 — xanthippa

This is the result when we stop remembering the proper roles for police, the military and the government.

The reason we have police is to uphold the laws of the land.  That is, they are the instrument of force the State uses against its civilian population to maintain its monopoly on lawmaking within their territory.  Basic, simple and clear, right?

The only legitimate role for a police force is to uphold the law – equally and without discrimination.

The only legitimate role for a police officer is to uphold the laws within the policing framework, and it is each individual officer’s personal responsibility to ensure they are not upholding the laws unequally or obeying illegal orders.  This is essential because it is the front-line police officers who are the agents of the state within this:  that is why they are the only ones who can safeguard this powerful force from corruption.

When exactly did the role of the police become re-defined from ‘enforcing the law of the land’ to ‘maintaining public peace’?

Because ‘maintaining public peace’ is not the same thing as ‘upholding the laws of the land’.  If a crowd is upset by the presence of a witch, the easiest, most cost-effective course of action for someone ‘maintaining public peace’ is to simply  burn the witch!

Most moral people would have a problem with this approach…

Yet, this is exactly what the OPP are doing in Caledonia:  faced with an angry mob, they target the person the mob is angry at instead of maintaining order by upholding the laws of the land!

People who are willing to tolerate this approach to ‘maintaining peace’, who are ‘keeping their heads down’ in the conviction this will stop the mob from going after them should remember that in Eastern and Central Europe, the witch hunters sometimes killed every man, woman and child in a village they thought was infected with witchcraft.

The ‘peace of the tomb’ is not something our society ought to be striving for.  Yet that is the logical result of the type of policing the OPP is practicing in Caledonia and many other places in Ontario!

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Law Without Government

February 16, 2012 — xanthippa

The Libertarian Party of Canada has a nice, newly re-done website – well worth checking out!

Through the ‘resources’ section, I found a link to this interesting video:

Posted in freedoms, human nature, politics, society. Tags: , , . 1 Comment »

JotForm’s domain suspended for user-generated content

February 16, 2012 — xanthippa

JotForm is a web company that lets people easily generate forms for whatever they need.  Now, their domain has been siezed and their site has been blocked in a SOPA-style action.  From the JotForm blog:

‘UPDATE: Many people on the comments assumed the content was posted by us. This can happen to any site that allows public to post content. SOPA may not have passed, but what happened shows that it is already being practiced. All they have to do is to ask Godaddy to take a site down. We have 2 millions user generated forms. It is not possible for us to manually review all forms. This can happen to any web site that allows user generated content.’

(Emphasis added by me.)

So, here we have yet another confirmation that despite of SOPA itself having been scrapped, the practices it was normalizing already exist and are being followed by state agents.

This is outrageous on so many levels…and yet, it is even worse on the other side of the pond…

We must shine the light under all these proverbial rocks, or we’ll be overrun by the creepy-crawlies!

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Ending race-based policing in Ontario – let us hope we are one step closer

February 15, 2012 — xanthippa

I received an email which I would like to reproduce in its (almost) entirety, because it not only speaks for itself, it also includes the most-important links….and, it does raise a ray of hope!

Here it is, in its (almost) entirety (I only redacted a phone number):

1. Just days after our Queen’s Park news conference –‘Ending Race-Based Policing: The Caledonia Act\,’ – where we were joined by speakers from the pro-Israel Never Again Group and the International Free Press Society,  MPP Toby Barrett has issued a call for strong action re the Caledonia occupation, and praised our efforts and ideas for reaching a resolution…

“Barrett credits Gary Mchale and CANACE for keeping the issue alive in the media and in the limelight, suggesting a lot of McHale’s ideas have been ‘pretty good’.” They include having more oversight from the Ontario Ombudsman with respect to the OPP and more protection for whistleblowers in the Police service.

 

It was Toby Barrett who made the Queen’s Park Media Studio available for our news conference, as he has done in the past.
2. You can read the Caledonia Act recommendations here:
3. See also TobyBarrett.com: Occupy Caledonia will be six years February 28
This is the first time that Toby has publicly complimented our work to the media, and we hope it is a sign of good things to come.
Thank you Toby.
Mark Vandermaas 
VoiceofCanada.ca
IpperwashPapers.ca
ConservativesAgainstFantino.ca
HelplessByBlatchford.ca 
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Warrantless surveillance is becoming a reality in Canada

February 14, 2012 — xanthippa

Oh, I know I cannot write this up in a way to do this topic justice – mostly because it sends my blood pressure so dangerously high.  After all, blind rage is the only reasonable response to a minister claiming that those whodare to voice reservations about a proposed law that would make mincemeat out of civil liberties are no better than child molesters.

Because that is exactly what he is saying.

OK – I’m about to loose my temper…again…and not finish this post…

ARRRRGGGHHHH!

Resorting to the ‘do it or you hate children and kick puppies’ is the last resort of a bully who knows he cannot defend his position based on the issues!

AAAAAARRRRRGGGHHHH!!!!

YES!  It actually IS supposed to be difficult to deprive people of their liberties:  that is why cops have to follow all them silly rules!!!  Taking the rules away will not make one child safer, while at the same time, it will make all of us a little less safe!

AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!

Michael Geist has a good write-up on this – with lots of excellent and informative links.  Read him – it’ll make more sense than I can.

As you ponder this, also take a peek at this.

THAT is the root of the problem:  the system lacks accountability!

Actually, that article just might explain a lot about the minister’s attitude:  they have already started to build a huge electronic surveillance system.  Parts of it have been operational for years!

All the bluster now is to hide that they have as yet to pass the laws to make it legal…

 

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If the USA declared a ‘War on Drugs’, do ‘international rules of war’ apply?

February 13, 2012 — xanthippa

One of my favourite thinking games is taking words and looking at all the different layers of meanings in them – along with why certain of their meanings form the dominant interpretation at any given time.

Hours of fun – and anyone can play!

For example, I absolutely love the word ‘authority’:  it means quite literally, that we – as a culture – accept that ‘power’ flows exclusively from Thor.  Au Thor-ity.  Coming from Thor.  (This is particularly amusing when coupled with the term ‘divine’ – as in, ‘divine authority’.  If someone claims their god has ‘divine authority’, whether they are aware of it or not, they are literally saying that their god derives all of its power from Thor…which is fascinating when monotheists who deny the very existence of Thor do it.  Yes, it does not take a lot to amuse me…)

One thing I find very annoying are the ‘grand declarations’ of ‘war on …’ – especially ones that do not really have proper meaning.  For example, ‘The War on Terror’ is a nonsense-statement.

‘Terror’ is a feeling – a state of mind.  To wage a war on it would mean trying to make people feel better, perhaps by medicating them into a state of non-fear.  It certainly does not mean waging a physical war, with soldiers and guns.

Declaring war on terrorist organizations would make more sense…

Now, how about ‘The War on Drugs’?

Again, the jingoism of the slogan is non-sensical, at best.  ‘Drugs’ are not something that is capable of fighting back, it is just stuff.  Inanimate objects.   It makes even less sense to claim to wage a war against inanimate objects than it does to wage a war against a state of mind.  It does, however. bring up the image of one ’tilting at windmills’…

Except, of course, that the term ‘War on Drugs’ does not mean a war on drugs as such:  it means a war on the organizations that handle certain drugs currently prohibited by the government.

Ok – so we have deciphered what the ‘Drugs’ in the statement means:  organizations which are involved in the production and distribution of substances classified as ‘illegal’ by the US government. (Yes, I am intentionally not addressing why these laws are ‘illegal’!)  So, what does the word ‘War’ mean?

This is, by far, the more interesting part of the phrase.

What, indeed, is meant by the word ‘War’?!?!?!?

Typically, ‘wars’ are fought by armies – not police forces.  Yet, the ‘War on Drugs’ is being fought by non-military police officers.  That is curious, to say the least.  (Some would claim it is illegal – but that is a differen discussion.)

It would, of course, explain why the various police forces across the USA are becoming increasingly militarized: sometimes, it seems that cops are more military-like than the military itself!  This would, indeed, be a more-or-less necessary outcome if the police were, indeed, waging ‘a war’… at least, according to my understanding of the ‘conventional’ meaning of the word ‘war’.

So, let us look at whom the ‘war’ is being waged against:  the ‘drug gangs’.  Are these, in any way, shape, or form ‘an army’?

A good case could be made that ‘drug gangs’ are, indeed, ‘armies’.  If my memory serves me right (I have lost all of my bookmarks again, so I am not including links – please, check up on me!), according to international laws, ‘an army’ is defined as an organization must have:

  1. a well defined chain-of-command
  2. defined markings/insignia worn by its members to make them recognizable and differentiate them from civilians

Drug gangs most definitely satisfy this definition.  Their chain-of-command is very well defined.  And, all gang-members do wear specific ‘colours’, or symbols, which identify them clearly and unambiguously as members of that particular gang.  Many gangs go a step further than most conventional armies – they not only wear their gang insignia, they have them tattooed into their very skin, so no disguise is possible!

In other words, the ‘drug gangs’ are more of an ‘army’ (under international law) than ‘terrorist organizations’, which do not wear identifying insignia and pride themselves in hiding among the civilian population.  Honestly, the ‘War on Drugs’ adheres more closely to the definition of ‘war’ under international laws than ‘War on Terror’ does – yet the ‘War on Terror’ has been used, successfully, to justify (internationally) at least two extra-territorial wars that the US got involved in.

So, why is this an issue I bother thinking about?

Well, it does have some very interesting LEGAL implications….

If this is, indeed, a ‘War’ – then the ‘international rules of war’ automatically kick in!!!

It means that each and every person arrested in the USA under the ‘drug laws’ MUST be treated as a prisoner of war – and is not subject to any criminal laws!!!

Yes, please, do think about it!

Frankly, I find it difficult to believe that no enterprising lawyer has not thought of this yet…

The US government cannot have their cake and eat it, too. (OK – ‘the cake is a lie’….but that does not take away from my point!)

The US government has openly declared ‘A War’ on all organizations even peripherally involved in the drug trade.  These drug organizations straddle national borders.  This means that the international ‘rules of war’ most definitely kicked in once US made their declaration of war!!!

Under international ‘rules of war’, if you capture ‘a soldier’ from the opposing side, even if that person had indeed brutally killed many, many people, they cannot be tried as ‘murderers’!  Rather, they must be given all the privileges attached to Prisoners Of War!

To re-phrase: because the US government has openly declared ‘War on Drugs’, is it now violating the Geneva Convention every single time it applies criminal law to anyone arrested on any drug-related charges?

Please, think about it!!!

Posted in corruption, freedoms, politics, society. Tags: , , , , , . 2 Comments »

Gary McHale on SunTV

February 6, 2012 — xanthippa

 

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