Imagine: life as a wrongly accused pedophile

February 17, 2011 — xanthippa

Can you imagine how your life would change if you were accused of pedophilia – or of distributing child pornography?

If this accusation were in a public forum, where your kids, spouse, parents, extended family, friends, colleagues and/or customers, potential employers, community activists and anti-pedophilia organizations would be sure to see it?

If this accusation came from the government, which cited a legal warrant to confiscate your property because a judge has been satisfied that your property was used for the creation and propagation of pedophilia?

AND IF THIS ACCUSATION WERE 100% UNFOUNDED?!?!?

84,000 Americans do not have to imagine this – they are living it!

No kidding, it’s true.

That is EIGHTY FOUR THOUSAND!!!

And, please, ask yourself – why was this not front line news?  Why do you have to read about this in a blog?

As per TorrentFreak (via HackerNews):

“The US Government has yet again shuttered several domain names this week. The Department of Justice and Homeland Security’s ICE office proudly announced that they had seized domains related to counterfeit goods and child pornography. What they failed to mention, however, is that one of the targeted domains belongs to a free DNS provider, and that 84,000 websites were wrongfully accused of links to child pornography crimes.

…

As with previous seizures, ICE convinced a District Court judge to sign a seizure warrant, and then contacted the domain registries to point the domains in question to a server that hosts the warning message. However, somewhere in this process a mistake was made and as a result the domain of a large DNS service provider was seized.

…

Most of the subdomains in question are personal sites and sites of small businesses. A search on Bing still shows how innocent sites were claimed to promote child pornography. A rather damaging accusation, which scared and upset many of the site’s owners.”

No kidding!

Imagine being involved in a child-custody battle, when your ex’s lawyer gets a hold of this….

Or a million other situations:  child abuse, especially sexual child abuse, is a serious issue.  Many people react to it instinctively…without thinking…considering this to be one of those areas where vigilante justice is not only OK, but necessary (as the courts have systematically failed to protect the kids).

So, what was the reaction of the government?

After all, they were after 10-12 specific sites:  these 84,000 innocent sites were siezed accidentally…

Did they make a huge announcement, explaining their mistake so that the 84,000 would not be stigmatized?

So that they would be believed when they defended themselves?

So they would even be listened to when they tried to explain?

Explain that the official banner everyone who came to their website and saw the official notice “that the website had been siezed because it distributed pedophilia” was one of those 84,000 that were accused by a mistake?

No, not really.

Actually, not at all!

“Although it is not clear where this massive error was made, and who’s responsible for it, the Department of Homeland security is conveniently sweeping it under the rug. In a press release that went out a few hours ago the authorities were clearly proud of themselves for taking down 10 domain names.

However, DHS conveniently failed to mention that 84,000 websites were wrongfully taken down in the process, shaming thousands of people in the process.

“Each year, far too many children fall prey to sexual predators and all too often, these heinous acts are recorded in photos and on video and released on the Internet,” Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano commented.

“DHS is committed to working with our law enforcement partners to shut down websites that promote child pornography to protect these children from further victimization,” she added.”

This is troubling on so many levels, I don’t know where to begin.

Sure, there are conspiracy theories out there – and I, for one, don’t buy into them.

However, once learned, institutions hardly ever forget lessons:  and the lesson learned here was that yes, it was possible for the US government to ‘make dissappear’ a whole block of thousands of websites.  The first one may have been a mistake, but will the second one be?

We know that in Australia, the leaked, ultra secret ‘black list’ of sites banned due to pedophilia/child pornography included more ‘political’ websites and innocent victims (including a dentist’s site) than actual pedophilia/child pornography sites.  And there was no appeal – since the ‘black list’ was uber secret, even knowing the name of a site on it was a criminal offense…  How do you defend against abuse in a situation like that?  Admitting you know the site was shut down is equivalent to pleading guilty to a child sex crime….even if the site was erroneously listed!

Of course, this is just one facet…

If your site is siezed in this manner, even after it is released, there will be echoes on the internet linking it to pedophilia for ever.

And….

If this is a business website you had built up, slowly but surely building up your livelihood by slowly climbing the way up the search-engine ratings – having had your site siezed in this manner will have pretty much wiped out your rating.  Even if you get your site back, even if you are again up and running – business will not be as before!  You will likely have to re-build your ratings – the ‘method’ your customers find your site – and this may take years!

It would be comparable to having the government falsely shut down a prominent store on ‘Main St.’, put ‘the person who runs this store is a pedophile’ sign in the front window, and then permit them to re-open the store, perhaps after they re-located it several blocks away from the busy area….

The walk-by traffic will just not be the same!

And that does not even address the ‘civil liberties’ aspect of confiscating someone’s property/livelihood in this manner….

Or the ‘eagerness’ with which some ‘child-sex-offender registries’ keep track not only of people who had been covicted, but also of people who had ever been accused of child sex crimes:  after all, we can never be too careful in protecting our babies!

Oh, and this is not the first time this type of thing has happened.  Perhaps not on this scale, but…

 

Posted in corruption, freedoms, opression, society, technology. Tags: , , , , , , , , . 4 Comments »

Government-free internet

January 31, 2011 — xanthippa

For years, on and off, I have brrm ranting about the need to create an internet-type thing which would be outside the grasp and control of the powers that be – be they governments or large corporate interests (though, the lines between them have been so blurred lately, it is impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins).

And, no, I am not a complete conspiracy nut.

I have just ben paying attention – with all the ‘bailouts’, so many governments now have a physical stake in various corporations, it would be foolish to deny that the separation between our law-makers and the largest corporate ‘players’ has been eroding quite a lot.  To put it mildly…

That is never a good thing!

It is an especially bad thing when it comes to communications:  that is why I keep going on about the importance of free speech.  And, I also keep going on about the dual dangers to free speech:  government censorship AND corporate censorship.

Because BOTH of these are extremely dangerous to freedom of speech – and to the ability of regular, non-privileged citizens like you and I, to communicate with each other, to exchange information, to compare thoughts….

Without the ability to find out what is truly happening in the world around us – and without being able to discuss it amongst ourselves – we will be divided and powerless.

Isolated.

Easy to control…

This is well understood by those who would like to be rulers, everywhere.

That is why governments try to control media.

In the West, where people believe they have freedom of speech and where we would protest direct censorship of the media, more devious tools, like ‘political corectness’, are used to filter, distort and, yes, censor information that reaches the populace.  It is ‘censorsip by sneak’. so to speak.

It is also understood by the corporatists: hence the repression of all the freedoms we hold near and dear in, say, large areas around the spot where The Olympic Games are held, and so on.  (I have long held that the fascism inherrent in corporatism – the collusion between government-corporations-labour unions necessary to make this system function – is an incarnation of evil much worse than most others, because it pretends that it looks after ‘everyone’ and, if some person does not like it, there must be something wrong with them.  It thus oppresses both the body and the soul…)

But, I am rambling…..

Time has come for us, the ‘unwashed masses’, us, the rabble, to start taking things into our own hands.

Taking to the streets with pitchforks – except, I suspect we will be uch more effective if we can figure out an electronic equivalent to a pitchfork and take to the electronic equivalents of the streets and village squares.

First, of course, we have to build these electronic equivalents.

There are some who have started.

Please, read the following two links – they say it better than I could and are well documented and chock full of links with good info.

Both of these have come about because of what has happened in Egypt – and what could easily happen here.  (And, do not kid yourself – the groundwork has been laid for it….)

H/T: Tyr

 

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

Cheaper by the dozen – except in the EU

June 27, 2010 — xanthippa

If you think government interference in our daily lives is a good thing, you’ll be delighted at this tidbit of news:  EU is about to ban the sale of things ‘by the dozen’.

Yes.

Eggs will be sold ‘by weight’.

You know – to make sure the label on the package is accurate.

So, it’s for your own protection….

Of course, this does not explain why they’d be considering (as is reported that they are) to even ban selling ‘six chocolate bars for the price of 4’?

As John Robson is fond of saying: “The more governments do things they shouldn’t, the less they do the things they should.” You know, like controlling every aspect of how grocers run their business and even sales promotions instead of figuring out how to cut down on the size of the civil service which is so bloated, it is bankrupting the EU….

Posted in opression, politics, society. Tags: , , , , , , , . 1 Comment »
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