New Bill Gives Obama ‘Kill Switch’ To Shut Down The Internet

And yet another story about the Net "Kill Switch" which I am including as it gives another perspective about this situation. (See RELATED STORIES at the bottom of this page following the story.) There are also some links to information that wasn't provided in the two previous stories that I've posted this weekend. But, to be starkly up front with you, what really drew me to this column is the following graphic!

Barry at the Net "Kill Switch"

We have extensively covered efforts to scrap the internet as we know it and move toward a greatly restricted “internet 2″ system. Handing government the power to control the Internet would only be the first step towards this system, whereby individual ID’s and government permission would be required simply to operate a website.

The Lieberman bill needs to be met with fierce opposition at every level and from across the political spectrum. Regulation of the Internet would not only represent a massive assault on free speech, it would also create new roadblocks for e-commerce and as a consequence further devastate the economy.

Government would have “absolute power"
to seize control of the world wide web
under Lieberman legislation

By Paul Joseph Watson

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

The federal government would have “absolute power” to shut down the Internet under the terms of a new US Senate bill being pushed by Joe Lieberman, legislation which would hand President Obama a figurative “kill switch” to seize control of the world wide web in response to a Homeland Security directive.

Lieberman has been pushing for government regulation of the Internet for years under the guise of cybersecurity, but this new bill goes even further in handing emergency powers over to the feds which could be used to silence free speech under the pretext of a national emergency.

“The legislation says that companies such as broadband providers, search engines or software firms that the US Government selects “shall immediately comply with any emergency measure or action developed” by the Department of Homeland Security. Anyone failing to comply would be fined,” reports ZDNet’s Declan McCullagh.

The 197-page bill (PDF) is entitled Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, or PCNAA.

Technology lobbying group TechAmerica warned that the legislation created “the potential for absolute power,” while the Center for Democracy and Technology worried that the bill’s emergency powers “include authority to shut down or limit internet traffic on private systems.”

The bill has the vehement support of Senator Jay Rockefeller, who last year asked during a congressional hearing, “Would it had been better if we’d have never invented the Internet?” while fearmongering about cyber-terrorists preparing attacks.

The largest Internet-based corporations are seemingly happy with the bill, primarily because it contains language that will give them immunity from civil lawsuits and also reimburse them for any costs incurred if the Internet is shut down for a period of time.

“If there’s an “incident related to a cyber vulnerability” after the President has declared an emergency and the affected company has followed federal standards, plaintiffs’ lawyers cannot collect damages for economic harm. And if the harm is caused by an emergency order from the Feds, not only does the possibility of damages virtually disappear, but the US Treasury will even pick up the private company’s tab,” writes McCullagh.

Tom Gann, McAfee’s vice president for government relations, described the bill as a “very important piece of legislation”.

As we have repeatedly warned for years, the federal government is desperate to seize control of the Internet because the establishment is petrified at the fact that alternative and independent media outlets are now eclipsing corporate media outlets in terms of audience share, trust, and influence. (Emphasis my own)

We witnessed another example of this on Monday when establishment Congressman Bob Etheridge was publicly shamed after he was shown on video assaulting two college students who asked him a question. Two kids with a flip cam and a You Tube account could very well have changed the course of a state election, another startling reminder of the power of the Internet and independent media, and why the establishment is desperate to take that power away.

READ FULL STORY at PrisonPlanet.com

RELATED STORIES:
Should president have Net 'kill switch'? ~ By Joseph Farah
Is Obama getting Web 'kill switch'?

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johnny2k's Tea Party Gear!

Rockefeller on Obama: Prez isn't 'believable'

From WorldNetDaily

Message the same as famous 'You lie' by GOP's Joe Wilson

By Bob Unruh

Posted: February 12, 2010 ~ 11:00 pm Eastern

© 2010 WorldNetDaily

Republican Rep. Joe Wilson created waves that left Washington rocking for weeks by shouting "You lie" to Barack Obama during the president's address to Congress last fall, and now a similar message has been delivered by a member of the president's own party.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., told an audience today the president is "beginning to be not believable to me."

The comment was just the latest evidence of the dissension in the Democratic Party that prevented Obama from passing his health care proposal last year despite having a significant party majority in the U.S. House and a supermajority of 60 votes in the Senate.

Rockefeller, a Democrat in a family of lifelong Republicans, was referring to Obama's proposed budget that would cut tax incentives to coal mining companies.

The cut would hit West Virginia's coal industry hard, and Rockefeller's dissatisfaction was evident in the video posted on Real Clear Politics.

Obama's budget proposal would kill $2.3 billion in coal tax breaks, Rockefeller pointed out.

READ FULL STORY >

Liberal love for tyrants ~ By Burt Prelutsky

From WorldNetDaily

By Burt Prelutsky Posted: October 30, 2009 ~ 1:00 am Eastern © 2009 Back when I was a kid, the two major fears in America revolved around polio and communism. Because the first disease was so prevalent and so often fatal prior to the miraculous cures wrought by Dr. Albert Sabin and Dr. Jonas Salk, neither of whom managed to garner a Nobel Prize for their heroic efforts, children were kept out of public swimming pools and were discouraged from having too much physical activity. It's a wonder that our entire generation didn't grow up to be hypochondriacs because if you were even slightly fatigued or had an aching back or a stiff neck, anguished parents started measuring you for an iron lung. The second disease, communism, created its own form of hysteria. During the late '40s and early '50s, we had A-bomb drills in public schools. We grammar-school kids were led to believe that in case the Russians hit L.A. with an atomic bomb, we would be safe so long as we dropped to the floor and huddled beneath our desks with our hands clasped tightly behind our necks. As everyone knows, there's nothing better than tiny hands to ward off the effects of atomic radiation. To this day, I wonder who came up with that particular brainstorm. On the off-chance that the Russkies elected not to vaporize us, a lot of people were convinced that the plan to prevent tooth decay by introducing fluoride into our reservoirs was a Commie plot. The fluoride, we were warned, would turn our brains to mush and make us easy prey for the Soviet Menace. It's taken about 60 years, but I am now convinced that the scaremongers were right. How else to explain American liberals except by accepting that the Commies contaminated our water supply? The fact that most Americans haven't turned into brain-dead zombies muttering "hope … change … hope … change" like those scary creatures in horror movies only goes to prove that people have different tolerances to tainted water, just as they do to alcohol, various viruses and Barack Obama's voice. I mean, seriously, when Obama, during the campaign, spoke about judging him by the people he surrounded himself with, he pointed to Richard Lugar, Joe Biden and Warren Buffett, while drawing the curtain on Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers and Rashid Khalidi. These days, though, he surrounds himself with such visitors from a strange planet as Van Jones, Kevin Jennings and Cass Sunstein. I'm just wondering if it's still OK for us to judge him by his associates. The MSM likened Obama to Abe Lincoln. I guess their confusion was caused by both men being skinny and from Illinois. One major, rather obvious difference, though, is that Lincoln waged a war to preserve the Union. Obama, on the other hand, would go to war to preserve such unions as the SEIU and the UAW. Liberals get all in a tizzy when they're accused of hypocrisy, but it's hard to escape the fact that while arguing for the redistribution of wealth, you never see such kazillionaires as George Soros, Dianne Feinstein, Jay Rockefeller, Charles Schumer or John Kerry redistributing any of theirs or even paying a penny more in taxes than is absolutely required. And, as we discovered when he was putting his administration together, Obama's friends and colleagues quite often try to avoid paying any taxes at all. [CLICK HERE TO READ MORE]

2 quick ways to lower health-care costs ~ By Henry Lamb

From WorldNetDaily

By Henry Lamb Posted: October 03, 2009 ~ 1:00 am Eastern © 2009 To anti-capitalists, "profit" is a dirty word. Karl Marx hated profit, which he considered to be "surplus value from the exploited proletariat." Despite the spectacular collapse of the Soviet Union, a nation constructed on Marx's theory, there are still people who think "profit" is a dirty word. Many of these people are in Washington, D.C. Sen. John Rockefeller issued a statement claiming that "… insurance companies are awash in profits." In reality, the health insurance industry stands 35th among Fortune magazine's profitability rankings, with an average profit of 2.2 percent. Sen. Chuck Schumer doesn't think much of profit, either. He has proposed fees (taxes) that will extract $75 billion from private insurance companies over the next decade. Since taxes, or fees, are a cost of doing business that is simply passed along to the consumer, Schumer's idea is nothing more than an indirect tax that individuals will have to pay. But by applying the tax to insurance companies, Obama's promise not to increase taxes for people earning less than $250,000 can go unchallenged. It is clear that Rockefeller, Schumer and the majority of Democrats want to reduce the cost of health care by squeezing profit out of the health insurance industry. This, of course, would kill the health insurance industry and leave the task of providing health-care services up to the government. This is the ultimate goal. Whether it's called "public option," "co-op exchange," or "single-payer," the goal is the same: Get rid of the profit private companies earn, and let government provide the service. [CLICK HERE TO READ MORE]

Democrats echo Truman and threaten to nationalize Internet

From REDSTATE

Posted by Neil Stevens (Profile) Saturday, August 29th at 9:29AM EDT In 1952, during the Korean War, the United Steel Workers of America had gone out on strike. The union was demanding pay increases beyond what steel firms said they could afford to pay, unless they were to raise prices beyond what would be approved by the government’s Wage Stablization Board (set up for the war to attempt to keep costs in line despite inflationary government policies). President Harry Truman, Democrat, unilaterally declared the steel firms to be at fault for the strikes, which were set to cripple Defense contractors’ ability to keep the war supplied. So, the President nationalized America’s steel manufacturing plants with the plan of dictating his own terms to the unions, appeasing them as part of his political base, while keeping afloat an early front of the Cold War. The Supreme Court two months later shut the President down, denying the administration’s claim that he had broad implied or residual powers to do whatever he wanted as President of the United States. Had he relied on the Selective Service Act to take control, he might have gotten away with it, but he refused to use it because it had too many pesky controls to protect property rights. Had he relied on Taft-Hartley to stop the strikes, he might have gotten away with it, but he refused to use it because the unions were his allies. So today, it is surely with the case of Youngstown Sheet & Tube co. vs Sawyer in mind that the Congress debates giving President Barack Obama, Democrat, sweeping authority over Internet Service Providers, including the authority to nationalize whatever Internet resources he declares to be important. S. 773, a bill by West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller, Democrat, has a 55-page draft bill that would create new “emergency” powers for the President, a ‘cybersecurity’ Enabling Act of sorts, that would give the President the authority broad powers over any “non-governmental” computer networks, whether public or private, that are declared by the President to be “critical.” On its own, this power is already dangerous, and even frightening to anyone in the industry. Whether large or small, we all who operate on the Internet invest in online capital. Large firms spend billions on the task, and now the Democrats want to nationalize it at the drop of a hat. This is threatened theft on a scale not usually seen outside banana Republics. (Emphasis mine) [READ FULL STORY]

MY COMMENT: This bill sounds quite insidious, to say the least. The author, Neil Stevens, hits it on the nose in this column. Be sure to read the comments at the end of the column, too. As one comment (by MathMom) mentions, "The internet is the lifeline of the Right. The Left has co-opted the major media outlets and all “news” magazines. ABC and NBC won’t air an ad opposing government-issued health care. Our way of getting the word out is by the internet. If Bambi takes that over, the US is over." It could not be better said! Neil Stevens is on twitter as presjpolk

Will bill give Obama control of Internet? ~ By Drew Zahn

Proposed new powers called 'drastic federal intervention' By Drew Zahn © 2009 WorldNetDaily A pair of bills introduced in the U.S. Senate would grant the White House sweeping new powers to access private online data, regulate the cybersecurity industry and even shut down Internet traffic during a declared "cyber emergency." Senate bills No. 773 and 778, introduced by Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.V., are both part of what's being called the Cybersecurity Act of 2009, which would create a new Office of the National Cybersecurity Advisor, reportable directly to the president and charged with defending the country from cyber attack. A working draft of the legislation obtained by an Internet privacy group also spells out plans to grant the Secretary of Commerce access to all privately owned information networks deemed to be critical to the nation's infrastructure "without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule or policy restricting such access." Privacy advocates and Internet experts have been quick to sound the alarm over the act's broadly drawn government powers. "The cybersecurity threat is real," says Leslie Harris, president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, which obtained the draft of S.773, "but such a drastic federal intervention in private communications technology and networks could harm both security and privacy." "The whole thing smells bad to me," writes Larry Seltzer in eWeek, an Internet and print news source on technology issues. "I don't like the chances of the government improving this situation by taking it over generally, and I definitely don't like the idea of politicizing this authority by putting it in the direct control of the president." [Continue reading]

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