Candidate and Election News
Fox News FreedomWorks
Sign Up
Hoover Institution The Blaze Heritage Foundation
Federal
on Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) called for a “digital bill of rights” to protect Internet users from intrusive legislation. More…
Opinion: Big Brother looms over House GOP’s ‘Orwellian’ cybersecurity billImagine that the Congress approves of this radical challenge to civil liberty by saying the new law is the best way to prevent terrorists from creating chaos in the financial system, plotting violence and hacking into big companies in a conspiracy to destroy the nation with a “Digital Pearl Harbor.”
The House Energy and Commerce’s subcommittee on Communications and Technology scheduled a hearing for next Thursday to examine international proposals to regulate the Internet.
A witness list was not immediately available.
Some countries are pushing to give the United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union more control over the governance of the Internet. U.S. officials, including Larry Strickling of the Commerce Department and Robert McDowell of the Federal Communications Commission, have warned the proposal would undermine freedom on the Internet. MORE…
Video provided by Brasscheck TV
Senate Democrats are quietly revamping cybersecurity legislation in an attempt to pick up Republican votes.
The move is an acknowledgement that they currently lack the 60 votes needed to bring their preferred bill to the floor.
“Undoubtedly we’ll make some changes,” a Senate Democratic aide told The Hill. But he said getting the legislation through the Senate “is not as hard of a lift as some people have made it out to be.”
The aide predicted that the entire Senate Democratic caucus will vote for the bill.
The House passed its own measure, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), last month despite a veto threat from the White House. More…
“Cannot guarantee adequate protection for citizens’ rights”
Steve WatsonPrisonplanet.comApril 18, 2012
A member of the European parliamnent who was appointed to oversee a controversial global internet treaty has called for the legislation to be scrapped, just weeks after his predecessor quit the post in disgust.
MEP David Martin denounced the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), saying that “The intended benefits of this international agreement are far outweighed by the potential threats to civil liberties.” More…
ACLU warns of expanded spying powers in new GOP cybersecurity legislationThe American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is warning that a cybersecurity bill from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and other Republicans would give spy agencies unprecedented powers to snoop through people’s personal information.
McCain’s bill, the Secure IT Act, would encourage companies to share information about cyber threats with government agencies, including the National Security Agency (NSA) and U.S. Cyber Command.
“The bill would allow the NSA to collect the Internet records of civilians who are not suspected of doing anything wrong,” Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel for the ACLU, told The Hill. More…
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.
Since the Net’s inception, engineers, academics, user groups and others have convened in bottom-up nongovernmental organizations to keep it operating and thriving through what is known as a “multi-stakeholder” governance model. This consensus-driven private-sector approach has been the key to the Net’s phenomenal success.
In 1995, shortly after it was privatized, only 16 million people used the Internet world-wide. By 2011, more than two billion were online—and that number is growing by as much as half a million every day. This explosive growth is the direct result of governments generally keeping their hands off the Internet sphere. More…
Everyone knows that armies of well-paid lobbyists influence legislation to benefit wealthy clients. That is business as usual on the Hill. The average member of Congress must raise more than $5,000 per week to get reelected. Most of that money comes from PAC fundraisers and Beltway insiders — not from their constituents. More…
This is interesting. Kader Arif, the “rapporteur” for ACTA, has quit that role in disgust over the process behind getting the EU to sign onto ACTA. A rapporteur is a person “appointed by a deliberative body to investigate an issue.” However, it appears his investigation of ACTA didn’t make him very pleased:
I want to denounce in the strongest possible manner the entire process that led to the signature of this agreement: no inclusion of civil society organisations, a lack of transparency from the start of the negotiations, repeated postponing of the signature of the text without an explanation being ever given, exclusion of the EU Parliament’s demands that were expressed on several occasions in our assembly.
As rapporteur of this text, I have faced never-before-seen manoeuvres from the right wing of this Parliament to impose a rushed calendar before public opinion could be alerted, thus depriving the Parliament of its right to expression and of the tools at its disposal to convey citizens’ legitimate demands.”
Everyone knows the ACTA agreement is problematic, whether it is its impact on civil liberties, the way it makes Internet access providers liable, its consequences on generic drugs manufacturing, or how little protection it gives to our geographical indications.
This agreement might have major consequences on citizens’ lives, and still, everything is being done to prevent the European Parliament from having its say in this matter. That is why today, as I release this report for which I was in charge, I want to send a strong signal and alert the public opinion about this unacceptable situation. I will not take part in this masquerade.
Pretty rare to find such direct honesty in political circles. That’s quite a direct and clear condemnation of the entire process. In terms of process, it will be interesting to see if this has an impact. While the EU did sign on to ACTA today, it still needs to be ratified by the European Parliament (more on that in a little while). Having Arif quit makes a pretty big statement, and hopefully makes it easier for Parliament Members to speak out loudly against ACTA… Still, this is an uphill battle. The supporters of ACTA have been working to get ACTA approved for years. To them, this is basically a done deal.
Obama Tries to Bypass Congress with Deadly Global Internet Treaty ACTA |
| Written by Raven Clabough |
| Friday, 27 January 2012 16:00 |
 Before the American people were protesting the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, the president managed to sign an international treaty which would permit foreign companies to demand that ISPs (Internet Service Providers) remove web content in the United States without any legal oversight. Entitled the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the treaty was signed by Obama on October 1, 2011, but it is currently a subject of discussion because the White House is circulating a petition demanding that senators ratify the treaty.What’s worse is that the White House has done some maneuvering — characterizing the treaty as an “executive agreement” — thereby bypassing approval by members of Congress. Concerned by this action of the administration, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore., above left) sent a letter to President Obama in which he declared: More… |
Video provided by: Brasscheck.com
White House bypasses Senate to ink agreement that could allow Chinese companies to demand ISPs remove web content in US with no legal oversight
Paul Joseph Watson/Infowars.com/Thursday, January 26, 2012
Months before the debate about Internet censorship raged as SOPA and PIPA dominated the concerns of web users, President Obama signed an international treaty that would allow companies in China or any other country in the world to demand ISPs remove web content in the US with no legal oversight whatsoever.
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement was signed by Obama on October 1 2011, yet is currently the subject of a White House petition demanding Senators be forced to ratify the treaty. The White House has circumvented the necessity to have the treaty confirmed by lawmakers by presenting it an as “executive agreement,” although legal scholars have highlighted the dubious nature of this characterization.
The hacktivist group Anonymous attacked and took offline the Federal Trade Commission’s website yesterday in protest against the treaty, which was also the subject of demonstrations across major cities in Poland, a country set to sign the agreement today. More…
CYBER WAR: Feds SHUT DOWN file-sharing website; No trial, no due process…January 20, 2012/Source: Guardian
According to prosecutors, Megaupload illegally cheated copyright holders out of $500m in revenue as part of a criminal enterprise spanning five years.
A lawyer for Megaupload told the Guardian it would “vigorously” defend itself against the charges, dismissing the criminal action as “a civil case in disguise”.
News of the indictment – being framed as one of the biggest copyright cases in US history – came a day after major internet firms held a 24-hour protest over proposed anti-piracy laws.
According to a Department of Justice release, seven people associated with Megaupload were indicted by a federal grand jury earlier this month over the charges. Read More…
Support for two controversial online-piracy bills began to crumble Wednesday in the face of protests from thousands of websites, including tech titans Google and Wikipedia.
The unprecedented online demonstration against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) — epitomized by a black censorship bar plastered over the Google logo — spurred a rush for the exits on Capitol Hill as lawmakers rapidly withdrew their support for the legislation.
Senate Republicans reacted quickly to the Web blackout, which exposed hundreds of millions of Internet users to the piracy bills for the first time. More…
By Brendan Sasso
In an unprecedented display of political muscle, thousands of websites went dark on Wednesday to protest two Internet piracy bills, the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Senate’s Protect IP Act.
The backlash seems to be slowing the momentum for both piracy bills on Capitol Hill.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a rising star in the Republican Party, on Wednesday dropped his support for the Senate version of the piracy bill and said lawmakers should take the time to craft new legislation that addresses the concerns “raised by all sides.”
1/18/2012 10:00:43 AM Ed Morrissey
The SOPA/PIPA Internet blackout has delivered a message to at least one elected official in Washington, DC. Tea Party favorite Senator Marco Rubio announced a few minutes ago on his Facebook page that he has abandoned his support for the Senate PIPA
More…
Reid pushes online piracy bill despite White House concerns
The Persistent Patriots 
White House Considers Executive Order, Leaves Internet Takeover A Possibility
The White House has left open the possibility of enacting its Internet agenda via executive order after the failed effort to bring the Democrat-supported cybersecurity bill to a full vote in the Senate last week. More…
Share this:
Posted in Political Commentary | Comments Off on White House Considers Executive Order, Leaves Internet Takeover A Possibility