Informing Americans Who Love Freedom
The 248-168 roll call Thursday by which the House passed legislation encouraging companies and the federal government to share information collected on the Internet to prevent electronic attacks from cybercriminals, foreign governments and terrorists.
A “yes” vote is a vote to pass the bill.
Voting yes were 42 Democrats and 206 Republicans.
Voting no were 140 Democrats and 28 Republicans.
X denotes those not voting.
There are 3 vacancies in the 435-member House.
The controversial internet censorship bill SOPA, which we worked to defeat earlier this year, is back. Now, it is called CISPA. The name has changed, but the goal is the same. Put the government and the elites in control of what you hear and see on the internet. They don’t like your mind being too free.
Tomorrow morning the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will mark the winter solstice by taking an unprecedented step to expand government’s reach into the Internet by attempting to regulate its inner workings. In doing so, the agency will circumvent Congress and disregard a recent court ruling.
How did the FCC get here?
For years, proponents of so-called “net neutrality” have been calling for strong regulation of broadband “on-ramps” to the Internet, like those provided by your local cable or phone companies. Rules are needed, the argument goes, to ensure that the Internet remains open and free, and to discourage broadband providers from thwarting consumer demand. That sounds good if you say it fast.
Nothing is broken that needs fixing, however. The Internet has been open and freedom-enhancing since it was spun off from a government research project in the early 1990s. Its nature as a diffuse and dynamic global network of networks defies top-down authority. Ample laws to protect consumers already exist. Furthermore, the Obama Justice Department and the European Commission both decided this year that net-neutrality regulation was unnecessary and might deter investment in next-generation Internet technology and infrastructure.
Read More: By ROBERT M. MCDOWELL, WSJ
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is poised to add the Internet to its portfolio of regulated industries. The agency’s chairman, Julius Genachowski, announced Wednesday that he circulated draft rules he says will “preserve the freedom and openness of the Internet.” No statement could better reflect the gulf between the rhetoric and the reality of Obama administration policies.
With a straight face, Mr. Genachowski suggested that government red tape will increase the “freedom” of online services that have flourished because bureaucratic busybodies have been blocked from tinkering with the Web. Ordinarily, it would be appropriate at this point to supply an example from the proposed regulations illustrating the problem. Mr. Genachowski’s draft document has over 550 footnotes and is stamped “non-public, for internal use only” to ensure nobody outside the agency sees it until the rules are approved in a scheduled Dec. 21 vote. So much for “openness.”
The issue of “net neutrality” is nothing new, but the increasing popularity of online movie streaming services like Netflix have highlighted an area of potential concern. When someone watches a film over the Internet, especially in high definition, the maximum available capacity of the user’s connection is used. Think, for example, of the problems that would arise at the water works if everyone decided to turn on their faucets and take a shower simultaneously. Internet providers are beginning to see the same strain on their networks.
In some cases, heavy use of this sort slows the Web experience for everyone sharing the same lines. That has prompted some cable Internet providers to consider either charging the heavy users more or limiting access to the “problematic” services. Of course, if cinema buffs find themselves cut off from their favorite service, they’re going to be mad. If companies don’t act, they’re just as likely to find irate customers who don’t want their experience bogged down by others.
Read More: By THE WASHINGTON TIMES
House Minority Leader John Boehner recently accused the Obama Federal Communications Commission (FCC) of pursuing a “government takeover of the Internet.”
Specifically, Boehner said that the FCC is engaging in an action that “amounts to a government takeover of the Internet, and yet another government takeover of a large portion of the private sector by the Obama administration.”
The scheme amounts to an online “Fairness Doctrine” but it goes under another equally benign name: “network neutrality.”
Can you imagine what would happen if we were required under penalty of law to “balance” all the information on the Internet? Well that’s exactly what Barack Obama wants.
Recently, the effort suffered a major setback when the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals put up a road block to the plan. Fox News’ Phil Kerpen reported: “That effort suffered a major setback when the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals emphatically smacked down the FCC’s regulatory proposals in Comcast v. FCC.”
But Obama’s not going to let the court get in his way. He’s going to “go nuclear” and defy the courts.
Kerpen continued: “President Obama and his close friend and FCC chairman Julius Genachowski, however, refuse to back down. Instead they’re escalating to the regulatory equivalent of a nuclear attack on the free-market Internet: Chairman Genachowski will announce today his intention to reclassify broadband Internet as an old-fashioned telephone system as a pretext for pervasive regulatory control.”
The key phrase in Kerpen’s report is “pretext for pervasive regulatory control.” That means, once they have their foot in the door — once they have control — Obama and the FCC will go about instituting their own version of the “Fairness Doctrine” on the Internet.
According Contributing Editor Neil Stevens of RedState.com: “If the FCC is allowed to put the Internet in the U.S. under those powers, then the Obama administration will have total power to tax internet users, regulate content on internet servers, and even institute price controls on internet services.”
Of course, Obama and the FCC don’t really have the authority to do what they are setting out to do, but they don’t really care. The authority over regulation actually rests with Congress, but that means that Congress must act and exert its authority to stop this plan.
Obama’s FCC Chairman, Julius Genachowski may be the man who will attempt to implement this plan to take over the internet but there’s more to this story. One of the shadow organizations that is joined-at-the-hip to Genachowski and is driving this plan is a Marxist-run organization ironically called Free Press.
FOX News’ Glenn Beck has already alerted his viewers to the plot saying: “Free Press has [had] three confirmed meetings now with Obama’s FCC to work on new Internet regulations…. The FCC chairman, not to be confused with the diversity ‘czar’ – this is the chairman of the FCC, Julius Genachowski – chose Free Press spokeswoman, Jen Howard, to be his press secretary.”
In another venue, Beck said: “The FCC is being inundated by a special interest group ironically named Free Press, whose goal it is to limit America’s free press and freedom of speech. This special interest group also claims that it’s due to special interest groups that it has become necessary for them to intervene on our behalf.”
Seton Motley, contributing editor of Newsbusters.org, has also addressed what is going on behind the scenes: “The groundwork for government information totalitarianism – favored by people like Hugo Chavez-loving FCC ‘Diversity Czar’ Mark Lloyd and Marxist ‘media reform’-outfit Free Press founder Robert McChesney – is being laid in the (p)lan being crafted by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski.”
And just in case you may still doubt the motives of the folks creating this plan, consider these four past statements by the man-behind-the-curtain, Free Press’ founder Robert McChesney:
1. “Any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself.”
2. “There is no real answer but to remove brick by brick the capitalist system itself, rebuilding the entire society on socialist principles.”
3. “We need to do whatever we can to limit capitalist propaganda, regulate it, minimalize it and perhaps even eliminate it.”
4. “At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies. We are not at that point yet. But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.”
Wow, no need to do more than quote their own statements.
By Floyd and Mary Beth Brown, Western Journalism
China has signalled a change of approach to the Google crisis, with state media describing the company’s threat to pull out of the country as a political conspiracy by the US government.
Accusations in two newspapers that Washington was using Google as a foreign policy tool were echoed by Chinese government officials on Wednesday.
This comes before a policy speech by Hillary Clinton, US secretary of state, on internet freedom on Wednesday, raising the risk that the standoff will damage already testy relations between the two major powers.
Global Times, a nationalist tabloid owned by People’s Daily, the Communist party mouthpiece, ran an editorial with the headline: “The world does not welcome the White House’s Google”.
“Whenever the US government demands it, Google can easily become a convenient tool for promoting the US government’s political will and values abroad. And actually the US government is willing to do so,” the piece said.
Read More: By Kathrin Hille, Financial Times
Hardly anyone predicted the Internet and its consequences, with the amazing new freedom to communicate with almost anybody across the globe and easily look up facts. Who would have thought that someone could pull out a cell phone at dinner and have the most comprehensive encyclopedias in hand to peruse for information? All this was created without the federal government protecting us from the companies that were providing the service.
The Obama administration doesn’t hold the new freedom in high regard. The administration labels new regulations as “net neutrality.” If enacted, new Federal Communications Commission regulations will change everything. The federal government not only will regulate prices (which is never a good idea), but also will eliminate any control by service providers over the programs they run on their systems.
Preventing Internet providers from charging higher prices to those who use more bandwidth will, the argument goes, benefit consumers. Unfortunately, although we all would like lower prices, things don’t work that way. Large downloads slow down the Internet. Not limiting those who want to make large downloads produces congestion, slowing down the rate at which others can access information on the Internet.
Read More: THE WASHINGTON TIMES
There was a time, not so long ago, when the term “Internet Freedom” actually meant what it implied: a cyberspace free from over-zealous legislators and bureaucrats. For a few brief, beautiful moments in the Internet’s history (from the mid-90s to the early 2000s), a majority of Netizens and cyber-policy pundits alike all rallied around the flag of “Hands Off the Net!”
From censorship efforts, encryption controls, online taxes, privacy mandates and infrastructure regulations, there was a general consensus as to how much authority government should have over cyber life and our cyber liberties. Simply put, there was a “presumption of liberty” in all cyber matters.
Those days are now gone; the presumption of online liberty is giving way to a presumption of regulation. A massive assault on real Internet freedom has been gathering steam for years and has finally come to a head. Ironically, victory for those who carry the banner of “Internet Freedom” would mean nothing less than the death of that freedom.
We refer to the gradual but certain movement to have the federal government impose “neutrality” regulation for all Internet actors and activities–and in particular, to Monday’s announcement by Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski that new rules will be floated shortly. “But wait,” you say, “You’re mixing things up! All that’s being talked about right now is the application of ‘simple net neutrality,’ regulations for the infrastructure layer of the net.” You might even claim regulations are not really regulation but pro-freedom principles to keep the net “free and open.”
Read More: By Adam Thierer and Berin Szoka, Forbes
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CISPA The New SOPA: Is The Era Of Internet Freedom Coming To An End?
I am sure you remember the successful movement earlier this year to prevent Congress from passing the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA.) Tens of millions of people around the world signed petitions from websites such as Google and Wikipedia while many websites “went black” for a day to protest what they saw as an attempt by the feds to censor the internet.
Unfortunately, the Republican House of Representatives and the Democratic Senate still don’t seem to have gotten the message. You see, while both parties claim to disagree on a lot of issues, they agree basically that the federal government needs to police the internet in the name of innocent-sounding reasons like “copyright protection” and “cyber-security.” Each bill addressing these “problems” has had bipartisan support. I wonder what part of the Constitution will be referred to by the House in justifying the passage of one or more of these bills into law (more on the Constitution in a bit…)
The latest bill to be introduced that threatens to censor the web is the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA.) Some consider it to be worse than its predecessors, unfortunately. Essentially, CISPA allows companies to collect information about you and then report said info to the feds. The government simply needs to request this into in the name of cyber-security.
The actual language of the bill is rather vague and could very well allow Congress to monitor, censor, and delete any online communications that it considers to be “disruptive” to the government and the big corporations and special interests behind this anti-free internet legislation.
Kendall Burman of the Center for Democracy and Technology, which supports a free and open internet, says that our of the several cyber-security bills pending in Congress, CISPA is the “most alarming.” It does not specify to whom in the government that this collected information would go, although Ms. Burman thinks it is likely it will go into the hands of the NSA, which is quite reassuring.
Is this bill constitutional? I know that collectivists on both sides of the aisle who support this legislation will say something like the following: “Back in the day while writing the Constitution, the Founders could not have possibly predicted the rise of computer technology as well as the downsides that come with it.” On this point in and of itself, I agree with them; nevertheless, the Constitution does not authorize Congress to pass laws like these (as per Article I, Section 8.) At the very least, it imposes an enormous threat to our First Amendment rights of free speech and a free press as well as our Fourth Amendment rights of protection against unnecessary searches from authority.
Besides, Ms. Burman insists that law enforcement already has plenty of tools at its disposal to combat the crimes that the co-sponsors of this legislation are concerned with. Also, she is concerned that this bill could lead to a “backdoor wiretap or a surveillance program” by an innocent-sounding name (i.e. the PATRIOT Act.)
CISPA has so far been introduced, referred to, and reported by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The goal is to ram this bill through the entire House later this month and then the Senate will probably take up their version of this legislation. President Obama so far has not openly taken a position on CISPA, although personally I do not think it takes a rocket scientist to figure out where he privately leans on this bill.
Perhaps the most unfortunate thing about the bill is the fact that dozens of supposedly anti-”big government” Republicans in the House are co-sponsors (the lead sponsor is Republican Mike Rogers from Michigan). These so-called “conservatives” include Michele Bachmann, Marsha Blackburn, Trent Franks, Darrell Issa, Phil Gingey, Ben Quayle, Joe “You Lie” Wilson, Sue Myrick, and others.
Everyone reading this should immediately call or e-mail their Congressman and tell them to vote against this monstrosity of a bill every chance they get. Of course if their representative is a co-sponsor, tell them that you plan to vote for a primary challenger unless they wash their hands of this filth.
Click here to watch Ms. Berman’s interview with RT about CISPA.
Photo credit: Ashley Poeticy (Creative Commons)