They reckon you could pick more at random than tailgunner joe scored.There
were communists in the state dept! Thanks to dingbats like joe they stayed
there.
Venona turned out to be well known to both the FBI and the KGB yet a secret
to all others.
Will Fortress America learn from the mistake of the suppression of the
Venona findings?
They will probably wind up whining about how much they loved us like Markus
Wolf did when the wall came down."We had to treat you all like infants to
protect you."
Submitted for your entertainment...
Bush's Master Plan For The Internet
By Kurt Nimmo
1-3-3
Bush and his Machiavellian minions will no longer put up with you roaming
free into dangerous territory on the internet. You need to be corralled,
electronically tethered, kept away from sites promoting conspiracy theories
-- in other words, information the corporate media, the official US
Ministry of Disinformation, does not want you to read or see. It's now
increasingly obvious the Bushites want to lock us up in a hermetically
sealed informational box and throw away the key. All the information they
consider worthwhile will be pumped in through a one-way hole.
During war, as they say, the first causality is truth. And war -- all the
time and everywhere people resist -- is what Bush will deliver. It will be
easier for him to accomplish this if you can't read the truth, if you
remain ignorant, or if you are obstructed from organizing and speaking out
on the internet against war and madness. Bush knows this -- or, at least,
those around him know this. The internet, regardless of its trashy and lame
commercial characteristics, is a nearly perfect medium for organizing. It's
a thorn in the side of neo-cons and fascists everywhere.
Enter Dubya's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board (CIPB), which the
unelected one created with a flourish of his pen (another executive order,
a most popular way to rule vassals). The men and women around Bush want to
require internet service providers, ISPs, to build a centralized network
capable of monitoring where you go, what you look at and read, what you
write in your email -- and all in real-time. Of course, they don't say
this. What they say is they want to protect you against viruses and
terrorist attacks. They want to shield you from Osama bin Laden and Saddam
Hussein, who are everywhere, ready to attack, even on the internet (Osama's
cave in Tora Bora, don't you know, bristled with computers and crack virus
software programmers).
CIPB is working on a report, "The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace,"
which it will release early next year. It is billed as a strategy for the
Ministry of Homeland Security and -- this is the laughable part -- is
subject to congressional review. Yeah, like Congress protected us from
Bush's totalitarian Patriot Act and the Ministry of Homeland Security bill.
What a joke. 99% of these folks are Bush co-conspirators. When Bush tells
them to jump, they ask how high. Your right to travel through cyberspace
without a snoop noting your every move is one of the next hoops Bush will
wave before an obeisant Congress. The internet is one of the last bastions
of resistance. Besides, some rabble-rouser posted the Anarchist's Cookbook
on there.
Of course, converting the internet into a big Carnivore system is one
thing, while denying you access is quite another. Bush's centralized system
will make this a reality. Get labeled a malcontent, a "security risk," or
even a "cyber-terrorist" and you can be easily barred from Bush's "secure,
trusted, robust, reliable, and available infrastructure." Say the wrong
thing on a bulletin board or forum and your ISP -- afraid of the government
breathing down its neck, yanking its business license, or sicking the IRS
on it -- may terminate your service. Hell, if things go as Bush and Clan
envision most small ISPs will go out of business, replaced by AOL, Comcast,
and other rich communications industry friends and big dollar contributors
to Project Bush.
Dubya wants to essentially authorize a Department of Approved Internet Use
within the Ministry of Homeland Security. This new department will create
and demand implementation of new network protocols, take over the task of
verifying IT vendors (so much for the conservative idea of getting rid of
big government), and issue security assessment and policy tools (maybe
Dubya can roll Microsoft into the Ministry of Homeland Security, demand
everybody use Windows instead of Mac or Linux because Windows will be
"secure" and adapt, at taxpayer expense, the latest government mandated
protocols). Don't worry about the cost -- this idea comes from the guys who
think a $200 billion war is nothing to sweat, even if it wrecks the
economy. Plus, a lot of the cost will be picked up by the ISPs, which is to
say you, the subscriber. Nothing like paying through the nose to have the
government turn your computer into a Carnivore box.
Just in case you think I'm playing fast and loose with the word
"Carnivore," consider what an official with a major data services company
who has was briefed on several aspects of the government's plans told John
Markoff of the New York Times the other day, "Part of monitoring the
Internet and doing real-time analysis is to be able to track incidents
while they are occurring... Am I analogizing this to Carnivore? Absolutely.
But in fact, it's 10 times worse. Carnivore was working on much smaller
feeds and could not scale. This is looking at the whole Internet." OK, I
inserted the required quote from a "respected" source, so I guess we can
all rest easier now. The idea of Bush squashing a (relatively) free and
unhampered internet has now broken free of the besmeared realm of
conspiracy theory. Hallelujah!
So there you have it, in a nutshell. You can't be trusted and you will
never have privacy again -- not on the internet, not with your bank or
credit card transactions, medical records, not when you fly on a plane or
cross the border, and certainly not if you decide Bush and his neo-con
fascists are wrong about forever war and you decide you want to do
something about it. As it looks now, things are moving in a bleak direction
rather quickly. But even Russians under the yoke of Soviet communism
managed to publish samizdats -- typed on manual typewriters with multiple
carbons, since the photocopying machines were locked up and closely watched
by the state -- and news thus disseminated, people learned the truth.
Somewhere buried in a box in the closet of my apartment is BBS software on
an old, dusty floppy disk. In the days before the web -- when the internet
was mostly confined to computer students, faculty, government types, and
other such privileged geeks -- a few of us dialed into computers running
BBS software. If Bush and his Critical Infrastructure Protection Board
bureaucrats have their way, we may be forced to return to those less
sophisticated days. Call it a dial-up samizdat where information remains
free. Of course, sooner or later, Bush will get around to making this
illegal, too. But where there's a will, there's a way. We may even be
reduced to sending CD-ROMs via snail-mail in the future. Or passing them
hand-to-hand under the cover of darkness. Truth refuses to be suppressed.
It will always break out, regardless of the technology.
Kurt Nimmo is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New
Mexico. Visit his excellent online gallery. He can be reached at:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
We highly recommend frequent visits to Nimmo's website, Another Day in the
Empire
http://www.counterpunch.org/nimmo01022003.html
