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The protesters were outraged by the decision of Communist Party leaders on the mainland to stack the deck for elections to Hong Kong's chief executive post with pro-Beijing lackeys. Day after day, as the "umbrella revolution" in Hong Kong swelled from thousands to hundreds of thousands, China's infamous "Great Firewall" effectively prevented most Chinese from even learning about the Hong Kong protests.
China's army of Internet censors, ably
assisted by software and hardware from Western companies, worked
furiously to block and scrub stories, images, and comments about the
demonstrations from news sites, blogs, social media, and search
engines.
When coverage of Hong Kong finally did
appear on mainland television and Internet, it was to falsely
present the largely peaceful demonstrations as violent and lawless.
The man-on-the-street interviews presented by the Party-controlled
media, not surprisingly, presented comments that universally
condemned the Hong Kong protests and unanimously supported the
"democracy" willed by the party leaders.
It also entails tracking down those who dare to dissent from the party line in cyberspace.
They had been able to track down his friend thanks to the "Golden Shield" program, an integral part of China's Great Firewall for Orwellian control of the Internet.
Harry Wu, who spent 19 years in China's labor camps, explained that Golden Shield has been built with indispensable assistance from U.S.-based companies.
Communist China may be infamous for its Golden Shield and its Great Firewall, but it is far from alone in using draconian police powers to troll, patrol, and censor the Internet.
The member states of the United Nations comprise a den of thugs and thieves with atrocious human rights records. Even the governments we are accustomed to deeming more "enlightened" - such as those of the United States and Western Europe - have been revealed, by recent leaks and admissions, to be more than willing to trample the rights of netizens.
The National Security Agency, Department of Homeland Defense, FBI, IRS, and other agencies have shown that they have already opened the door for tyrannical abuse of their awesome capabilities to monitor virtually every word and action of every American - not to mention the billions of other human inhabitants of our planet.
Those were the important questions under discussion and negotiation at the recently concluded Ninth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), which took place September 1-5 in Istanbul, Turkey.
Considering the magnitude of the issues
involved - privacy, surveillance, cybercrime, national security,
intellectual property rights, not to mention trillions of dollars in
commerce - the UN-sponsored IGF summit received remarkably little
coverage from the mainstream media. A Plenipotentiary Conference of
the UN's International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is
taking place in Busan, South Korea, during the last week of October
and the first week of November.
When the secret text of the ITU's
proposed Dubai "reforms" leaked out in 2012, it was clear that it
reflected these statist influences.
The U.S. House of Representatives,
likewise, approved the same resolution by a 397-0 vote.
Despite repeated pledges by President
Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, and other
administration spokesmen of commitment to openness, transparency,
privacy rights, and freedom of expression on the Internet, the
reality is that the administration is moving toward more censorship,
surveillance, and repression on the Internet.
That group, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), promises to create a new structure that will keep the Internet private, safe, and robust. From the start of the Internet in the early 1990s, a computer genius named Jon Postel managed the Internet from his office at the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, under the name Internet Assigned Names Authority (IANA).
When Postel died suddenly in 1998 at age 55, his responsibilities were transferred to ICANN under the control of the Department of Commerce (DoC).
But the contract under which ICANN has been operating ends in September 2015, after which ICANN will operate on its own.
According to Larry Strickling, the head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) inside the DoC, the new ICANN management will not lead to control by the UN or any other international government agency.
However, these and other assurances notwithstanding, there is more than ample cause for the freedom-minded to be concerned about the administration's Internet policy.
On October 1, 2011, President Obama signed the global Internet treaty known as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which, among other things, sets up international governing and adjudicating bodies and would allow foreign companies to demand that ISPs (Internet Service Providers) remove web content in the United States without any legal oversight.
Typical of his modus operandi, President Obama has attempted to implement this treaty as an executive agreement, in clear violation of our Constitution's requirement of congressional approval. In addition to ACTA, the Obama White House has also been simultaneously championing the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House of Representatives and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) in the Senate, both of which contain dangerous ACTA-style censorship and control provisions.
Then, of course, there is Presidential Policy Directive 20 (PPD 20), which was secretly implemented by President Obama in October 2012, ostensibly as a security directive against cyberattacks.
The American people didn't find out
about it until June 2013, when PPD 20 was leaked by Edward Snowden.
...there is the usual convergence of socialist, communist, and authoritarian regimes with globalist think tanks, multinational corporations, and tax-exempt foundations, all aiming to centralize control over the Internet.
Specifically, leading the charge in this push for control are,
In an essay entitled "The Strategic Significance of the Internet Commons," former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff describes cyberspace and the Internet as a "global commons" that must come under "global governance."
The article by Chertoff (a Trilateral Commission member) was published in the Summer 2014 issue of Strategic Studies Quarterly, a journal published by the Air Force Research Institute.
In it, Chertoff writes:
This is revealing, inasmuch as LOST has been a cauldron of controversy for decades, since it would:
...and much more.
The Royal Institute of International
Affairs is the British cabal of globalists who serve as the de facto
governing class of the U.K., in much the same manner that its New
York-based sister house, the Council on Foreign Relations, operates
here in the United States.
And another is Joseph Nye, professor and former dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, former chair of the National Intelligence Council, current executive director at the CFR, and current North American chairman of the Trilateral Commission.
As we've already noted, Chertoff is also a member of the Trilateral Commission, a very rarified group of one-worlders organized by David Rockefeller (former chairman of the board and current honorary chairman of the CFR, as well as founder and current honorary chairman of the Trilateral Commission).
The CFR, RIIA, and Trilateral Commission form the top tier of globalist think tanks promoting world government.
Notable allied outfits in this effort include the,
Not surprisingly, Chertoff's views concerning Internet governance fit nicely with his un-American views of "homeland security."
In 2012, he co-chaired the Aspen Institute's Homeland Security Group, which produced a report entitled "Homeland Security and Intelligence: Next Steps in Evolving the Mission."
As to be expected, the Chertoff-led Aspen report advocated for evolution in the direction of centralized, nationalized control of police functions.
That is always a given, for in the
CFR-RIIA worldview, power - political and economic - must always
"evolve" (with plenty of helpful pushes, shoves, and brow beatings
by the CFR thought cartel) toward more concentrated and centralized
power, first by breaking down checks and balances and transferring
authority from the local to the national level, and then from the
national to the regional and global levels.
General Hayden served as a member of the CFR's Advisory Committee that helped produce the Council Special Report No. 56 entitled "Internet Governance in an Age of Cyber Insecurity."
The report was a project of the CFR's
International Institutions and Global Governance program, an ongoing
project that is ever pushing for more centralized, concentrated
global government.
Rockefeller is enthusiastic over the internationalizing of the Internet, stating,
Esther Dyson served, along with General Hayden, on the Advisory Committee that produced the above-mentioned CFR report.
But Dyson's role goes much deeper - she was the founding chairwoman of ICANN when it was established in 1998 to take over the Internet domain roots. And although she often is described as "an entrepreneur and philanthropist," like many of her fellow global corporatist elites, she has an affinity for authoritarian (and totalitarian) regimes.
Dyson, for instance, is a major investor
in Russian tech companies and a big promoter of Skolkovo, Russia's
effort to build a competitor to America's Silicon Valley.
We also noted in the same article that Dyson had been appointed to the Presidential IT Advisory Council of Bulgaria, by Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov, who, like Putin and so many "former" communists now in power in central and eastern Europe, is a veteran "Chekist," a member of the secret police.
But CFR/RIIA globalists such as Bildt,
Dyson, Hayden, Rockefeller, et al., have never had a problem
consorting with tyrants.
WEF/Davos is that annual glamorous soirée of globalist billionaires, bankers, butchers, dictators, politicians, and academics where the CFR-RIIA elites of the capitalist world hobnob and network with their communist and socialist counterparts.
Thus the subsequent explosion of
activity and propaganda in favor of "global governance" for the
Internet.
The organized one-worlders targeted 2014
as the critical year to advance their agenda to seize the Internet
with the NETmundial conference in Brazil in March, the IGF summit in
Istanbul in September, and the ITU conference in South Korea in
October-November.
Of course, many of the so-called grassroots groups attending the IGF summit are actually "AstroTurf" organizations that already are financial beneficiaries of the WEF "resources" to which Marcus made reference.
The WEF is based in Geneva, Switzerland,
which makes for easy collaboration between its grasstops members and
the multitude of UN agencies headquartered in that city, including
the International Telecommunications Union.
After all, the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, embroiled in one scandal after another, has resorted to extreme repressive measures to prevent exposure of its corruption via the Internet and social media. Turkey's notorious Law No. 5651 on the Struggle Against the Crimes Committed on the Internet has been used to block YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, Blogger, and, reportedly, thousands of other websites.
According to the liberal-left Freedom House, the government of Turkey also is,
But the despot pedigree of the IGF conference didn't begin and end merely with the host country.
Befitting an event sponsored by the UN, the Istanbul Internet Governance Forum was presided over by Wu Hongbo, under-secretary-general of the UN's Department of Economic and Social Affairs.
Comrade Hongbo, besides representing the UN, ultimately answers to his real bosses in Beijing, the leaders of the Communist Party of China. The communist Beijing regime, of course, is notorious for brutal repression of all human rights, including rigid censorship and aggressive policing of the Internet.
Under-Secretary-General Hongbo issued the UN's official invitation for the IGF confab,
Comrade Hongbo had plenty of help at the IGF from fellow Communist Party members, who attended as "official participants," as well as members of the IGF's Multistakeholder Advisory Group (MAG).
China's representation includes Professor,
These are the folks that have helped
build and maintain China's shameful "Great Firewall" that the
communist regime uses to spy on, censor, restrict, and police
Internet usage.
Schlegel is also a spokesman for the
Russian Internet Governance Forum, where his official bio
unabashedly admits (or perhaps boasts) that he was press director of
the "Nashi"
movement, Putin's version of the Hitler Youth.
Lest one may think that the Istanbul IGF conference was a one-off, unique affair, as far as providing a venue that is unfriendly to freedom is concerned, consider the 2012 IGF in Baku, Azerbaijan, hosted by the ultra-repressive regime of Ilham Aliyev.
Aliyev inherited his position as
"president" from his father, Heydar Aliyev, the KGB chief and
Communist Party dictator of Azerbaijan under the old Soviet Union.
One of the most ominous signals that
this UN-led effort is fatally tilted against freedom is the
dominance of the process by leaders of the Socialist International,
which traces its lineage to the First International founded by Karl
Marx.
Its members are completely at home inside the United Nations and are comfortable collaborating with representatives of communist regimes.
In fact, many Communist Parties of the
former Soviet bloc have simply renamed themselves (as socialists or
democrats) and are now member parties of the SI. Speakers at
Socialist International confabs address each other as "comrade," and
the SI still maintains the old Soviet organizational structure,
governed at the top by a "Presidium."
Currently, former Swedish Foreign
Minister Jan Eliasson serves as deputy secretary-general at
the UN, second only to Ban Ki-moon in the organization's hierarchy.
Eliasson is a member of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, which
is a member party of the Party of European Socialists (PES) and the
Socialist International.
His Estonian Social Democratic Party is
a member party of SI, and when Ilves served as a member of the
European Parliament, he sat with the Party of European Socialists
group. Also on the Panel is Thorbjørn Jagland, former
Norwegian prime minister and leader of the Norwegian Labour Party,
an SI member party.
A former UN under-secretary-general and former secretary-general of the UN's World Summit for Sustainable Development, Desai has been in the forefront of the globalist effort to place the Internet under "international" control. Desai, who was appointed in 2004 by the UN secretary-general to chair the Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG), has been an active participant in many SI activities.
During the 2012 Rio+20 Earth Summit on sustainable development, Desai penned an op-ed attacking the United States for failing to jump on board the UN's global-warming bandwagon.
Other high-level Socialist International agents within the UN system include former Irish President Mary Robinson and former prime minister of Norway Gro Harlem Brundtland.
Robinson, who was previously appointed
UN high commissioner for human rights (1997-2002), now serves as UN
special envoy for climate change. Brundtland, a former SI vice
president and former director general of the UN World Health
Organization, now, along with Robinson, also draws a lucrative
salary as UN special envoy for climate change.
In 2003, the UN's World Summit on the Information Society declared its ,
Those Millennium Development Goals have been the centerpiece of the UN's plan for global wealth redistribution for the past decade-and-a-half.
Naturally, the high-flying, high-living
UN plutocrats intend for the dwindling middle classes of the United
States and Europe to foot the bill for this trickle-down program,
which, incidentally, will never result in any appreciable level of
aid actually trickling down to those genuinely in need.
Very clearly, many of the top globalists in our government, the corporate world, and the think tank/foundation world are, for the most part (if not entirely), comfortable with the authoritarian/totalitarian regimes that use the Internet to enforce Orwellian conformity and tyranny.
That means that actions taken by netizens to influence Congress in the next weeks and months may well determine whether cyberspace will continue to offer a window of freedom for communication and expression, or whether it will become the new tax and surveillance arm of Global Big Brother.
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