U.S. Considers Outlawing 'Unauthorized Information Exchanges'

If not, you have no expectation of privacy if you have no expectation of the greater liberty guaranteed by the great writ.

In Amerika under the Military Commissions Act, you must always consider yourself pre-detained, rather than free.

Likewise anything in your possession is simply a pre-seizure bit of evidence, its possession, evanescent.

They cannot take down the thousands of pirate p2p networks that exits now. A lot of them underground.

All they have to do is turn off the switch.

Unfortunately for them, their pacemaker is wired to that switch too. So go ahead, flip the switch. I'll just wait a couple minutes for the corpse to quit twitching and just walk right over it. :evilgrin:

Technically, there is no "switch" to turn off. The Intertubes is based on multiple redundancies and best effort delivery via virtual circuit creation and subsequent teardown. In English, this mainly means that each message -- including the basic components of the message called "packets" -- can take a different route to the recipient. They reassemble into their proper order on the receiving end using arcane mathematical formulas I don't even begin to understand.

This is more relevant when sending subversive emails than when using the web. But for that there are anonymous intermediary sites and proxy servers and all kinds of stuff that makes life just a little harder for the NSA and the rest of the sleazy bastards who are paid with American tax money to try their best to "get the goods" on their bosses -- which should be us, if we're weren't too gutless to assert that particular employer-employee relationship.


As to physically pulling the plug, I know that the most they've been able to accomplish so far is run a couple of low-rent "Bush is a fuckhead" type of sites off the grid.

Wikileaks is a whole different animal. It's run by smart and seriously pissed off people, mostly former mainstream journalists who got sick of anything but Bushie-praising happy talk getting censored or spiked by US corporate media or, calling them what they actually are, the Bushies' very own ministry of propaganda.

Wikileaks can also tap into a pool of equally pissed off civil rights lawyers, paralegals and so forth who offer their services pro bono because they believe that keeping the spotlight on governmental and corporate malfeasance is the best defense against creeping fascism and the rise of the totalitarian state.

So here's how that's played out in the real world.

A Swiss bank with a subsidiary in the Caymans filed suit to keep Wikileaks from displaying "potentially embarrassing information" about recent funds transfers by one of their more notorious clients.

This past February, the suit made it to federal court in San Francisco, and the court bought the bank's argument, as well as its solution to putting Wikileaks out of business. That solution was to coerce Wiki's ISP to cancel their domain registration, thinking this would pull the plug on the entire operation.

Wikileaks is, as I said, comprised of a lot of smart people who share a very important and useful attribute: They're fucking furious at the global corporatocracy; they're furious at every single hair on every single head of every single liar and thief that's part of the Bush junta; and they're not easily intimidated.

So they immediately issued a news release calling out the bank for its lies and distortions before the court. Then they called for a world-wide boycott of eNom, the ISP that caved to the feds. Then they issued a third statement announcing that the bank's lies were fully documented and now available via download from Wikileaks, and demanding a public apology from the bank.

Then they issued a "we're back" statement just hours after the ISP pulled the plug in the US. This one listed every single Wikileaks mirrored server that was still available. And here it is: a list of Wikileaks Cover Names consisting of links to dozens of offshore sites that the US can't touch -- legally.

The pricks could always expend time, effort and money on tracing every one of these, but as soon as word got out of what they were up to, these would go quietly dark and another few dozen would take their place with no loss of continuity or data.

With the entire world as a potential hosting site, Wikileaks gives less of a shit about Uncle Snoop than you might imagine.

And for your continued reading pleasure, I just found this DU thread announcing the initial ruling, back when the bank and its lawyers naively thought they had actually stopped the free flow of information.

All they really did is draw the world's attention to their situation and cause many hundreds of thousands of people who wouldn't normally give a bank scandal five seconds' attention to read the whole sordid tale. And get a bunch of great PR for Wikileaks into the bargain.

Nice try, fascist fucks. Come back when you've got your Masters in Computer Science and maybe you'll know something useful by then.

Finally, just for fun, here's a link to one of Wikileaks' most widely read documents, which also serves as another in the long, long list of answers to Pollyanna Cali's recent thread wondering whether the US is really, really evil, moderately evil but on a par with most other countries, or just a little bit warped around the edges but basically well-intentioned.


And don't forget: every day, in every way, try to commit some little act that, when combined with billions of other, similar little acts the world over will eventually drive a stake right through the heart of the new world order. You'll feel better when you do.


wp

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