Europe Moves To Kill The Internet

We have previously highlighted the trouble we have had with censorship from Google Video who reset viewing totals for Terror Storm from hundreds of thousands of views on several different video versions back down to zero for each one. This seemingly stalled the viral spread of the film for a while.

However, the proposed EU legislation dwarfs any Google censorship as it would kill off Google Video/You Tube as a project before it had even started.

The latest proposed directive is another in a long line of draconian legislative procedures that seek to totally centralize and regulate the spread of information and ideas. Anyone in Europe can already be arrested and possibly extradited under the European arrest warrant, which passed into law in 2002. This supercedes national law and means that anyone could be arrested for expressing an opinion deemed to be illegal in another EU country.

The BBC reported that under such laws people who distribute stories about fictional children's hero Biggles or the Old Testament could be criminalized under the guise of anti-racism legislation.

Such laws in turn require implementation and upholding, therefore increasing the need for broad data retention, which had previously come up against opposition as part of anti-terror legislation, but has not faced as much backlash under anti-racist or child protection laws.

This means surveillance on a massive and coordinated centralized scale.

The EU data retention bill, passed in February after much controversy and with implementation tabled for late 2007, obliges telephone operators and internet service providers to store information on who called who and who emailed who for at least six months. Under this law, investigators in any EU country, and most bizarrely even in the US, can access EU citizens' data on phone calls, sms', emails and instant messaging services.

Such EU directives mirror US proposals for data retention, the reasoning for which as either a standalone measure or as an amendment to a broad telecommunications bill, is that it is designed to protect children.

This may mean that any normal website or blog would have to fall into line with such new rules and suddenly total web regulation would become a reality.

We are being led to believe that a vast army of maniac pedophiles are on the loose and we must do away with all forms of privacy in order to stop them. This is akin to saying that blanket cctv prevents crime. As if to say "if we film everyone all the time, even innocent people, then no one will ever commit any crimes."

Increasingly we are seeing this in every aspect of our lives. Recording, tracking and retaining our data in the name of keeping us all safe. Everyone is now treated as guilty until proven innocent.

The attack on internet freedom is forging ahead every day. Monday saw Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff declare the internet as a "terror training camp" that attracts Disaffected people. His solution is "intelligence fusion centers," staffed by Homeland Security personnel which will go into operation next year.

The US government is also funding research into social networking sites and how to gather and store personal data published on them, according to the New Scientist magazine.

"At the same time, US lawmakers are attempting to force the social networking sites themselves to control the amount and kind of information that people, particularly children, can put on the sites."

Both American and European moves mimic stories we hear every week out of State Controlled Communist China, where the internet is strictly regulated and virtually exists as its own entity away from the rest of the web.

We have also previously exposed how moves are afoot to clamp down on internet neutrality and even to designate a new form of the internet known as Internet 2.

This would be a faster, more streamlined elite equivalent of the internet available to users who were willing to pay more for a much improved service. providers may only allow streaming audio and video on your websites if you were eligible for Internet 2.

Of course, Internet 2 would be greatly regulated and only "appropriate content" would be accepted by an FCC or government bureau. Everything else would be relegated to the "slow lane" internet, the junkyard as it were. Our techie rulers are all too keen to make us believe that the internet as we know it is "already dead".

The Internet is freedom's best friend and the bane of control freaks. Its eradication is one of the short term goals of those that seek to centralize power and subjugate their populations under a surveillance panopticon prison, whether that be in Communist China, Neoconservative America or the Neofascist EU.

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