The Megaupload takedown is dominating headlines, but there is something the incident has overshadowed – large internet corporations and government have censored political websites for years as part of a plan to domesticate the internet.
Censorship of the internet is not simply for the Chinese.
On Thursday, Paul Joseph Watson pointed out the hypocrisy of Google as the transnational corporation shouldered its way into the limelight by opposing SOPA while enforcing SOPA-like policies of its own, blacklisting legitimate websites from its news aggregator and following government orders to remove material from its search results and You Tube.
Watson notes that Google has delisted both Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com – the flagship websites of nationally syndicated talk show host Alex Jones – from its popular news website and news search engine. Google News is a content aggregator that allows users to search thousands of news sources for relevant stories.
Google has memory holed these two websites from its news portal for political reasons and not because they are insignificant and draw paltry traffic. In fact, Infowars.com is a major news source that gets more traffic than MSNBC.com and many other corporate media news websites.
Google is not alone in attempting to blunt Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com. MySpace, Time Warner, New Zealand’s Asia Netcom, the ISP Tiscali in the UK and even a British aiport – along with a number of libraries and government-owned entities – have shut out Alex Jones’ popular websites.
Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com are not alone. “Public wi-fi systems stationed in airports, train stations, libraries, schools, and workplaces also routinely censor political websites,” writes Watson.
In addition to blocking and censoring Jones’ news websites, Google property YouTube has consistently taken down his videos and fiddled with hit counters and other metrics to make it seem the videos are less popular than they actually are.
Google’s effort to censor Alex Jones and other dangerous alternative media sites makes sense when you realize the company has intimate ties with the CIA and the military-industrial complex.
The establishment has worked behind the scenes for years to devise a method to sanitize the internet – in the same way corporate television has been disinfected for decades – and drive the truth-seekers and tellers off the medium. SOPA and PIPA, under the guise of fighting dreaded copyright criminals, is only the latest guise.
In 2010, globalists meeting in Davos, Switzerland, called for internet licensing by the United Nations in order to combat so-called cyber warfare of the sort the shadowy Anonymous hacktivist collective used against the Department of Justice and the FBI following the Megaupload takedown.
For at least three years, the corporate media has trumpeted a vastly exaggerated threat of cyber terrorism and illustrated the warning with dire scenarios of disabled power grids and hobbled civilian infrastructure.
Former president Bill Clinton has called for a government-run internet “Ministry of Truth” to get rid of pesky troublemakers – his wife recently admitted the government is losing the information war – and Obama’s information czar Cass Sunstein has demanded that websites be mandated by law to link to opposing information or that pop ups containing government propaganda be forcibly included on political blogs.
Sunstein had previously called for a COINTELPRO-like effort against politically incorrect activist groups and also called for the government to tax or even ban outright political opinions it finds objectionable.
Finally, the Pentagon has declared the internet a battlefield and recently stated it will respond to so-called cyber attacks militarily. “If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks,” a military official said last May.
The military response to exaggerated cyber threats was put on the fast track by Obama in 2009 when he instructed the Pentagon to attack “cyberthreats” within the United States. Instead of allowing local police response to suspected cyber crimes, Obama moved to violate Posse Comitatus and turn the United States into a combat zone:
“The Obama administration has adopted new procedures for using the Defense Department’s vast array of cyberwarfare capabilities in case of an attack on vital computer networks inside the United States, delicately navigating historic rules that restrict military action on American soil,” the New York Times reported at the time.
SOPA and PIPA are merely part a larger and more comprehensive effort to control the internet and reduce the threat it poses to the government. Both laws are efforts to codify what has been going on now for several years.
The defeat of SOPA and PIPA are certainly welcome and the large response in opposition to the legislation is a positive development, however we must consider the larger and more ominous threat the government and the transnational corporations it answers to pose to our liberty and the ability to communicate and raise political awareness.
Kurt Nimmo, Infowars.com, January 20, 2012