Christian Leftist

Bloggers have been advocating legislation that ensures the equal exchange of information between internet users regardless of class, status, or the content being transmitted — in other words, net neutrality — for a while now. It’s an incredibly important issue for those of us who rel on the internet for not only our livelihoods but our entertainment. What we download and upload is nobody’s business, period, and the whole proposed “tiered pricing system,” where users have t pay internet providers depending on how much they use the internet and how much bandwidth is consumed, would allow wealthy corporations to have the fastest connections and screw everyone else furth down the ladder, especially the average consumer. Who wants to pay fees based on how many YouTube videos they watch per week? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

As with almost any other issue these days, the major news networks have avoided talking about net neutrality whenever possible. But now that the WGA, which has recently ended a several-month-long strike against film and television producers, understands just how dependent the rest of the writing world depends on those flate-rate internet packages to communicate and thrive, its members are suddenly MUCH more ardent supporters of fair legislation, according to this Yahoo News report:

Writers push for laws to maintain Internet freedom

Don’t misunderstand me; I am fully in support of the WGA, and I think they’re doing the right thing. What I am frustrated with is the lag between the attention many news stories about the internet receive from those of us in the ‘electronic generation’ and those who are, despite the explosion of blogging aware, web 2.0 and the internet revolution, still incredibly slow and old school about bringing national attention to online issues OFFLINE.

By the way, Barack Obama is the only presidential candidate that I know of who has pledged to support net neutrality and protect the rights of individual citizens against a lack of regulation of the corporations who seek play gatekeepers and thus control access to the web.

They are many, many people who cannot afford to have internet service at home but who may someday. There are many, many people who are just now learning how to utilize the vast resources that the world-wide web provides. They and their children deserve to know about issues that will affect them when the ever-changing economic situations in all countries force them to seek jobs that require the internet.

This is one of those stories that should garner more attention than a quarterly blurb in the technology section of a newspaper.

Wow! DHS actually PAUSED before implementing a monumentally unconstitutional plan for once! Who’da thunk it?

The New York Times article excerpt:

A program to employ spy satellites for certain domestic uses has been postponed because of privacy concerns.

Congress had already provided money for the program, which was to begin this month. But some lawmakers demanded more information about its legal basis and what protections there were to ensure that the government was not peering into the homes of Americans. As a result, the Homeland Security Department is not formally moving ahead with the program until it answers those questions, a department spokesman said.

I realize a lot of news on this blog (and everywhere) is bad news or at least moderately depression-inducing. That’s why I’ve created a new category for the archives. Every time the government does something decent for the American people, even if it’s only a small step in the right direction, I’ll file it and tag it for the world to know. This tag is mixed in with the other tags. See if you can spot it! Freedom lives!

From the NYT article on the abuse of national security letters:

The F.B.I. cast a much wider net in its terrorism investigations than it has previously acknowledged by relying on telecommunications companies to analyze phone-call patterns of the associates of Americans who had come under suspicion, according to newly obtained bureau records.

The documents indicate that the Federal Bureau of Investigation used secret demands for records to obtain data not only on individuals it saw as targets but also details on their “community of interest” — the network of people that the target was in contact with. The bureau stopped the practice early this year in part because of broader questions raised about its aggressive use of the records demands, which are known as national security letters, officials said.

What this means is whatever or whoever the F.B.I. determines to be ‘relevant’ or within a suspect’s “community of interest” is fair game. Say someone named Margie Johnson shares a name with a suspected terrorist sympathizer in Scotland. That name comes up on the T.S.A.’s No-Fly list when she goes to an airport. Now, assuming that the two Margie Johnsons are one and the same (and that’s a big if, but the T.S.A. screw-ups are a beef for another barbecue), the F.B.I. would keep track of her calls and any meetings, activities, etc. that they deem suspicious.

It turns out Margie attends a local genealogy group meeting every Saturday at the local library. She also checks out a few books afterwards and usually returns those books in a few days. Since the feds tend to assume everyone is guilty until proven innocent, maybe they think these group meetings are suspicious and that she’s passing secret messages in the library books or learning how to build bombs.

Too bad you joined that group two weeks ago. The national security letter that went out? It covers everyone involved in the group. You thought you were just trying to find your lost great uncle from Romania!

It also covers anyone who was in the library and checked out or turned in a book in the time frames when Margie was present in the library. The library has to send their records of electronic checkouts and drop-offs and give the F.B.I. the names of all of those people. Now they’ll follow you and everyone else the sweep turns up. It’s already established that the F.B.I. has used its terrorist surveillance field agents and local law enforcement to monitor anti-war activists and others critical of the Bush administration.

In 2005, the Bureau instructed a telecommunications company to provide “a community of interest for the telephone numbers in the attached list.”

There are a lot of ways in which the vague language applied in many cases could be interpreted.

Hypothetically speaking, of course. But “relative” is a ‘relative’ term nowadays.