These guys really love their acronyms. This ridiculous name – PIPA – or PROTECT IP stands for Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and the Theft of Intellectual Property. This should have been our first clue that this is yet another attempt to disguise the truth and put more profits into the coffers of multibillion dollar conglomerates while eliminating infringing sites.

As Homeland Security is enhancing the profits of the Military Industrial Complex under the guise of security, PIPA is enhancing the profits of multibillion dollar corporations in the music, film and pharmaceutical industries in the name of copyright infringement. Guess what industry benefits primary from this legislation and then guess which industry has been a principle contributor to Leahy’s election efforts. Surprise surprise…..

But the public has begun to catch on.  OWS (Occupy Wall Street) efforts and the Internet are raising the consciousness of voters. The public is becoming painfully aware about how politics is run in Washington and PIPA is a perfect illustration of this process. It is entirely about the control of the politicians through legal bribery and the control of the public through a corporately owned and operated mainstream media. So what if PIPA supports no real due process?

So what if thousands of innocent and tiny websites get victimized and shut down without the opportunity to address their accuser before action is taken?

So what if all accusers are to be held harmless for any false accusations that they may make?

So what if legitimate copyright infringers are victimized by this legislation?

So what if the door is now opened to more aggressive censorship and the compromise of free speech?

It is the price we must pay to get billions more into the hands of these billion dollar industries and to silence sites attempting to inform the public through the works of others.

Does the Patriot Act ring a bell?  Without a doubt, this bill represents the most fundamental attack on our constitution ever waged. It was first launched by a Republican and then reauthorized without change by a Democrat. Money, greed and legal bribery control both sides of the isle and PIPA is just another manifestation of business as usual in Washington.  Money pulls the strings and the political puppets then dance.

Senator Leahy is no different than any other politician in Washington.  Currently it is the only way to get reelected. Those in office (the incumbents) have all the money and if they play ball with their primary contributors they are allowed to stay in office and become very rich.

Maybe Leahy can pull off a Chris Dodd special. By anyone’s measure this former Senator was one of the most legally corrupt politicians in Washington and now he resides over the Motion Picture Association to the tune of over $1 million a year. Perhaps Senator Leahy can do several dances before he leaves office and secure a fat private sector job when he retires.

This is about big money going to big business – not to the people. The people are always second-class citizens to them, and rather than point this out to the public, mainstream media perpetuates it.

Part of copyright law and conspicuously absent from all copyright infringing legislation (PIPA, SOPA and now OPEN) and almost every news outlet is a thing called Fair Use. It is section 107 of title 17 of the copyright law. It generally says for the purpose of commentary, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching, library archival, scholarship and the manifestation of new information,  it is perfectly legal to use the works of others (copyright infringement) without their permission.

Think about this for a moment. What invention was not created by standing on the shoulders of previous inventors? What documentarian can describe the past without using the past to illustrate his works? What political satirist can criticize the hypocrisy of Washington without exposing previous statements and previous actions in film as recorded by others?

Copyright law embraced a key concept when it was established and one that has been absent for quite some time. There is supposed to be a balance between the protection of intellectual property and the public’s right to know.  It is called Fair Use and it is part of copyright law.

Further, new copyright infringement laws are not absolutely needed to prosecute these bad boys. Megaupload.com was recently shut down without using new copyright infringement laws to accomplish such. Do not be fooled, Fair Use is not mentioned in any of these pieces of legislation for a reason. Go after the bad guys, yes. Prosecute the criminals who copy and sell unaltered and fully intact music, film and drugs, but do not trample the rights of legitimate infringers who want to do nothing more than inform an uninformed public.

Want to put this matter to bed? See how many senators will sponsor a facsimile of the words below into PIPA, SOPA and now OPEN.

This legislation is directed at all websites engaged in the sale and distribution of unaltered music, movies and drugs and as protected by U.S. trademark and copyright law.

This legislation is not about copyright infringement as it applies to thousands of bloggers, documentarians, political satirists, re-mixers, librarians, scholars and teachers who in the course of their work often use segments from another for archival purposes, to illustrate a point, to initiate a discussion or a criticism or bring new issues to light. This constitutes a fair use of copyright law and is fundamental to free speech and the constitution and will be protected at all costs.

Unfortunately these bills and these efforts are far from dead. A brief pause has been taken and now a new one OPEN (Online Protect and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act) has recently been introduced. Free speech on the Internet is just too significant a Congressional indictment to leave alone. The more we know the more obvious those responsible will become.

Fair Use allows little guys to attempt to do for almost nothing what a corporately owned and controlled Mainstream Media has failed to do with billions. My words, my film and my site are a mosaic of other peoples work. I qualify as an infringing site. Will my work someday be under attack? Will my little squeak be silenced?

I do not possess the resources to battle the DOJ and their corporate sponsors and there are thousands more much more qualified than I trying to point out the rampant injustices that are sweeping this country. Bloggers, writers and filmmakers often use the works of others to illustrate their points. Be extremely leery of any legislation that attempts to regulate the Internet.  It is the last bastion of free speech on the planet and it is definitely under attack, especially by those very forces who proclaim their innocence the loudest.

As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. There is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in just such a twilight that we must be most aware of change in the air — however slight — lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.

– William O. Douglas

“This is a slightly unusual request,” said Dr. Wagner, with what he hoped was commendable restraint. “As far as I know, it’s the first time we have been asked to supply a dissident or ‘truth telling’ website with our Automatic Traversal Algorithm. I don’t wish to be inquisitive, but I should hardly have thought that your — ah — establishment had much use for such software. Could you explain just what you intend to do with it?”

“Gladly,” replied the dissident, adjusting his woolen beret and carefully putting away the mobile-phone with which he had been messaging his co-conspirators. “Your ATA can carry out any standard tree traversal involving up to one hundred million nodes, using the most efficient path. However, for our work we are interested in traversing actual routers and web-servers on the Net, not nodes of a data-structure. As we wish you to modify the code, the software will not only traverse nodes but also execute an instruction on each node.”

“I don’t understand …”

“Here’s my other b-card,” the dissident said, handing Wagner a business-card, a different one from that with which he had introduced himself.

“Hal L. Burton, Ph.D., President, Burton Microprocessor Research?” Wagner finished on a surprised note, reading the business-card. “I see — so that’s how you earn your money then, and I suppose freedissident dot-com is where you spend it.” Wagner warmed to his visitor. “You know, I, I …” he trailed off. After fifteen years of authoritarian rule under FEMA and the so-called ‘USA Patriot Act’, personal freedoms were severely restricted and it was not wise to express admiration for any dissident activity. Still, he said, “Actually, I visit freedissident dot-com quite often. You do great work, you’re gutsy folks.”

Wagner meant it. That website was only about three years old but had quickly developed a reputation for occasionally managing to expose government secrets and lies, and breaking suppressed news-stories. The government had tried to shut it down but had failed.

Burton smiled. “Thank you, Dr. Wagner. Been in and out of prison for it.”

Wagner smiled too, feeling a new respect for his customer. “Hoder. Call me Hoder.”

“Hoder? Nordic?”

“You’re right. Norwegian and German extraction. So tell me, how I can help you — in any way.”

“This is a project on which we have been working for the last three years — since freedissident dot-com was founded, in fact. It is perfectly in keeping with your line of work, so I think you will be able to provide the solution after I explain it,” Burton began.

“Ooo-kay.”

“It is really quite simple. It’s because of the CPU-virus and worm menace that started a few years ago. Remember Stuxnet? — that was the grandpa. My team has made a self-learning firmware patch, a one-time universal patch that takes care of several entire classes of these damn things. Nobody will have to care about any CPU virus or worm for several years, especially with new server-boxes, and therefore new chips, not being available anymore. We want to traverse the Web and apply the patch to every web-server and router.”

“Excellent idea!” Wagner was enlivened. “So you wish to start at triple-a dot-com and work up to, say, uh, … zygote dot-org …”

“Exactly–”

“… not that the actual process would be executed alphabetically,” mused Wagner thoughtfully.

He had seen the immense benefits of Burton’s plan at once; it was the need of the day, literally. Only personal desktop computers were available to Joe Blow; these machines were made such that they could not be used as web-servers. Server-class computers and routers were strictly regulated and were not available to the general public. Apart from the government and the armed forces, servers could be sold only to businesses and they too had to fill out a variety of forms to establish ‘need’, and even so, permits were granted to a minority of applicants. All the personal and independent media websites in the country ran on repaired and re-repaired machines that were over ten years old. Ten years ago, after coordinated hostage-takings and bomb-blasts in Peoria, which were blamed on foreign ‘terrorists’, the Department of Homeland Security had demanded the law regulating servers and routers, and had been given what it had asked for. Wagner knew that it was critically important to take good care of the old machines that the general public and individuals were using, and to minimize their vulnerability to viruses and worms. Personally, he suspected that the N.S.A. was behind many of the viruses that regularly crippled free-thought and dissident websites.

“You know how the Baldur chip works, right?”

“In general, yes,” Wagner nodded. He thought back to the second Bush-Cheney administration when the Baldur chip had been invented and mandated as an etched integrated-circuit on every CPU. First, it had been the V-chip. Then, the RFID chip. It had been only a matter of time before something like the Baldur chip would be proposed, be legislated for electronic devices, and become ubiquitous — every web-server and router carried it now. It provided the means to disable or lock, and re-enable or unlock, any device it was on-board on by means of one kilobit lock or unlock instructions and an accompanying and suitable five kilobit key.

“Because it’s not possible to install a firmware patch when the CPU is operating, what we plan to do is to make two passes: on the first pass, we disable the CPU and install our patch. And on the second pass, we attempt to upgrade to a different version of the firmware patch by applying a delta on the old patch for any CPU that needs it, and re-enable the CPU. I am afraid it would take too long to explain why we need this dual-pass system, even if I knew all the technical details behind it.”

“I’m sure it would,” said Wagner hastily. “Go on. I’m curious about, I mean, how are we supposed to crack those one-K instructions?” Not even any single government branch possessed those two one kilobit instructions’ bit-sequences. Each instruction was split up into three components. The Federal government was the custodian of the lower-order 512-bit-sequence, and the State governments and the Judiciary were the custodians of the higher-order bit-sequence with the 512 bits of each instruction equally split between them. This would be a first, if they pulled it off. And an underground effort, at that.

“We’ve hacked it,” Burton said with a trace of smugness. “That’s what we’ve been working on for the past three years. That, and the universal patch. But for the traversal, you’re the experts. That’s why I’m here.”

“Of course, to successfully unlock a chip, the re-enable code must be accompanied by — doesn’t the key … I mean that doesn’t it have to somehow mesh … in that there has to be a — an equivalence between the bit-wise ORs and the bit-wise ANDs between the one-K disable instruction and the key’s one-K chunks … ?” trailed off Wagner in a querying tone. He was not at all sure as to just how all this worked; he was a through-and-through Language Theory & Automata man. One or two of his specialists would certainly know this Baldur-chip business backwards, however.

Burton laughed. “I’m even more in the dark than you, but we’ve got that part nailed down. My boys are all set with the keys, the instructions, the whole shebang on that end. All we need from you is a guaranteed traversal of every node, every leaf, every router, every web-server on the Net in North America. And then they’ll be safe from these virus-making crazies.”

“Thanks to you.”

Burton smiled. “I wouldn’t say that. Thanks to us, if you must.” Shifting his weight to one side, he pulled out a chequebook from his hip-pocket. “There are just two other points—”

Before he could finish the sentence, Wagner replied, “Don’t even think about it, Hal — we’re in this together.” He smiled at Burton and rose to shake his hand.

The root reason behind these machinations was the fact that the World Wide Web was that greatest of ‘unknown unknowns’ — a random techno-sociological mutation in an otherwise (mostly) ordered and controlled world; an ‘unknown unknown’ whose unforeseen birth and stupendous power to capture and exhibit the evasive and coquettish Truth had thrown off-course, and was hampering, the march towards that unholy concentration of wealth and power — the ‘New World Order’ — which the European-originated money-lending power-elite clans had so carefully been planning for centuries.

This, thought Greg, was the most satisfying thing that had ever happened to him. Chuck and he were both volunteers with an activist movement, ‘Winter Soldiers & Rainy-day Patriots’ — an apt twist of a two-century-old American concept — to restore (true) Republican government, and so the nature of this project and the linkage with freedissident.com gave him a good feeling. His thoughts drifted to the erosion of civil liberties. Besides a question of ideals, he had personal reason to be concerned: he had been detained in prison for a fortnight without any charges, simply for submitting a withering short-story about the government to a publisher — someone there had probably ratted on him. A number of laws contradicting and subverting the still-constitutionally ‘guaranteed’ free-speech were on the books now. These anti-constitutional laws had various sections — ‘dissent,’ ‘incitement,’ ‘sedition,’ and so forth. They had either been in existence since 2001 by way of un-American legislation or had been enacted during Bush-Cheney II or Clinton-Lieberman I. He was a boy when it had all started, but he knew that except for a few (true) patriots who invoked Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin, the majority of the populace, apathetic and afraid, had not bothered to challenge those repressive Totalitarian laws.

Greg heard the heavy wooden door slam in the wind as Chuck joined him on the balcony.

“Dude! Clean compile,” Chuck said. The software they had been working on that day had built successfully.

“Sounds good! Seems like we’ll beat the schedule. You told Shrub?” ‘Shrub’ was their private nick-name for Sam W. Jaffe who was nominally partnering them from Burton’s team. On their very first day, he had delivered a near-monologue about a documentary he had seen on the San ‘Bush-men’ of the Kalahari Desert. He had gone on a little too long for Greg’s liking, and had finished by telling Greg and Chuck that, in his opinion, ‘the Bush-man’s way of life is thoroughly depraved, degenerate, and inhuman.’ After that, Greg had started referring to him as ‘Shrub.’

“Yeah, he’s happy. I’m likin’ this so far. Wanna go get some coffee?”

“Sure.”

They walked back into the office and out to the corridor.

“You seem kinda … a little subdued …” ventured Chuck after a couple of minutes, as they were descending in an elevator.

“Thinking about this project made me think of the Unpatriotic Act, FEMA, and all the shit that came after that,” said Greg, and cut loose with a few obscenities. “It’s perverse to have called something so un-American and anti-patriotic the ‘Patriot Act’!” he said loudly, and punched the elevator door as it was opening.

“Well, one reason was to fool the public into buying it, so that they would not protest against it,” said Chuck matter-of-factly. “Doing anything on New Year’s?” he asked hurriedly as they turned left at the Christmas tree in the main lobby, wanting to get Greg’s mind off the USA Patriot Act.

“Maureen and I are just getting together with a few friends. And being grateful we’ve made it a quarter of the way into the century … without blowing everyone up, despite all the carnage and mayhem. Hey, you and Janie, if you don’t have plans, why don’t you join us?”

“Aw-ight, thanks dude. I’ll tell her. Guess she’ll give you guys a call,” answered Chuck as they entered the cafeteria.

He picked up a bar of chocolate from the packaged foods rack. “Wonder which of the F3 this benefits,” he groused.

“Huh? F3? — what are you talking about?” Greg said, not comprehending.

“Dude! You mean you don’t know?! The F3 — that’s Cargill, ADM, and Monsanto — they’ve a lock on all foodstuffs. Throughout the Americas. Happened during Clinton-Lieberman II. Not even a giant like McDonald’s gets its beef now without it passing through one of the F3.” Chuck kept up with the minutiae of economic developments much more than did Greg who was naturally inclined to ideologies and abstract concepts.

“Oh!” Greg sighed and shook his head in disgust. He thought back to the second Hillary Clinton-Joseph Lieberman administration and the merger of the two political parties. Soon after their increasingly lockstep economic policies had become undeniable and obvious, the show ‘Democracy’ had been dispensed with and the Democrats and the Republicans had made their marriage official. It had ostensibly been ‘to foster inclusiveness, put an end to partisanship, and bring all Americans together under one tent.’ Exalted sentiments, tawdry reasons … and Totalitarian phraseology. The new combined party — the aptly-named ‘Federalists’ — pointed to the disorganized, little-known Constitution Party as evidence of a thriving ‘Democracy’. Standing at the packaged-foods rack, Greg subconsciously smiled wryly and shook his head in the midst of his ruminations that were triggered by Chuck’s little nugget, causing one or two people nearby to stare at him. The strange part of it all was that even though large bodies of voters would agree amongst themselves that they had voted for a Constitution Party candidate, that candidate would somehow almost never win the election. The Max McKinney crisis of the previous election was evidence of that. But the strangest thing was that frequently the media’s ‘scientific polls’ too would be at odds with an honest person’s investigation of reality. Everyone and their dog would tell you that they had voted for populist, popular activist Green, yet the ‘polls’ would show capitalist, well-connected businessman Gray holding a ‘twenty percent lead.’ It was as if normal, sane people were saying one thing to their friends and families but saying something else to these ‘pollsters’… .

“Howdy guys,” replied Sam, walking into their office. “Hal just sent me a secure message. He’s not sure if you’ve been told but absolute secrecy is essential for this project; if any governmental agency — any snoop — gets wind of it, they’re going to try to halt it, sabotage it, whatever.”

“You bet,” answered Chuck. “Hode — that’s our president, Dr. Hoder Wagner — told us. Yeah, I can imagine that the Pentagon warlord, the A-G — all those Anti-American dictatorial creeps — would not like web-servers and routers getting virus and worm-proofed.”

Their concerns were well-founded. For the past two decades, the government had maintained a network of informants within the general public, reminiscent of the long-gone U.S.S.R.

“Mum’s the word,” Greg chimed in. “So, where does Dr. Burton keep himself?”

Sam made no answer. Greg and Chuck stared at him, then glanced at one another.

“He usually, er, he has another concern that … that he spends his, um, time at,” said Sam uncertainly.

“If you mean freedissident dot-com, we know about it,” said Greg.

Sam looked relieved. “Well, I wasn’t sure you did. Yes, these days he’s usually over there. That setup is in a basement, a townhouse near Tysons Corner.” Tysons Corner was an expensive commercial and semi-residential area in Northern Virginia, about half-an-hour’s drive from Washington D.C.

After a pause, Chuck said, “It’s odd that they — the government — didn’t take down at least some part of the Web by fiat. What I mean is that I’m surprised they haven’t really tried.”

“I suppose they know that … that if they messed with the backbone or the routers, the Web would go underground,” offered Sam. “People possess routers and web-servers. Activists would create an alternate mini-Web … like a bits-and-pieces Web.”

“You’re right, we could patch up something, hmmm …” Greg mused. “Yeah, one-oh-nine-B, cable hookups, plain old copper … all underground,” he continued; he was thinking out loud more than talking to Sam. “Though I wouldn’t have thought that they’d, I mean the Feds, woulda been able to think around that curve,” he finished, addressing Sam now.

“Well, I’ll leave you guys to your work,” Sam said, walking to the door. “The Web is a prized freedom and this project is important. In fact, it should have been done years ago — previous generation should’ve taken care of it.” Sam winked at them conspiratorially as he left their office.

“Shrub’s a funny guy,” said Chuck. “But he’s awright.”

“The previous effin’ generation was complacent. Complacent! Those dumb-asses kept blabbering about America being the most free country in the world even though that wasn’t true and even as our freedoms were gradually being … being chopped down, like a bloody forest being clear-cut,” said Greg, turning back to his computer. “Our freedoms are like the species: once plentiful, now declining.”

“Nice, that’s a good analogy, partner. Hey, how many species are there?” enquired Chuck. Responding to his own question, he continued, “After these climate-change-related extinctions, I think there’s, hmm … The Nine Billion Names of God … I mean, er, names of God’s creations,” he corrected himself, having taken a stab at flowery speech and felt embarrassed at the results.

“Uh, not billion, but million,” Greg said. “Nine million species.”

“Oh, yeah … ‘scuse me!” Chuck laughed at his mistake. “Though our freedoms have vanished at a rate far faster than the species,” he mused, on the same bent. “Ya know, I hacked into a Fed server one night and hit paydirt.”

“Welcome to the club,” grinned Greg. “But what do you mean, ‘paydirt’?”

“Yeah, was gonna tell you — it had a bunch of Top Secret white-papers and research reports. One was about freedoms, I’ll never forget that one. A complete list, and then some, of all the freedoms that man has and has had. Sociologists have determined that there’s precisely nine thousand freedoms.”

“Like?” prodded Greg curiously, swivelling in his chair to face Chuck.

“We-e-ell, it had all types of … of details; stuff about Paine and Mill and Nietzsche, and sociometrics and ethnograms and biostatistics … and I don’t know what — government’s technocrats have waded through all kinds of crap. They’ve concluded that 21st century humans have, or can have, exactly nine thousand freedoms. Like, just take one freedom, Communication. From plain talking to coded speech to music to … um, yes, ritual gift-giving to, what was it … gypsy-camp markers to smoke-signals, would you believe we have, if I recall correctly, exactly six-hundred and-seventeen modes of Communication? At least that’s what that research report says.”

“Six-seventeen? What were some of the others? I mean the other modes of Communication?”

“Gawd, I dunno. I remember they’ve, like, enumerated different ‘elemental’ freedoms within … what was it, a ‘group-level’ freedom, and those are within a ‘top-level’ freedom. Like ‘eye movements,’ ‘head movements,’ aah … yes, ‘muscle tone,’ ‘foot shifting,’ ‘finger-tapping’ and so on fell under ‘Body Language,’ which itself falls under a ‘top-level’ freedom, ‘Communication.’ Man, it’s freaky, I tell ya. Supposed to be a ‘research report’, but what with its different volumes it’s really like a book. It’s over three thousand pages.”

Sam appeared in the doorway of their office, looking a little flushed. “Hey, guys. Just on the news. The invasion got underway.”

“Oh, great! Now we’re killing Norwegians!” exclaimed Greg, opening a web-browser and going to news.yahoo.com.

“What’s the government-controlled media gonna call this? After all the ‘Oil Wars’, now the ‘Water Wars’?” muttered Chuck morosely.

“Um, yeah,” answered Chuck sheepishly.

Seeing Greg’s querying expression, a sly, insinuating grin spreading on his face, Chuck continued, “Hey, I found it in my pocket! I don’t know — perhaps it fell in … perhaps Janie put it there. So what?” he ended on a petulant note.

Greg clapped Chuck on the shoulder and laughed out good-naturedly at his defensiveness, setting Chuck laughing too.

“So nothing … dude!” he said, in a friendly way. “That first dynlib we built, the one for the disable-and-patch, it’s still just ‘oh dot d-n-l.’ We needed a name for it. I’ll call it ‘Mistletoe’.” Greg was referring to the dynamic-library which would, at run-time, disable or lock the CPUs on the first-pass and apply the anti-virus/anti-worm patch.

They turned back to their workstations, still working but easing off for the day.

“Damn!” said Chuck suddenly. “Hey, we gotta stress-test that random key-sequence generator I wrote before we leave for the day.” Glancing at the time, he continued, “Oh hell, Greg, Hode will be here soon. We should’ve started testing it earlier today.”

“Already banged the hell out of it. It’s good to go.”

“Oh … you did? Cool! Ya know, I wonder though that there’s no test-team. I mean what’s Hode thinking, and that guy Burton? We’re testing each others’ stuff. Should’ve had a couple of good QA guys.”

“Well … I suppose Hode knows that what we write doesn’t need testers,” said Greg with a touch of conceit. Grinning and crooking an eyebrow at Chuck, he continued, “I mean, in these past few projects, how many bugs — I mean material defects — have been found in what you and I have written? All that’s happened is that the QA guys have wound up getting an inferiority complex because they couldn’t find a single, real bug!”

Chuck smiled and shook his head, and both of them ended up laughing at Greg’s hot-shot ego-stoking. Though egotistical, his vanity was not misplaced; neither was Chuck’s caution: in the three projects that they had worked on together, the testers actually had felt dispensable — Greg and Chuck were not only exceptionally talented, they were also very careful with their coding and debugging. Yet the lack of an independent, professional Quality Assurance unit in any software project considerably increased the chances of a calamitous defect being discovered post-deployment — when the software went ‘live.’

After some time, Greg rose from his chair and stretched. However, with the first step he took, he stumbled, and awkwardly and noisily toppled across a chair. Startled, Chuck got up. Grasping the edge of the table, Greg got back on his feet and voiced an oath or two.

“Dude! You okay?” enquired Chuck. “You know I’ve seen you do this before … like, stumbling, lurching — maybe there’s a balance problem?”

“Yup, there is. Inner-ear problem. In fact, that’s what saved me from my — ah — ‘elective service’,” replied Greg, holding on to the table and grimacing at the words ‘elective service.’ “Not that I’d have enlisted, I’d rather rot in prison than kill innocents abroad.” Except for the spoilt brats of the super-wealthy and powerful, who somehow received unlimited deferments or took refuge in the National Guard, all males had to enrol compulsorily with the armed forces. The draft was back in force in the good ol’ U.S. of A. Except that it was not called ‘the draft’ any more. It was called ‘Elective Patriotic Service.’ Such Orwellisms were consistent with the by-then usual government practice of redefining old terms and inventing new ones to befog the minds of the people.

“Oh — okay.” Chuck looked on with some concern as Greg settled himself in his chair. “I was deferred because of my sciatica. Same here; I’d have chosen prison over getting brainwashed by the armed forces into massacring other peoples.”

He went on, slowly, “Ya know, it’s the armed forces themselves who shoulda bailed us out of this horror. Before it got to this point.” He was voicing a thought more than talking to Greg, blankly gazing into the distance.

“I can’t understand why the national guard, the army — they all … they all attack us, arrest us, when we simply demonstrate,” said Greg. “Are they crazy? Just for holding up signs?! Don’t they understand that we’re doing it for them besides for us? They’re the ones who get traumatized and sick and maimed for life, if not killed, in these wars and invasions!”

“That’s the way it goes — you know,” Chuck replied softly, resignedly. “The oligarchy and the Zioneocons, they make sure to recruit Afros and Hispanics from poor neighbourhoods, and those they call ‘hicks’ and ‘trailer-trash’. They’re expendable — cannon-fodder — to the powers-that-be.”

After a moment of silence, Greg said passionately, “Yes. Young guys all of them, and what a waste. Those stupid, stupid lame-brains. They’re made to feel special by being told they’re heroes, by being given their purple hearts and silver stars. Heroes on their two-bit military pensions, with amputated limbs, strange illnesses. And shattered consciences … or, or brutalized humanities from the horrors they perpetrate on innocent humans. But those corporate plutocrats and Zioneocons — the scum of humanity — they make their millions off those wars and laugh all the way to the bank.” Though conscientious and a true patriot as was Chuck, Greg was seldom quite so bitter.

Chuck said nothing; he knew that staying on the subject would only get Greg wound up. Greg was right, he thought. The public had at last realized that the mega-corporation’s main function was simply to be a front behind which the super-wealthy and the privileged few hid to further their narrow interests and accumulate ill-gotten wealth, and that the ‘humanitarian’ and ‘pre-emptive’ wars had been nothing other than wars of loot and plunder for American corporate officers, stake-holders, and Zioneocons. Those ‘pen for hire’ writers who had sung to their tune earlier in the century had been rewarded with book contracts, positive publicity by the corporate-controlled media, and outright payoffs disguised as ‘grants’. But the few courageous writers who had exposed the truth had seen their works damned with faint praise or trashed altogether. And the writers themselves had had their names smeared and been hit with ruinous lawsuits; and those residing overseas had even been murdered by U.S. puppet-regimes or C.I.A. hit-men. Chuck shook his head as he gazed vacantly at his monitor, lost in his thoughts. Murdering writers had become a frighteningly commonplace activity for the American government after they, in concert with Royal Dutch Shell, had murdered Nigerian author Ken Saro-Wiwa early in the century. Neither had had to face the consequences of their crime, for the American people had remained blissfully ignorant and unconcerned. They systematically had been deceived by the controlled media into believing that Arabs, Afros, drugs, ‘terrorists’, and other such hobgoblins hiding in the bush were the enemy, so as to divert their attention while the power-elite and the Zioneocons had been proceeding stealthily with their treacherous conquest of the U.S.A. and its economic structures and financial systems, all the while subverting the ideals of the founding fathers. American citizenry had finally woken up to reality, but it was nearly too late now… .

Chuck’s thoughts were suddenly but poetically interrupted by Greg; still in a fit of passion, he burst out in declamatory tones: “You would not tell with such high zest, to children ardent for some desperate glory, That old Lie! Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori!” He spat the words, with venom and bitterness.

Startled for a second time by Greg in twenty minutes, Chuck began “What was th—” when the door opened. It was Wagner.

“Hello, men,” he said, briskly walking into the room. “Now there’s a set of domains we don’t want to hit,” he said, coming up to them. “No dot-gov or dot-mil sites and apart from those, the ones written on this list. Doable, right?”

He showed them a printout; they looked at it. It had several hundred host-names or ‘domains’. Many of them were easily recognizable as being those of the largest and most powerful corporations and the rest were those of large corporate-controlled media, wealthy political foundations, and such.

“Can-do,” said Chuck, brow furrowed. “Just curious why.”

“Talked with Hal earlier today; he brought up a good point. We don’t want to virus-proof the government’s or military’s computers! And if these giant transnationals or big-media get hit with viruses and go down for a while, screw ‘em,” Wagner said with distaste.

“Oh yeah — cool!” replied Chuck. Greg grinned and nodded approvingly.

“Good. I just emailed it to both of you; encrypted of course. Stick it where needed. So, you guys ready? Meeting starts in thirty minutes.”

“So? How goes it?” Wagner asked as they walked up to the elevators.

“How goes it? Great!” said Chuck. “To be honest, Hal’s guys have done all the donkey work. Greg and I have the easy part and we’re ahead of schedule. Web’s gonna get vaccinated now, thanks to the Baddler — I mean the Baldur chip. Jeez, what a weirdo name — why, why would they call it that!”

“It’s the name of some god … North European, perhaps; a god of beauty, light, and stars, I think,” Greg said, trying to be helpful, interpreting Chuck’s rhetoric literally. “And that’s apropos — you know, aren’t some websites stars of freedom dotting the vast night-sky of, of ignorance and obfuscation? …and web-servers dot the miles and miles of fibre, and … twinkle with knowledge and information.”

“That’s pretty, Greg,” nodded Chuck appreciatively and Wagner concurred.

Greg chuckled and said that he hadn’t meant for it to come out the way it did as they entered an elevator.

Greg, Chuck, and Sam were having coffee and doughnuts in the office, a very early breakfast. They had reached the office by 3:45 a.m. on Monday and had set off the live run at four.

“Let’s see what the latest is from Norway … and also how that standoff with Brazil is developing,” said Greg, turning to his computer and bringing up a web-browser on his monitor.

“You guys think and talk a lot about wars and stuff,” commented Sam.

Greg looked at Sam and then looked through him. His face broke into a half-smile, a joyless smile; his eyes communicated the pain born of a compassionate humanity and carried a jadedness unnatural to their age of thirty-two years. He spoke very softly. “Sam, we Americans have been talking of warfare and dealing in wanton wickedness for over a century. We wouldn’t have to be talking about it and confronting it now if folks at the beginning of only this century hadn’t gotten things as totally out of hand as they did.”

Nobody replied.

“You know,” said Chuck, changing the subject, “I wonder why they asked us to randomize the keys the way they did. I mean, all the CPUs are going to be disabled for what — two, three hours? Nobody’s going to be able to crack any one-K key in even months so we might as well have used the same key for every CPU.” Chuck sounded perplexed. He looked at Sam.

Sam looked at Chuck, tilted his head, and shrugged. “That’s what Dr. Burton and his chief programmer decided.”

“I suppose they had a reason,” said Greg. “Or maybe they just didn’t think of it. Anyway, we’ll find out when Hal comes in this morning — we can ask him.”

“If he knows, if there was a reason,” said Chuck, still bemused.

“Speak of the devil…” said Sam as Burton walked in the door.

“Greg? Chuck? Pleased to meet you,” Burton said, pleasantly shaking hands with them. He gave each of them a business-card.

“Hal I. Burton, Ph.D.,” said Chuck, mis-reading the business-card.

“That’s ‘L’, not ‘I’,” corrected Burton.

“Oh! Yes, sorry. What’s the ‘L’ stand for?” Chuck asked amiably, trying to make small talk.

“My middle-name? Oh, that’s kind of embarrassing!” laughed Burton. “Blame my classicist parents! And their flights of fancy. But anyway, it’s Loki.”

“Huh! Loki. Never heard that name before.”

Greg, however, had. He frowned and smiled wryly to himself. ‘Baldur’. ‘Mistletoe’. And now ‘Loki’. A peculiar coincidence … eerie, in fact… .

Six military policemen silently entered the office and stood along a wall. Greg and Chuck, quite perplexed, stared at them, looked into their faces. Not that they found any variety or even individuality: each man had the blank, glazed, obedient face of an automaton who does as he is told; the face of an ever-increasing number of Americans, in truth.

“Change of plans, boys. We’re not starting the second pass this morning,” said Burton, as two men appeared in the dim corridor outside the door.

Greg and Chuck now looked at these two new arrivals. One of the men was elderly and squat and had a shuffling gait, the other seemed equally elderly but walked with a jaunty strut. They came into the office. Both men were remarkably ugly; their countenances bespoke the arrogance and corruption of unrestrained and untrammelled abuse of power.

“We are going to have to delay that second pass; indefinitely,” the ugly squat man said. Greg and Chuck realized with a sense of confusion that this new visitor was the Attorney-General, Sandler ‘Sandy’ Farm.

“And that’s strictly confidential, strictly confidential,” the ugly jaunty man offered, flashing that roguish grin he doled out like spare change to the fawning, vacuous hacks and flacks of the American media. He shook hands in a faux-friendly manner with Greg and Chuck. They were struck dumb, for this was the Secretary of War, Ron S. Field.

“After all, you are working for the Government of the United States of America so your absolute secrecy is required,” said Farm. His usually sullen — literally ashen — face was beaming, even cheery. “But I thank you gentlemen most sincerely for bringing this project to a successful closure.”

“I guess I can tell you now why we used different bit-sequences so as to manufacture unique five-kilobit keys for every CPU that’s being locked,” Sam said. He wore a smirk and it made him look both stupid and crafty at the same time. “Even if some bunch of idealists somehow cracks the standard re-enable instruction, it would take literally years of cracking for them to figure out the five-K key with which one particular CPU has been locked. And if they do, so what? You can’t use that same key to unlock any other — virtually any other — CPU.”

Chuck looked at Greg, not making full sense of it. Greg returned his gaze.

“You’re very smart engineers, breaking into government computers and reading our white-papers and research reports,” said Field. Nodding at Chuck, he continued, “If you had read that one all the way through — I mean ‘Mankind’s Nine Thousand Freedoms’ — you would have found out that here in America, fewer than several hundred freedoms now remain for the riffraff … I mean for the common man. The top-level freedom to think straight — ‘Unconstrained and Noise-free Cognition,’ they call it — that freedom’s, of course, the fundamental one, and it plus all its derivatives has been off the table for … what, over fifty years now.”

Everyone remained silent. Field went on, addressing both Greg and Chuck, “A small group of people have been working on this project to create voluntary free-slaves for more than two centuries — since shortly after the country was founded, in fact. It is somewhat alien to your idealistic way of thought. And the Web, now –’The World-Wide Web’ is the linchpin freedom.”

“The Web was the linchpin freedom, was the linchpin!” Farm shrieked, punching the air in quite an uncharacteristic spasm of excitement. “That’s why — Yes, yes! — I, I wanted to be here! … when i-i-it it-happened!” he babbled, and started laughing in a manner that was quite maniacal. His face was twitching and his eyes were bulging and glinting as he cackled uncontrollably.

“What … what do you mean?” asked Chuck, distracted and repulsed by Farm’s demeanour. He was still not comprehending, or perhaps not wanting to comprehend. Greg realized in a flash that there would be no second pass. They had been taken. He fell back limply in his chair.

Burton answered. His demeanour too had changed, though in a different way. His very face seemed to have undergone a transformation — as if a snake had moulted its old skin. He looked triumphant, but apart from that emotion, base cunning, greed, and evil had manifest themselves, as if settling into their rightful home after a necessary absence. “I’ll tell you what he means. The Web and the Internet started off as the ARPANet. It was not meant for –and I’m not even sure how … the rabble managed to get it. But we know how to scaremonger the little people, we know how to control you, even if the process is slow and gradual. We’re the rulers, we want the Internet back, and this time we’ll keep it for ourselves. Forever,” he said, leaving nothing to interpretation.

“All right,” said Field, now wearing a cold, disdainful smile. “Time to clear out. You’ll be debriefed at a location in Fort Meade.”

“Hoder’s waiting there,” said Burton, smiling the smile of the serpent.

Someone switched off the lights. The room was now lit only by the corridor lighting seeping in and the glare of six or so computer monitors.

Chuck walked a step or two past Greg, and started to whistle but gave it up immediately. This roomful of hostile strangers silhouetted in the dim light of the monitors did not encourage such ebullience. Greg remained seated, he felt light-headed and nauseous. There was one thing whose loss he was never going to be able to get used to… .

At a signal from Burton, two military policemen walked up to Chuck and Greg to escort them out.

Chuck glanced at his watch. “Should take only an hour more,” he murmured over his shoulder to Greg. Then he added, in an afterthought, “Wonder how many hosts have been hit? It should be halfway through about now.” He felt a sense of desolation, a stark desolation, as he said that.

Greg didn’t reply so Chuck turned around to see why. Just a moment earlier, Greg had swivelled his chair to a nearby workstation, opened a web-browser, and typed in ‘news.yahoo.com’. Chuck could just see his face, a pale, drained oval staring at the monitor.

“Look,” whispered Greg, and Chuck looked at the monitor. (There is always a last time for everything. Even the Web.) Well knowing that all was lost, Greg had acted on emotion in bringing up that website, just for the sake of looking at it once more. But it was not to be. The familiar white-and-blue home-page loaded only partially before the web-browser froze –

‘Error: Server not responding.’

Across America, without any fuss, the Web was shutting down.

Patriot Act

On May 27, 2011, President Obama, over widespread bipartisan objections, approved a Congressional four year extension of controversial parts of the Patriot Act that were set to expire.  In March of 2010, Obama signed a similar extension of the Patriot Act for one year.  These provisions allow the government, with permission from a special secret court, to seize records without the owner’s knowledge, conduct secret surveillance of suspicious people who have no known ties to terrorist groups and to obtain secret roving wiretaps on people.

Criminalization of Dissent and Militarization of the Police

Anyone who has gone to a peace or justice protest in recent years has seen it – local police have been turned into SWAT teams, and SWAT teams into heavily armored military.  Officer Friendly or even Officer Unfriendly has given way to police uniformed like soldiers with SWAT shields, shin guards, heavy vests, military helmets, visors, and vastly increased firepower.  Protest police sport ninja turtle-like outfits and are accompanied by helicopters, special tanks, and even sound blasting vehicles first used in Iraq.  Wireless fingerprint scanners first used by troops in Iraq are now being utilized by local police departments to check motorists.  Facial recognition software introduced in war zones is now being used in Arizona and other jurisdictions.  Drones just like the ones used in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan are being used along the Mexican and Canadian borders.  These activities continue to expand under the Obama administration.

Wiretaps

Wiretaps for oral, electronic or wire communications, approved by federal and state courts, are at an all-time high.  Wiretaps in year 2010 were up 34% from 2009, according to the Administrative Office of the US Courts.

Criminalization of Speech

Muslims in the US have been targeted by the Obama Department of Justice for inflammatory things they said or published on the internet.  First Amendment protection of freedom of speech, most recently stated in a 1969 Supreme Court decision, Brandenberg v Ohio, says the government cannot punish inflammatory speech, even if it advocates violence unless it is likely to incite or produce such action.  A Pakistani resident legally living in the US was indicted by the DOJ in September 2011 for uploading a video on YouTube.  The DOJ said the video was supportive of terrorists even though nothing on the video called for violence.  In July 2011, the DOJ indicted a former Penn State student for going onto websites and suggesting targets and for providing a link to an explosives course already posted on the internet.

Domestic Government Spying on Muslim Communities

In activities that offend freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and several other laws, the NYPD and the CIA have partnered to conduct intelligence operations against Muslim communities in New York and elsewhere.  The CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans, works with the police on “human mapping”, commonly known as racial and religious profiling to spy on the Muslim community.  Under the Obama administration, the Associated Press reported in August 2011, informants known as “mosque crawlers,” monitor sermons, bookstores and cafes.

Top Secret America

In July 2010, the Washington Post released “Top Secret America,” a series of articles detailing the results of a two year investigation into the rapidly expanding world of homeland security, intelligence and counter-terrorism.   It found 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence at about 10,000 locations across the US.  Every single day, the National Security Agency intercepts and stores more than 1.7 billion emails, phone calls and other types of communications. The FBI has a secret database named Guardian that contains reports of suspicious activities filed from federal, state and local law enforcement.  According to the Washington Post, Guardian contained 161,948 files as of December 2009.  From that database there have been 103 full investigations and at least five arrests the FBI reported.  The Obama administration has done nothing to cut back on the secrecy.

Other Domestic Spying

There are at least 72 fusion centers across the US which collect local domestic police information and merge it into multi-jurisdictional intelligence centers, according to a recent report by the ACLU.  These centers share information from federal, state and local law enforcement and some private companies to secretly spy on Americans.  These all continue to grow and flourish under the Obama administration.

Abusive FBI Intelligence Operations

The Electronic Frontier Foundation documented thousands of violations of the law by FBI intelligence operations from 2001 to 2008 and estimate that there are over 4000 such violations each year.  President Obama issued an executive order to strengthen the Intelligence Oversight Board, an agency which is supposed to make sure the FBI, the CIA and other spy agencies are following the law.  No other changes have been noticed.

Wikileaks

The publication of US diplomatic cables by Wikileaks and then by main stream news outlets sparked condemnation by the Obama administration officials who said the publication of accurate government documents was nothing less than an attack on the United States.  The Attorney General announced a criminal investigation and promised “this is not saber rattling.” Government officials warned State Department employees not to download the publicly available documents.  A State Department official and Columbia officials warned students that discussing Wikileaks or linking documents to social networking sites could jeopardize their chances of getting a government job, a position that lasted several days until reversed by other Columbia officials.  At the time this was written, the Obama administration continued to try to find ways to prosecute the publishers of Wikileaks.

Censorship of Books by the CIA

In 2011, the CIA demanded extensive cuts from a memoir by former FBI agent Ali H. Soufan, in part because it made the agency look bad.  Soufan’s book detailed the use of torture methods on captured prisoners and mistakes that led to 9-11. Similarly, a 2011 book on interrogation methods by former CIA agent Glenn Carle was subjected to extensive black outs.  The CIA under the Obama administration continues its push for censorship.

Blocking Publication of Photos of U.S. Soldiers Abusing Prisoners

In May 2009, President Obama reversed his position of three weeks earlier and refused to release photos of US soldiers abusing prisoners.  In April 2009, the US Department of Defense told a federal court that it would release the photos.  The photos were part of nearly 200 criminal investigations into abuses by soldiers.

Technological Spying

The Bay Area Transit System, in August 2011, hearing of rumors to protest against fatal shootings by their police, shut down cell service in four stations.  Western companies sell email surveillance software to repressive regimes in China, Libya and Syria to use against protestors and human rights activists.  Surveillance cameras monitor residents in high crime areas, street corners and other governmental buildings.  Police department computers ask for and receive daily lists from utility companies with addresses and names of every home address in their area.  Computers in police cars scan every license plate of every car they drive by.  The Obama administration has made no serious effort to cut back these new technologies of spying on citizens.

Use of “State Secrets” to Shield Government and Others from Review

When the Bush government was caught hiring private planes from a Boeing subsidiary to transport people for torture to other countries, the Bush administration successfully asked the federal trial court to dismiss a case by detainees tortured because having a trial would disclose “state secrets” and threaten national security.  When President Obama was elected, the state secrets defense was reaffirmed in arguments before a federal appeals court.  It continues to be a mainstay of the Obama administration effort to cloak their actions and the actions of the Bush administration in secrecy.

In another case, it became clear in 2005 that the Bush FBI was avoiding the Fourth Amendment requirement to seek judicial warrants to get telephone and internet records by going directly to the phone companies and asking for the records.  The government and the companies, among other methods of surveillance, set up secret rooms where phone and internet traffic could be monitored.  In 2008, the government granted the companies amnesty for violating the privacy rights of their customers.  Customers sued anyway. But the Obama administration successfully argued to the district court, among other defenses, that disclosure would expose state secrets and should be dismissed.  The case is now on appeal.

Material Support

The Obama administration successfully asked the US Supreme Court not to apply the First Amendment and to allow the government to criminalize humanitarian aid and legal activities of people providing advice or support to foreign organizations which are listed on the government list as terrorist organizations.   The material support law can now be read to penalize people who provide humanitarian aid or human rights advocacy. The Obama administration Solicitor General argued to the court “when you help Hezbollah build homes, you are also helping Hezbollah build bombs.”  The Court agreed with the Obama argument that national security trumps free speech in these circumstances.

Chicago Anti-war Grand Jury Investigation

In September 2010, FBI agents raided the homes of seven peace activists in Chicago, Minneapolis and Grand Rapids seizing computers, cell phones, passports, and records.  More than 20 anti-war activists were issued federal grand jury subpoenas and more were questioned across the country.  Some of those targeted were members of local labor unions, others members of organizations like the Arab American Action Network, the Columbia Action Network, the Twin Cities Anti-War Campaign and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.  Many were active internationally and visited resistance groups in Columbia and Palestine.  Subpoenas directed people to bring anything related to trips to Columbia, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Israel or the Middle East.  In 2011, the home of a Los Angeles activist was raided and he was questioned about his connections with the September 2010 activists.  All of these investigations are directed by the Obama administration.

Punishing Whistleblowers

The Obama administration has prosecuted five whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, more than all the other administrations in history put together.  They charged a National Security Agency advisor with ten felonies under the Espionage Act for telling the press that government eavesdroppers were wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on misguided and failed projects.  After their case collapsed, the government, which was chastised by the federal judge as engaging in unconscionable conduct allowed him to plead to a misdemeanor and walk.  The administration has also prosecuted former members of the CIA, the State Department, and the FBI.  They even tried to subpoena a journalist and one of the lawyers for the whistleblowers.

Bradley Manning

Army private Bradley Manning is accused of leaking thousands of government documents to Wikileaks.  These documents expose untold numbers of lies by US government officials, wrongful killings of civilians, policies to ignore torture in Iraq, information about who is held at Guantanamo, cover ups of drone strikes and abuse of children and much more damaging information about US malfeasance.  Though Daniel Ellsberg and other whistleblowers say Bradley is an American hero, the US government has jailed him and is threatening him with charges of espionage which may be punished by the death penalty.  For months Manning was held in solitary confinement and forced by guards to sleep naked.  When asked about how Manning was being held, President Obama personally defended the conditions of his confinement saying he had been assured they were appropriate and meeting our basic standards.

Solitary Confinement

At least 20,000 people are in solitary confinement in US jails and prisons, some estimate several times that many.  Despite the fact that federal, state and local prisons and jails do not report actual numbers, academic research estimates tens of thousands are kept in cells for 23 to 24 hours a day in supermax units and prisons, in lockdown, in security housing units, in “the hole”, and in special management units or administrative segregation.  Human Rights Watch reports that one-third to one-half of the prisoners in solitary are likely mentally ill.  In May 2006, the UN Committee on Torture concluded that the United States should “review the regimen imposed on detainees in supermax prisons, in particular, the practice of prolonged isolation.”  The Obama administration has taken no steps to cut back on the use of solitary confinement in federal, state or local jails and prisons.

Special Administrative Measures

Special Administrative Measures (SAMS) are extra harsh conditions of confinement imposed on prisoners (including pre-trial detainees) by the Attorney General.  The U.S. Bureau of Prisons imposes restrictions such segregation and isolation from all other prisoners, and limitation or denial of contact with the outside world such as: no visitors except attorneys, no contact with news media, no use of phone, no correspondence, no contact with family, no communication with guards, 24 hour video surveillance and monitoring. The DOJ admitted in 2009 that several dozen prisoners, including several pre-trial detainees, mostly Muslims, were kept incommunicado under SAMS.  If anything, the use of SAMS has increased under the Obama administration.

These twenty concrete examples document a sustained assault on domestic civil liberties in the United States under the Obama administration.  Rhetoric aside, how different has Obama been from Bush in this area?

Under “transparency president” Barack Obama, the U.S. government initiated a criminal probe of the organization after the site began releasing a virtual tsunami of confidential military and State Department files.

In the last two years alone, WikiLeaks revealed that the United States had committed grave war crimes in Afghanistan, Iraq and other global hot-spots of interest to America’s resource-grabbing corporate masters.

This year’s release of 779 classified dossiers on prisoners housed at the Guantánamo Bay prison gulag fleshed out the public’s knowledge of ongoing torture programs run by the military and the CIA under cover of it’s murderous “War on Terror.”

But it was their publication of some 250,000 secret State Department cables which sparked a new round of hysterical denunciations in Washington culminating in the witchhunt against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks supporters, a demonization campaign aided and abetted by U.S. financial institutions such as Bank of America and Pentagon cyberwar contractors.

Cable after cable revealed “the extent of US spying on its allies and the UN; turning a blind eye to corruption and human rights abuse in ‘client states’; backroom deals with supposedly neutral countries; lobbying for US corporations; and the measures US diplomats take to advance those who have access to them.”

Leading politicians, including Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell have called the web site’s founder a “high-tech terrorist,” and commentators such as right-wing Washington Times columnist Jeffery Kuhner and others have demanded that Assange and his co-workers be treated “the same way as other high-value terrorist targets.”

The Obama administration, loathe to pursue criminal probes of the previous regime’s lawbreaking, the better to immunize themselves over their own contemporary lawless acts, including the torture of prisoners at Bagram Airbase, clandestine CIA drone killings and the due process-free assassination of an American citizen who was never charged, let alone convicted of a crime, was up to the challenge and empaneled a grand jury in Alexandria, Va.

And when Justice Department inquisitors first sought to seize the activist’s information, in keeping with the new “Washington consensus” that constitutional rights are nothing more than empty platitudes duly trotted out on national holidays, they demanded that Twitter turn over the files without benefit of a warrant.

American Civil Liberties Union staff attorney Aden Fine denounced the ruling. “Internet users don’t automatically give up their rights to privacy and free speech when they use services like Twitter,” Fine said.

“The government shouldn’t be able to get this kind of private information without a warrant, and they certainly shouldn’t be able to do so in secret. An open court system is a fundamental part of our democracy, and the very existence of court documents should not be hidden from the public.”

According to the ACLU, it wasn’t only Twitter that was served with record demands by the Justice Department. “Based on the file numbers that have been created, it appears likely that there are additional orders whose existence remains secret.”

The public first became aware of the government’s fishing expedition only because Twitter informed the three activists, Jacob Appelbaum, a founding member of the online anonymity network, Tor Project, Rop Gonggrijp, a founder of the Dutch web portal XS4ALL and Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a left-wing member of Iceland’s Parliament.

As Antifascist Calling reported in March, Jónsdóttir was specifically targeted for her role in helping WikiLeaks release the Collateral Murder video last year.

That scandalous video exposed the wanton slaughter of a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad, including two Reuters photojournalists, by a U.S. military Apache helicopter crew. Two children were also seriously wounded in the unprovoked attack.

The Army’s thrill-kill gun camera video wasn’t concealed from the public because of any alleged threat to “national security” or to protect intelligence “sources and methods,” standard boilerplate used to hide war crimes by the U.S. Empire, but precisely to cover-up imperialism’s murderous rampage that helped “liberate” Iraqis of their lives.

Commenting on the ruling, Jónsdóttir told The Guardian, “This is a huge blow for everybody that uses social media. We have to have the same civil rights online as we have offline. Imagine if the US authorities wanted to do a house search at my home, go through my private papers. There would be a hell of a fight. It’s absolutely unacceptable.”

Unfortunately, under Section 213 of the oxymoronic USA Patriot Act, which was not subject to a “sunset” provision of the constitution-shredding legislation, FBI agents can do precisely that and obtain so-called “delayed notification” warrants for the search and seizure of evidence of any federal crime, not only those related to “terrorism” investigations.

Called “sneak and peek” searches, federal snoops are permitted to clandestinely seize property or conduct electronic searches on a home computer if a court deems such seizures “reasonably necessary.” Indeed, notification of a covert FBI home invasion “may thereafter be extended by the court for good cause shown.”

The sweeping ruling by Judge Liam O’Grady upheld demands by U.S. investigators that they should have virtual free-reign to pillage private records related to the users’ IP address, the unique identifier used by a computer or hand-held device to log onto the internet.

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) who represent Jónsdóttir along with American Civil Liberties Union attorneys, O’Grady “also blocked the users’ attempt to discover whether other Internet companies have been ordered to turn their data over to the government.”

“When you use the Internet, you entrust your online conversations, thoughts, experiences, locations, photos, and more to dozens of companies who host or transfer your data,” EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn said.

“In light of that technological reality, we are gravely worried by the court’s conclusion that records about you that are collected by Internet services like Twitter, Facebook, Skype and Google are fair game for warrantless searches by the government.”

Among other things, O’Grady wrote in his 60-page decision that “the information sought was clearly material to establishing key facts related to an ongoing investigation and would have assisted a grand jury in conducting an inquiry into the particular matters under investigation.”

O’Grady, appointed to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in 2007 by President George W. Bush, argued that because Twitter users “voluntarily” turned over their IP addresses when they signed up for an account, they lost any expectation of privacy.

In other words, simply because users click through opaque “Terms of Service” agreements with Twitter, Google, Facebook or any other internet vendor, “petitioners knew or should have known that their I.P. information was subject to examination by Twitter, so they had a lessened expectation of privacy in that information, particularly in light of their apparent consent to the Twitter terms of service and privacy policy.”

However, as security researcher Christopher Soghoian pointed out in Slight Paranoia, “The federal judge in the Wikileaks case cited in his order a version of Twitter’s privacy policy from 2010, rather than the very different policy that existed when Appelbaum, Gonggrijp and Jonsdottir created their Twitter accounts back in 2008.”

“That older policy,” Soghoian wrote, “actually promised users that Twitter would keep their data private unless they violated the company’s terms of service. It is unclear how the judge managed to miss this important detail.”

“There is a slight problem with relying on a privacy policy created on November 16, 2010 to decide the reasonable expectation of privacy of these three individuals: They created their Twitter accounts several years before the document was written.”

Indeed, as Soghoian observes, “not only is a federal judge ruling that 3 individuals have no reasonable expectation of privacy with regard to the government getting some of their Internet transaction data, but the judge isn’t even citing the right version of a widely ignored privacy policy to do so.”

“If the judge were to examine the privacy policy that existed when these three targets signed up for a Twitter account,” Soghoian concludes, “he might decide that they do in fact have a reasonable expectation of privacy and that the government needs a warrant to get the data.”

While true as far as it goes, and Soghoian should be commended for pointing out this glaring contradiction in the government’s case, readers are well aware that the WikiLeaks Twitter case is about politics not process, that is, moves by the secret state to clamp-down on dissent and dissenters, and not whether someone has read and “voluntarily” signed-off on a vendor’s “Terms of Service” agreement.

Among other things, O’Grady’s ruling revealed that the government was seeking not only IP addresses but “1. subscriber names, user names, screen names, or other identities; 2. mailing addresses, residential addresses, business addresses, e-mail addresses and other contact information; 3. connection records, or records of session times and durations; 4. length of service (including start date) and types of service utilized; 5. telephone or instrument number or other subscriber number or identity, including any temporarily assigned network address; and 6. means and source of payment for such service (including any credit card or bank account number) and billing records.”

It doesn’t take a computer forensics expert to conclude that the government, in obtaining “connection records,” will also get their hands on information about anyone else who corresponded or “followed” the activists on Twitter.

Kevin Bankston, a senior staff attorney with EFF told CNET News that the ruling means that “essentially any data about you collected by an Internet service is fair game for warrantless searches by the government.”

The District Court’s ruling can be situated within the wider context of the Obama administration’s unprecedented drive to criminalize whistleblowing.

The persecution of Julian Assange and other WikiLeaks supporters is a shot across the bow not only against those who leak sensitive information to the public that expose egregious acts by the well-connected, but at investigative journalists and researchers who in their course of their work uncover high crimes and misdemeanors by powerful corporations and governments.

As the World Socialist Web Site pointed out, “Assange’s real ‘crime’ is that, through its publication of a mass of secret US military documents, diplomatic cables and video footage, WikiLeaks has exposed the criminal character of the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq and numerous other conspiracies carried out against the world’s people by Washington and its allies.”

Make no mistake, this ruling is a warning of further draconian moves to come.

School superintendents placed it in restricted sections of their libraries.

It is the most challenged book four of the past five years, according to the American Library Association (ALA).

“It” is a 32-page illustrated children’s book, And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson, with illustrations by Henry Cole. The book is based upon the real story of Roy and Silo, two male penguins, who had formed a six-year bond at New York City’s Central Park Zoo, and who “adopted” a fertilized egg and raised the chick until she could be on her own.

Gays saw the story as a positive reinforcement of their lifestyle. Riding to rescue America from homosexuality were the biddies against perversion. Gay love is against the Bible, they wailed; the book isn’t suitable for the delicate minds of children, they cried as they pushed libraries and schools to remove it from their shelves or at the very least make it restricted.

The penguins may have been gay—or maybe they weren’t. It’s not unusual for animals to form close bonds with others of their same sex. But the issue is far greater than whether or not the penguins were gay or if the book promoted homosexuality as a valid lifestyle. People have an inherent need to defend their own values, lifestyles, and worldviews by attacking others who have a different set of beliefs. Banning or destroying free speech and the freedom to publish is one of the ways people believe they can protect their own lifestyles.

During the first decade of the 21st century, the most challenged books, according to the ALA, were J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, apparently because some people believe fictionalized witchcraft is a dagger into the soul of organized religion. Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series was the 10th most challenged in 2010. Perhaps some parents weren’t comfortable with their adolescents having to make a choice between werewolves and vampires.

Among the most challenged books is Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the vicious satire about firemen burning books to save humanity. Other books that are consistently among the ALA’s list of most challenged are Brave New World (Aldous Huxley), Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut), The Chocolate War (Robert Cormier), Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck), I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou), Forever (Judy Blume), and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain), regarded by most major literary scholars as the finest American novel.

Name a classic, and it’s probably on the list of the most challenged books. Conservatives, especially fundamental religious conservatives, tend to challenge more books. But, challenges aren’t confined to any one political ideology. Liberals are frequently at the forefront of challenging books that may not agree with their own social philosophies. The feminist movement, while giving the nation a better awareness of the rights of women, wanted to ban Playboy and all works that depicted what they believed were unflattering images if women. Liberals have also attacked the works of Joel Chandler Harris (the Br’er Rabbit series), without understanding history, folklore, or the intent of the journalist-author, who was well-regarded as liberal for his era.

Although there are dozens of reasons why people say they want to restrict or ban a book, the one reason that threads its way through all of them is that the book challenges conventional authority or features a character who is perceived to be “different,” who may give readers ideas that many see as “dangerous.”

The belief there are works that are “dangerous” is why governments create and enforce laws that restrict publication. In colonial America, as in almost all countries and territories at that time, the monarchy required every book to be licensed, to be read by a government official or committee to determine if the book was suitable for the people. If so, it received a royal license. If not, it could not be printed.

In 1644, two decades before his epic poem Paradise Lost was published, John Milton wrote a pamphlet, to be distributed to members of Parliament, against a recently-enacted licensing law. In defiance of the law, the pamphlet was published without license. Using Biblical references and pointing out that the Greek and Roman civilizations didn’t license books, Milton argued, “As good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable create [in] God’s image,” he told Parliament, “but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God.” He concluded his pamphlet with a plea, “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”

A century later, Sir William Blackstone, one of England’s foremost jurists and legal scholars, argued against prior restraint, the right of governments to block publication of any work they found offensive for any reason.

The arguments of Milton and Blackstone became the basis of the foundation of a new country, to be known as the United States of America, and the establishment of the First Amendment.

Every year, at the end of September, the American Library Association sponsors Banned Book Week, and publishes a summary of book challenges. And every year, it is made more obvious that those who want to ban books, sometimes building bonfires and throwing books upon them as did Nazi Germany, fail to understand the principles of why this nation was created.

Their letter and with a copy of the op-ed I wrote in the Finger Lakes Times are attached.

Allow me to refute the lies and innuendos that these “colleagues” have levied against me, behind my back. Since each of you received the detractors’ letter, I am sending you this rebuttal.

1. The purpose of my op-ed was to define Holocaust denial. That should be clear from the byline “What do deniers really mean?” It was submitted in response to the media frenzy and demonization of President Ahmadinejad who addressed the UN General Assembly and whose picture was shown above my guest appearance piece. Instead of acknowledging this, my faculty detractors feigned outrage that it appeared on the eve of Yom Kippur. I had nothing to do with the timing of the article and make no apology for when it appeared vis-à-vis a Jewish holiday.

2. More egregiously these faculty detractors claimed to know my “personal beliefs” and claimed that I mis-used my title of professor emeritus at Hobart and William Smith Colleges to lend them credence. That is simply a lie. Nowhere are my personal beliefs stated. Moreover my op-ed included an exceptionally long disclaimer showing The Colleges neither condone nor condemn what I had written.

3. The faculty detractors claim that “Holocaust denial carries absolutely no weight among academic scholars in any field whatsoever.” That is simply not true. There are a number of scholars who write about the typical Holocaust narrative and are willing to fight the slime hurled at them by ardent Zionists and by others who feel it their duty to protect the narrative which serves as the sword and shield of apartheid Israel. (BTW, our former provost and former William Smith Dean both demanded that I not use the word “apartheid” in connection with Israel; granted the term was used in the Israeli press and later by President Carter, but it was not “suitable discourse” on our campus where we routinely claim to support free speech and diversity of opinion.)

4. The faculty detractors write that “denying undisputed facts of the holocaust (sic) is not a way to show support for the Palestinians.” First, the three tenets of Holocaust revisionism are clearly not “undisputed. To the contrary, they are hotly and passionately disputed; people’s lives are ruined when they even question these “facts.” In fourteen countries you can get jail time for disputing “facts” surrounding the Holocaust.

Second, disputing “facts” is what science and historical analysis is all about. We academics have no problem discussing and disputing whether or not Jesus Christ is truly the son of God, or if President Obama’s birth certificate is real, or if President Roosevelt knew a Japanese attack on Hawaii was imminent, but we are not allowed to discuss or dispute the six-million figure.

Third, what gives these detractors the credentials to pontificate on what supports or hurts Palestinians? Some of them have been responsible for feting at Hobart and William Smith Colleges anti-Palestinian demagogues including Wiesel and even Netanyahu. They helped give Madeleine Albright our highest humanitarian award, which is a disgrace in light of her statement that the death of over 500,000 Iraqi children was “worth it.” Was I the only one to protest that award?

I have team-taught a senior course on the Palestinians. I have published books and articles on the Palestinian Naqba and the massacre of Arab civilians by Jewish terrorists at Deir Yassin. I have built the only United States memorial to their dispossession and ethnic cleansing. I don’t need, nor accept, biased comments on how to support Palestinians.

5. Calling Holocaust historical revisionism “Holocaust denial” is unnecessarily pejorative. It might be fine for Fox News, but it is not conducive to academic discourse. To call Holocaust revisionism “thinly veiled anti-Semitism” is simply untrue and it demeans scholars and others, including Jews, who question the Holocaust doctrine as we are fed it in hundreds of films, books, articles, and commentaries. Terms like Holocaust Industry, Holocaust Fatigue, Holocaust professional, Holocaust wannabes, and Holocaust High Priest were not coined by “deniers” or anti-Semites; they were coined by Jews. (The High Priest quip is an obvious reference to Wiesel; it was made by Tova Reich in her book My Holocaust. Tova’s husband, Walter Reich, was the former director of the US Holocaust Museum in Washington.)

In 1946 the US government told us that over 20 million people were murdered by Hitler. Now that figure is said to be 11 million; it is literally carved in stone at the US Holocaust Memorial. For years we were told that over 4 million were killed at Auschwitz, but by the early 1990s that figure was reduced to 1.5 million. Wiesel tells us that people were thrown alive onto pyres; he claims to have seen it with his own eyes; today Yad Vashem trained guides at Auschwitz say that is not true. These are examples of historical revisionism and they are not inherently anti-Semitic.

6. It is most interesting to see academic colleagues say, “(a)s we all know … the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ was introduced to make genocide sound more palatable.” That means they either deny that Palestinians have been (and continue to be) ethnically cleansed or they agree that Israel is performing genocide of the Palestinian people.

7. While the faculty detractors found my speech to be “abhorrent,” they seemed unable to find fault with a single fact I presented. So they resorted to name-calling and labeled the piece “hate speech” and “unsupported vitriol” and smeared my name to hundreds of people. I am surprised that Abe Foxman or the Mossad did not come calling.

8. The detractors genuinely were concerned about the op-ed’s impact on our Jewish students, staff, and faculty. But maybe it is time for all members of the community to see the Holocaust for what it really was and not the unquestionable, unimpeachable, doctrine that makes Jewish suffering superior to that of other people. Maybe it is time to recognize that Zionism as a political movement to create a Jewish state in Palestine began long before the Holocaust and that Zionist discrimination, dehumanization, and dispossession of the Palestinian people should not be excused by it. Maybe it is time to see that since over half the population (within the borders controlled by Israel) is not Jewish, the dream of creating a Jewish state has failed. Walling in the non-Jews or putting them in Bantustans or driving them into Jordan will not make it a purely Jewish state. The nationalist allegiance to “blood and soil” has been a failure and that should be the real lesson of the Holocaust.

9. To say that my op-ed “does not meet our expectation of minimally rational and minimally humane discourse’ is nonsense. The piece is well written, well substantiated, and quite humane.

10. But the faculty detractors are quite right about one thing; they were deeply disturbed and saddened to see a Hobart and William Smith title attached to it. Diversity and perspectives outside the mainstream are to be encouraged, but not if they question Jewish power, Israel, or Holocaust doctrine. Apparently that is beyond the pale.

11. The demand to President Gearan to remove my title of Professor Emeritus is both classic and stupid. Consider how little it would accomplish. I would be supposedly ashamed and I would have to buy a walking pass at the gym that would cost me $40 a year. Would it save HWS from being associated with my writings? Of course not; I would simply use the title of “Former Professor Emeritus at Hobart and William Smith Colleges” with no disclaimer.

But what it would really do is to cast me into the briar bush with Norm Finkelstein, Marc Ellis, Paul Eisen, Henry Herskovitz, Gilad Atzmon, Rich Siegel, and Hedy Epstein (a Holocaust survivor), all friends of mine and all anti-Zionists. Professors Ost, Linton, and Mertens apparently saw this and I credit (or blame) them for my still having the emeritus title.

Lest I seem irreverent or unscathed by this widely-circulated smear letter from my detractors, allow me to admit that I have been hurt by it. Many faculty and other HWS folks now shun me as a persona non grata largely because they only read the slime and never a rebuttal. Of course until now there could be no rebuttal because the smear letter was withheld from me. (Even the Provost’s request to send me a copy was refused.)

My former student and long-time friend, David Deming, who is now the Chair of the HWS Board does not answer my letters. President Gearan does not answer them either. Board member, Roy Dexheimer, disparages me and wonders if I fell “off my meds.” Another Board member, Stuart Pilch, took it a step further and made a threatening phone call to my home and a promise “to hunt me down.”

But the biggest disappointment is with those faculty detractors who never came to discuss or complain about what I had written, but instead chose to spin their own interpretation, which was full of lies and half truths, and then disseminate their smear as widely as possible. Should any of you be one of the signatories, my door is open for further discussion. And if you know the names of the other signatories, I would appreciate your sharing that information with me.

Ever wonder why the truth about 9/11 never got exposed? Why Americans don’t have a clue about leadership fraud surrounding the War on Terror? Why Americans don’t know if the 9/11 investigation was really successful? Why the Iraqi Peace Option draws a blank? Somebody has known the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden— or his grave—for the past 10 years. But nobody’s talking to the people.

In significant part, that’s because of the Patriot Act— a law that equates free speech with sedition. It’s got a big agenda, with 7,000 pages of Machiavellian code designed to interrupt individual questioning of government policy. In this brave new world, free speech under the Bill of Rights effectively has been declared a threat to government controls for maintaining stability. And the Patriot Act has become the premiere weapon to attack whistle blowers and dissidents who challenge the comfort of political leaders hiding inconvenient truths from the public. It’s all the rage on Capitol Hill, as leaders strive to score TV ratings, while their demagoguery as “outstanding leadership performance” on everything from national security to environmental policy.

Truth has Become Treason

But wait–Congress assures us the Patriot Act only targets foreigners, who come to our shores seeking to destroy our way of life through violent, criminal acts. Good, law abiding Americans have nothing to fear. The Patriot Act restricts its powers of “roving wiretaps” and warrantless searches to international communications among “bad guys.” Congress has sworn, with hand on heart, it’s only purpose is breaking down terrorist cells and hunting out “lone wolf” mad men.

That’s what they told you, right? And you believed them? You trust the government. Well, that was your first mistake. With regards to the Patriot Act, it’s a fatal one. Would the government lie to you? You betcha! And they have.

The Patriot Act reaches far beyond terrorism prevention. In my home state of Maryland, State Police invoked the Patriot Act to run surveillance on the Chesapeake Climate Action Network dedicated to wind power, recycling and protection of the Chesapeake Bay. They infiltrated the DC Anti War Network, suggesting the group might be a front for “white supremacists,” and Amnesty International, claiming to investigate “civil rights abuses.” Opponents of the death penalty also got targeted (in case they got violent).

Bottom line: truth tellers who give Americans too much insight on any number of issues are vulnerable to a vast arsenal of judicial weapons typically associated with China or Myanmar. In the Patriot Act, the government has created a powerful tool to hunt out free thinking on the left or right. It doesn’t discriminate. Anyone who opposes government policy is at risk

How do I know all this? Because I was the second non-Arab American ever indicted on the Patriot Act. My arrest defied all expectations about the law. I was no terrorist plotting to explode the Washington Monument. Quite the opposite, I had worked in anti-terrorism for almost a decade, covering Iraq and Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Malaysia at the United Nations. At the instruction of my CIA handler, I had delivered advance warnings about the 9/11 attack to the private staff of Attorney General John Ashcroft and the Office of Counter-Terrorism in August, 2001. FBI wire taps prove that I carried details of a comprehensive peace framework with Iraq up and down the hallowed corridors of Capitol Hill for months before the invasion, arguing that War was totally unnecessary.

I delivered those papers to Democrats and Republicans alike; to my own second cousin, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card; and to Secretary of State Colin Powell, who lived next door to my CIA handler. Gratis of the Patriot Act, we had the manila envelope and my hand written notes to Secretary Powell, dated a week before his infamous speech at the United Nations. My papers argued that no WMDs would be found inside Iraq, and that the peace framework could achieve all U.S. objectives without firing a shot.

In short, I was an Asset who loudly opposed War with Iraq, and made every effort to correct the mistakes in assumptions on Capitol Hill.

Then I did the unthinkable. I phoned the offices of Senator Trent Lott and Senator John McCain, requesting to testify before a brand new, blue ribbon Commission investigating Pre-War Intelligence. Proud and confident of my efforts, I had no idea Congress was planning to blame “bad intelligence” for the unpopular War.

Over night I became Public Enemy Number One on Capitol Hill.

Thirty days later I awoke to hear FBI agents pounding on my door. My nightmare on the Patriot Act lasted 5 years— Four years after my arrest, the Court granted me one morning of evidentiary testimony by two supremely credible witnesses. Parke Godfrey verified my 9/11 warnings under oath. Otherwise, I never got my day in Court.

The Patriot Act’s Arsenal to Stop Free Speech

If you care about America and the traditions of freedom, whether you’re progressive or conservative, you should be angry about this law.

First come the warrantless searches and FBI tracking surveillance. My work in anti-terrorism gave me no protection. I got my first warrantless search after meeting an undercover FBI agent to discuss my support for free elections in Iraq and my opposition to torture and sexual humiliation of Iraqi detainees. (Sorry guys, body wires don’t lie.)

If truth tellers don’t get the message to shut their mouths, the Justice Department ratchets up the pressure. Defendants face secret charges, secret evidence and secret grand jury testimony. Throughout five years of indictment, my attorneys and I never got to read a single FBI interview or grand jury statement. Under the Patriot Act, the whistleblower/defendant has no right to know who has accused him or her of what criminal activities, or the dates of the alleged offenses, or what laws got broken.

Of course, I was able to piece together my activities. I knew that “sometime in October, 2001″ an Iraqi diplomat gave me the English translation of a book on depleted uranium, which showed how cancer rates and birth defects had spiked in Iraqi children.

And I was quite certain that on October 14, 1999, an Iraqi diplomat asked me how to channel major financial contributions to the Presidential Campaign of George Bush and Dick Cheney. The Justice Department got the date from me, since I reported my conversation immediately to my Defense Intelligence handler, Paul Hoven.

It’s unlikely the grand jury knew that, since the Justice Department has the prerogative to keep a grand jury in the dark. In this brave new world, a grand jury can be compelled to consider indictments carrying 10 years or more in prison, without the right to review evidence, or otherwise determine whether an individual’s actions rise to the level of criminal activity at all.

That’s just the beginning. Once Congress scores an indictment against a political opponent, the Justice Department can force Defense attorneys to undergo protracted security clearances, while the whistle blower cum defendant waits in prison–usually in solitary confinement or the SHU. After the security clearance, prosecutors have an ironclad right to bar attorneys from communicating communications from the prosecution to the defendant, on threat of disbarment, stiff fines or prison sentence.

Scared yet? Once you get to trial, the situation gets much worse. The Patriot Act declares that a prosecutor has no obligation to show evidence of criminal activity to a jury at all. And the Defense can be denied the right to argue a rebuttal to those secret charges, because it requires speculation that might mislead the jury—or might expose issues that the government considers, well, secret. After all that a Judge can instruct a jury that the prosecution regards the secret evidence as sufficient to merit conviction on the secret charges. The Jury can be barred from considering the lack of evidence in weighing whether to convict.

Think I’m exaggerating? You would be wrong. That’s what happened to me. All of it—with one major glitch. All of this presumes the whistle blower’s lucky enough to get a trial. I was denied mine, though I fought vigorously for my rights. Instead, citing the Patriot Act, I got thrown in prison on a Texas military base without so much as a hearing—and threatened with indefinite detention and forcible drugging, to boot.

Americans are not nearly afraid enough.

Neither is Congress. As of this week, members of Congress should be very afraid. Anyone who votes to extend the Patriot Act should expect to pack their bags in 2012. They will be targeted for defeat. Above all, the words “freedom” and “Constitution” will never appear in their campaigns without suffering extreme public scorn—never, ever again.

Arrests at protest have been increasing each year since 2009. Those arrested include people protesting US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Guantanamo, strip mining, home foreclosures, nuclear weapons, immigration policies, police brutality, mistreatment of hotel workers, budget cutbacks, Blackwater, the mistreatment of Bradley Manning, and right wing efforts to cut back collective bargaining.

These arrests illustrate that resistance to the injustices in and committed by the US is alive and well. Certainly there could and should be more, but it is important to recognize that people are fighting back against injustice.

Information on these arrests has been taken primarily from the newsletter The Nuclear Resister, which has been publishing reports of anti-nuclear resistance arrests since 1980, and anti-war actions since 1990.

Jack Cohen-Joppa, who with his partner Felice, edits The Nuclear Resister, told me “Over the last three decades, in the course of chronicling more than 100,000 arrests for nonviolent protest and resistance to nuclear power, nuclear weapons, torture, and war, we’ve noted a quadrennial decline as support for protest and resistance gets swallowed up by Presidential politicking. It has taken a couple of years, but the Hopeium addicts of 2008 are finally getting into recovery. We’re again reporting a steady if slow rise in the numbers willing to risk arrest and imprisonment for acts of civil resistance. Today, for instance, there are more Americans serving time in prison for nuclear weapons protest than at any time in more than a decade.”

In the list below I give the date of the protest arrest and a brief summary of the reason for the protest. After each date I have included the name of the organization which sponsored the protest. Check them out. Remember, they can jail the resisters but they cannot jail the resistance!

2011
January 1, 2011. Nine women, ages 40 to 91, who brought solar panels to the Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor were arrested for blocking the driveway at Entergy Corporation. Shut It Down.
January 5, 2011 and February 2, 2011. Five arrests were made of peace activists protesting at Vandenberg Air Force base, including a veteran of WWII. Vandenberg Witness.
January 11, 2011. Ten people protesting against the continued human rights violation of Guantanamo prison trying to deliver a letter to a federal judge were arrested at the federal building in Chicago, Illinois.
January 11, 2011. A sixty one year old grandmother protesting against excessive radiation was arrested for blocking the path of a utility truck in Sonoma County, California.
January 15, 2011. Twelve people protesting against Trident nuclear weapons at the Kitsap-Bangor naval base outside of Seattle, Washington were arrested – six on state charges of blocking the highway and six others on federal charges of trespass for crossing onto the base. Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action.
January 17, 2011. Marking the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, people protested outside the Lockheed Martin Valley Forge Pennsylvania office where eight people were arrested. Brandywine Peace Community.
January 17, 2011. Three people protesting the US use of armed drones and depleted uranium were arrested at the Davis-Monthan air force base near Tucson Arizona.
January 29, 2011. Eight peace activists marking the 60th anniversary of the testing of the atom bomb were arrested at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site. Nevada Desert Experience.
February 10, 2011. Twenty three hotel workers were arrested after protesting management abuses at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco. UNITE Here Local 2.
February 15, 2011. A former CIA agent turned whistleblower was arrested and battered by police for standing silently and turning his back during a speech on the need for human rights in Egypt delivered by the US Secretary of State. Veterans for Peace.
February 17, 2011. Nine people protesting against the attack on collective bargaining in Wisconsin were arrested at the Wisconsin Capitol in Madison.
February 25, 2011. Eleven people protesting federal budget cuts against the poor, including one person in a wheelchair were arrested charged with blocking traffic in Chicago.
March 4, 2011. Three people were arrested in Seattle after a protest against police abuse.
March 4, 2011. Sixteen people were arrested at a protest against tuition increases at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.
March 10, 2011. Fifty people protesting the removal of collective bargaining rights were arrested after being carried out of the Wisconsin Capitol in Madison.
March 16, 2011. Seven union supporters protesting proposals to strip collective bargaining from teachers were arrested in Nashville Tennessee.
March 19, 2011. One hundred thirteen people protesting the eighth anniversary of the war in Iraq, lead by Veterans for Peace, were arrested at White House. Veterans for Peace.
March 19, 2011. Eleven military family members and veterans were arrested in Hollywood California after staging a sit protesting the 8th anniversary of the war in Iraq. Veterans for Peace.
March 20, 2011. Thirty five people were arrested protesting outside the Quantico brig where Bradley Manning was being held. Bradley Manning Support Network.
March 28, 2011. Seven people defending a family against eviction and protesting home foreclosures were arrested in Rochester, NY, including a 70 year old neighbor in her pajamas. Take Back the Land.
April 4, 2011. Seven people protesting against unjust immigration legislation barring undocumented immigrants from Georgia colleges were arrested for blocking traffic in Atlanta Georgia.
April 7, 2011. Seventeen people were arrested protesting budget cuts in assistance for the poor and elderly and calling for an end to corporate tax exemptions in Olympia Washington.
April 10, 2011. Twenty seven people calling attention to the thousands of murders of people in Latin America by graduates of the US Army School of the Americas/WHINSEC were arrested outside the White House. School of Americas Watch.
April 11, 2011. Forty one people, including the Mayor and many of the members of the District of Columbia city council, protesting Congressional action limiting how the District of Columbia could spend its own money were arrested in Washington DC.
April 15, 2011. Eight teenage girl students, some as young as fourteen, were arrested after they refused to leave their public school Catherine Ferguson Academy, which is specially designated for pregnant and mothering teens in Detroit. Also with the young women were children and teachers. The school is targeted for closure due to budget cutbacks.
April 22, 2011. Thirty seven people were arrested protesting the use of drones outside the Hancock Air Force base near Syracuse New York. Syracuse Peace Council. Ithaca Catholic Worker.
April 22, 2011. Eleven women chained and locked the gate at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon Vermont before being arrested.
April 22, 2011. Thirty three people protesting at the Livermore Lab which designs nuclear weapons at an interfaith peace service were arrested for trespassing in California.
April 22, 2011. Four people were arrested at the Pentagon after they held up a banner and read from a leaflet outside of the designated protest zone. Dorothy Day Catholic Worker.
April 24, 2011. Sixteen protestors against nuclear weapons at the Nevada National Security Site were arrested after a sixty mile sacred walk from Las Vegas. Nevada Desert Experience. Pace e Bene.
May 2, 2011. Fifty two protestors against a nuclear weapons plant in Kansas City Missouri were arrested after blocking a gate to the construction site. Holy Family Catholic Worker.
May 9, 2011. Five people protesting against draconian immigration laws were arrested in the governor’s office in Indianapolis, Indiana.
May 7, 2011. Seven people celebrating Mothers Day and protesting nuclear weapons were arrested outside the Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor twenty miles from Seattle. Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action.
May 9, 2011. Sixty five people protesting cutbacks in education funding were arrested in Sacramento California.

2010
January 6, 2010. Over one hundred people protesting for union recognition of hotel workers at Hyatt San Francisco were arrested. UNITE Here Local 2.
January 15, 2010. A man who served nearly six months in jail and who was still on probation for hammering windows at a military recruiting center in Lancaster Pennsylvania was arrested at the recruiting center after insisting that recruiters and recruits to leave the army.
January 18, 2010. Seven people commemorating Martin Luther King’s birthday wore sandwich board messages saying “Make War No More,” “It’s about Justice,” and “its About Peace,” outside of Lockheed Martin’s main entrance in Merion Pennsylvania until they were arrested. Brandywine Peace Community.
January 21, 2010. Forty-two people protesting the ongoing human rights violations of Guantanamo prison were arrested at the US Capitol building. Twenty-eight were arrested on the steps of the Capitol and fourteen inside the rotunda. Witness Against Torture.
January 26, 2010. Thirteen people from Minnesota lobbying to stop funding for war were arrested after holding a die-in on the sidewalk in front of the White House. Voices for Creative Nonviolence.
January 31, 2010. Eight people were arrested trying to protest at Vandenberg Air Force base in California, one of those arrested, an octogenarian, was brought to the hospital for injuries suffered in the arrest. A few days later, seven protestors were arrested at the same spot. A month later, four more protestors were arrested. Vandenberg Witness.
February 22, 2010. Five people protesting against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were arrested inside US Senators’ offices in the Des Moines Iowa federal building. Voices for Creative Nonviolence. Des Moines Catholic Worker.
March 4, 2010. Four students protesting against rape were arrested after they refused to leave the administration building at Michigan State University in East Lansing Michigan.
March 20, 2010. Nine peace activists were arrested in Washington DC for lying down beside mock coffins outside the White House.
March 21, 2010. Two people protesting at the Aerospace and Arizona Days air show at Monthan Air Force base held a banner declaring “War is not a Show” in front of a Predator Unmanned Air Vehicle (drone) were arrested.
March 30, 2010. Eight protestors were arrested during a march against police brutality in Portland Oregon.
April 2, 2010. Eleven people on a Good Friday walk for peace and justice were arrested outside the USS Intrepid in New York city after they began reading the names of 250 Iraqi, American and Afghan war dead. Pax Christi New York.
April 2, 2010. Nine people carrying a banner “Lockheed Martin Weapons + War = The Crucifixion Today” in the 34th annual Good Friday protest at Lockheed Martin were arrested in Valley Forge Pennsylvania. Brandywine Peace Community.
April 4, 2010. Twenty two people protesting against nuclear weapons after the Sacred Walk from Las Vegas to the Nevada Nuclear Test Site were arrested after the Western Shoshone sunrise ceremony and Easter Mass. Nevada Desert Experience.
April 7, 2010. Three people, including a 12 year old girl, were arrested inside a US Senators office in Des Moines, Iowa with a banner “No More $$$ For War.” The mother of the 12 year old girl was called into the police station and issued a citation the next day for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Voices for Creative Nonviolence and Des Moines Catholic Worker.
April 15, 2010. A man protesting nuclear weapons was arrested inside the security fence of a nuclear missile silo near Parshall, North Dakota.
April 16, 2010. Twelve people protesting against Sodexho mistreatment of workers were arrested in Montgomery County Maryland. Service Employees International Union.
April 20, 2010. A woman was arrested for standing in the path of a bulldozer to try to prevent mining in Marquette County, Michigan.
April 26, 2010. Seventeen people protesting war and poverty inside and outside the federal building in Chicago were arrested. Midwest Catholic Worker.
April 26, 2010. Boulder Colorado police arrested five people protesting at Valmont coal power plant.
May 3, 2010. Three people protesting nuclear weapons were arrested at Bangor Naval Base outside of Seattle Washington. Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action.
May 3, 2010. Twenty two people protesting nuclear weapons were arrested at Grand Central Station in New York city after unfurling banners saying “Nuclear Weapons = Terrorism,” and “Talk Less, Disarm More.” War Resisters League.
May 9, 2010. Seven people trying to stop a foreclosure-driven eviction were arrested in Toledo Ohio. Take Back the Land.
May 15, 2010. Thirty four people protesting against Arizona’s draconian immigration laws were arrested outside the White House.
May 17, 2010. Sixteen people were arrested in NYC protesting against unjust immigration policies.
May 20, 2010. A woman US Army specialist who served as a Military Police applied for conscientious objector status while serving in Iraq and who later left her unit was sentenced to 30 days in jail.
May 24, 2010. Thirty seven people protesting against unjust immigration policies were arrests in New York City.
June 1, 2010. Fifty six people protesting against unjust immigration policies were arrested in NYC.
June 8, 2010. Six peace advocates were arraigned in federal court in Des Moines, Iowa for numerous actions protesting in US Senators offices for the previous several months. One activist, a grandmother and hog farmer, held weekly die-ins in Senators’ offices and was arrested frequently. Once, when police asked her to leave, she replied that she was dead and couldn’t leave. Voices for Creative Nonviolence.
June 15, 2010. Several people protesting against evictions caused by bank foreclosure were arrested in Miami Florida. Take Back the Land.
June 23, 2010. Twenty two people protesting in favor of immigration reform singing “America the Beautiful” and “This Land is Your Land,” were arrested and charged with blocking traffic in Seattle.
July 5, 2010. Thirty six people protesting for a nuclear free future were arrested at the Y12 Nuclear Weapons Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee – thirteen of federal trespass charges and twenty-three on state charges for blocking a highway. Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance.
July 6, 2010. Seventy eight people protesting against police brutality in Oakland California and the trial involving a shooting by a BART police office.
July 23, 2010. One hundred fifty two hotel workers protesting against management at the Grand Hyatt San Francisco were arrested. UNITE Here Local 2.
July 29, 2010. Thirteen people were arrested in Tucson Arizona protesting against the state’s illegal immigration laws.
August 9, 2010. On Nagasaki day, three people protesting against the US commitment to nuclear weapons were arrested outside the US Strategic Air Command in Omaha Nebraska. Omaha Catholic Worker.
August 15, 2010. A twenty two year old female student at Michigan State University who pitched an apple pie at a US Senator during an anti-war protest was arrested and charged with federal felony charges of forcible assault on a federal officer. Another anti-war activist was also arrested and charged with the same crime.
September 9, 2010. Twelve people protesting for equality for gay people in the workplace were arrested in San Francisco.
September 27, 2010. One hundred fourteen people protesting mountaintop removal coal mining were arrested at the White House after a conference of people from West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. Prior to this protest, forty-nine activists in the Climate Ground Zero Campaign have served jail time for taking action against strip-mining in Appalachia. Climate Ground Zero.
November 5, 2010. One hundred fifty two people protesting police killings were arrested in Oakland, California.
November 8, 2010. Five people protesting wind turbines in Lincoln, Maine were arrested including an 82 year old native of Maine.
November 21, 2010. Three people were arrested on federal charges and twenty-four more on state charges at the School of Americas/WHINSEC protest in Columbus Georgia outside the gates of Fort Benning. Six others were arrested at a protest against a private prison housing immigrants in rural Georgia. School of Americas Watch. ACLU Immigrant Rights Project.
December 1, 2010. Three people protesting against unjust immigration policies were arrested at the office of a Congress rep in Racine Wisconsin. Voces de la Frontera.
December 16, 2010. One hundred thirty one protestors, including numerous veterans, gathered in the snow outside the White House challenging the war in Afghanistan, the cover-up of war crimes and the prosecution of Bradley Manning and Wikileaks were arrested for failing to clear the sidewalk. In a parallel New York City protest, several others were also arrested. Veterans for Peace.
December 17, 2010. Twenty two people protesting against unfair home foreclosures were arrested when they blocked an entrance to a Chase bank branch in Los Angeles. Alliance Californians for Community Empowerment.
December 20, 2010. Six people were arrested after protesting at Bank of America against the foreclosure of an elderly couple in South Saint Louis. Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment.
December 28, 2010. Three parents asking for the abolition of all nuclear weapons were arrested for leafleting at the Pentagon. Dorothy Day Catholic Worker.

2009
January 2009, seventeen people, clad in black mourning clothes and white masks, were arrested in the US Senate Building for reading the names of the dead in ongoing US wars and unfurling banners stating “The Audacity of War Crimes,” “Iraq,” “Afghanistan,” “Palestine,” and “We Will Not Be Silent.”
January 26, 2009, six human rights advocates were sentenced to two to six months of federal prison or home arrest in federal court in Columbus Georgia for challenging training of Latin American human rights abusers at the US Army School of the Americas (SOA/WHINSEC) by walking onto Fort Benning. School of Americas Watch.
January 2009, a former Army specialist who refused to graduate with his Airborne Division because he realized he could not kill anybody was arrested and jailed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The former soldier had been ordered home in May 2002 to await discharge papers. Courage to Resist.
February 2009. There were fifteen arrests of activists protesting mountain top removal by Massey in West Virginia. Climate Ground Zero.
February 2009, five peace activists in Salem Oregon fasting on the steps of the state capitol building so that National Guard soldiers would not be sent to Iraq and Afghanistan were cited for trespass by state police.
March 1, 2009, six anti-nuclear activists protesting the 55th anniversary of the US nuclear bomb detonation at Bikini Atoll were arrested at the Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor in Kitsap, Washington after they knelt in the roadway. Ground Zero Community and Pacific Life Community.
March 4, 2009, nine people seeking to present a letter to CEO of Alliant Technologies outlining how weapons manufacturers were prosecuted as war criminals at the end of WWII were arrested in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. Alliant Action.
March 12, 2009, four people who were arrested during a protest at Vandenberg Air Force base were fined between $500 and $2500 by federal authorities. California Peace Action.
March 17, 2009, seven people seeking a meeting with US Defense Secretary to challenge the legality of the war in Iraq were arrested at the Pentagon. National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance.
March 18, 2009, seven women, ranging in ages from 65 to 89, some in wheelchairs and walkers, were arrested protesting the war in Iraq after wrapping yellow crime scene tape around a military recruiting center and blocking the entrance for an hour in New York City. Grannie Peace Brigade.
March 19, 2009, three people protesting the war in Iraq were arrested in Washington DC. In one instance a US Army veteran scaled the front of the Veterans Administration building and unfurled a banner saying “Veterans Say NO to War and Occupation.” Protests against the war in Iraq in Chicago resulted in an arrest there after banner drop.
March 19-21, 2009, protests against the war in Iraq in San Francisco resulted in twenty-two arrests at a die-in in the financial district, eleven more for blocking a street outside the Civic Center, and ten more at the Saturday march when Palestinian marchers were confronted by pro-Israel counter protestors resulting in police using batons and tear gas.
March 31, 2009, four people were arrested in Brattleboro, Vermont, for standing in silent opposition to the Vermont Yankee nuclear power reactor.
March 31, 2009, an anti-nuclear protestor was convicted of trespassing at the Los Alamos nuclear weapons facility and sentenced to two days in jail, community service and probation. Trinity House Catholic Worker.
April 3, 2009, four people protesting injustices on Wall Street and in Afghanistan and Iraq were arrested in New York, NY, for marching down the center of the street. Bail Out the People Movement.
April 9, 2009, fourteen people were arrested at Creech Air Force outside Las Vegas Nevada base protesting against the US use of drones in lethal attacks in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq. Nevada Desert Experience.
April 10, 2009, eight people were arrested while kneeling and praying for peace at the Pentagon. Another, clad in an orange jumpsuit and black hood, was arrested at the White House where he was chained to the fence protesting the human rights abuses of Guantanamo. Jonah House.
April 10, 2009, sixteen people were arrested while protesting the war profiteer Lockheed Martin in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Brandywine Peace Community.
April 12, 2009, twenty one people were arrested while protesting the use of nuclear weapons at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site on Western Shoshone tribal lands. Nevada Desert Experience.
April 17, 2009. A man protesting US polices of violence, racism and poverty-production was sentenced to six months in prison for hammering out some windows in the US Military Recruiting Center in Lancaster Pennsylvania.
April 23, 2009, four people protesting lies by military recruiters were arrested after locking themselves to the door at the military recruiting center in Minnesota. Three others were arrested at the Knollwood Plaza after disrupting the recruitment center so much it had to be closed. Another woman was arrested near a recruiting center after placing a “Don’t Enlist” sticker on a police car. Antiwar committee.
April 24, 2009, a woman calling for the return of the National Guard from Iraq was arrested in the US House Appropriations during testimony by US Generals in Washington DC. Code Pink.
April 28, 2009, a US Army veteran who refused to fight in Iraq was court-martialed in Fort Stewart, Georgia and sentenced to one year in prison. Courage to Resist.
April 29, 2009, twenty-two people were arrested after trying to serve a Notice of Foreclosure for Moral Bankruptcy on Blackwater/Xe, the mercenary company responsible for so many deaths in Iraq, at its compound in Mount Carmel, Illinois. Des Moines Catholic Worker Community.
April 30, 2009, sixty three people were arrested at the White House protesting against illegal detention and torture at Guantanamo prison. Witness Against Torture.
May 20, 2009. Twenty one people protesting against the war in Iraq were arrested outside a military recruiting center in Milwaukee Wisconsin.
July 22, 2009, four people protesting against Boeing’s role in the production of drones, which have killed more than 700 people in Afghanistan and Pakistan, were arrested inside the Boeing lobby in Chicago, Illinois. Christian Peacemaker Teams.
August 4, 2009, four shareholders who sought to speak at the shareholders meeting of depleted uranium munitions producer Alliant Techsystems were arrested when they approached the microphone in Eden Prairie Minnesota. Alliant Action.
August 5, 2009, a US Army specialist who refused to deploy to Afghanistan was sentenced to 30 days in jail and given a less than honorable discharge in Killeen Texas. Courage to Resist.
August 6, 2009, a 75 year old priest, protesting the 64th anniversary of the US dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima, was arrested outside of Greeley Colorado where he cut the fence around a nuclear missile silo, hung peace banners, prayed and tried to break open the hatch on the silo.
August 6, 2009, nine antiwar activists were arrested at Fort McCoy Wisconsin after a three day peace walk protesting against US nuclear weapons and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nuke Watch.
August 6, 2009, two people were arrested at the Pentagon entrance on the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing carrying a banner stating “Remember the Pain, Remember the Sin, Reclaim the Future.” Jonah House.
August 6, 2009, twenty two people protesting the horror of Hiroshima were arrested in Livermore California when they blocked the entrance to the Lawrence Livermore weapons lab. Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment.
August 6, 2009, nine people at a vigil for peace and nonviolence were arrested for walking onto Lockheed Martin property at Valley Forge Pennsylvania and spreading sunflower seeds, an international symbol for the abolition of nuclear weapons. Brandywine Peace Community.
August 6, 2009, two people were arrested when they refused to stop praying at the gates of the Davis-Monthan Air Force base in Tucson Arizona. Rose of the Desert Catholic Worker.
August 10, 2009, nine persons calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons were arrested at Bangor Naval base, home to the Trident submarine, twenty miles from Seattle Washington. Ground Zero Community.
August 14, 2009, a US Army Sergeant who refused to go to Afghanistan and who asked for conscientious objector status was found guilty of disobeying lawful orders and going AWOL at a trial in Fort Hood. He was sentenced to one year in prison and given a bad conduct discharge.
August 17, 2009. Four people were arrested outside the Boalt Hall classroom where they were protesting John Yoo, who coauthored the memos authorizing torture on people in Guantanamo during the Bush administration.
August 22, 2009, two people protesting against nuclear missile testing were arrested at Vandenberg Air Force base and cited for trespass.
September 9, 2009. Four people protesting against Massey Energy mountain top removal were arrested in Madison West Virginia. Climate Ground Zero.
September 12, 2009, seven people who were protesting against the use of the high-tech bloodless arcade Army Experience Center in Philadelphia were arrested. Seven other protestors were arrested there earlier in the year. Shut Down the AEC.
September 24, 2009, ninety two people protesting management disregard for union rights of hotel workers were arrested at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in San Francisco. UNITE Here Local 2.
September 27, 2009, twenty one people protesting against the Nevada Test Site were arrested at the Mercury gate. At an action to “Ground the Drones” protesting the increasing use of lethal drones in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, another eleven people were arrested. Code Pink. Pace e Bene. Nevada Desert Experience.
September 28, 2009, four women, ages 66 to 90, walked past security guards at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant protesting inadequate safety at the plant. Carrying signs saying “Yom Kippur, September 28, Time to Atone, Shut Down Vermont Yankee,” this was the seventh set of arrests at the nuclear plant or its corporate headquarters since 2005.
September, 2009, the US Army accepted the resignation of Lieutenant, who refused to fight in Iraq because he believed the war violates international law, and gave him a discharge under other than honorable conditions. Courage to Resist.
October 1, 2009. A well known mixed martial arts fighter was sentenced to 90 days of work release and a fine of $28,000 for spraying symbols on an Army recruiting center and the Washington State Capitol building to help raise consciousness about the illegal war in Iraq.
October 2, 2009. Four people trying to deliver a document titled “Employee Liabilities of Weapons Manufacturers under International Law” to the weapons manufacturer Alliant Technologies were arrested in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. Alliant Action.
October 5, 2009, a couple, who married the day before and who were carrying a banner saying “Just Married; Love Disarms,” were arrested during a peace protest at Lockheed-Martin in Sunnyvale California. A priest was also arrested as the three gave out leaflets to workers entering the war contractor work site. Albuquerque New Mexico Catholic Worker.
October 5, 2009, sixty one people were arrested while protesting the ninth year of the US war in Afghanistan in front of the White House. Some of the arrested were in orange jumpsuits and chained to the fence. Secret Service officers assaulted other protestors, pushing and pulling them away from the protest site, bruising some. No Good War and Jonah House.
October 7, 2009, twelve protestors against the war in Afghanistan were arrested in Rochester, NY. Some of the arrested were treated at the hospital after being struck by police. Rochester Students for a Democratic Society.
October 7, 2009. Two people were arrested in Grand Central Station after unfurling banners which said “Afghanistan Enough!” War Resisters League.
October 11, 2009. Two women who held up banners when Tiger Woods was ready to putt, saying “President Obama – End Bush’s War,” and “End the Afghan Quagmire,” were handcuffed and escorted away from the President’s Cup golf tournament in San Francisco.
November 2, 2009. Five people calling for nuclear disarmament cut through the fence around the Naval Base Kitsap which houses the Trident nuclear submarines and nuclear warheads outside of Seattle Washington. The five walked through the base until they found the storage area for nuclear weapons and cut two more fences to get inside where they put up banners and spread sunflower seeds until they were arrested. Disarm Now Plowshares.
November 4, 2009. Two people were arrested while protesting outside Vandenberg Air Force base in California. Vandenberg Witness.
November 4, 2009. Eight protestors, including one who was 91 years old, were arrested at the Strategic Space Symposium in Omaha Nebraska while holding a “Space Weapons=Death” banner. Des Moines and Omaha Catholic Worker.
November 15, 2009. Five people protesting against US torture practices at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, where military interrogators are trained were arrested. Torture on Trial.
November 22, 2009. Four people protesting the training of human rights abusers by the US Army at their School of Americas/WHINSEC were arrested in Columbus, Georgia. School of Americas Watch.
November 23, 2009. A longtime war tax resister pled guilty to avoiding paying taxes for war at court in Bangor Maine. National War Tax Resistance Coordination Committee.
December 1, 2009. Protestors at 100 cities across the country challenged President Obama’s talk at West Point to escalate the war in Afghanistan. Six were arrested at West Point, eleven in Minneapolis, and three in Madison Wisconsin.
December 9, 2009. Six people protesting that President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize were arrested outside the federal building in Los Angeles. Los Angeles Catholic Worker.
December 10, 2009. Six people protesting the use of lethal drones were forcibly escorted out of the 11th Annual Unmanned Aerial Systems Conference outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Trinity Nuclear Abolition and Code Pink.
December 29, 2009. Twelve people leafleting and praying for peace at the Pentagon were arrested. Dorothy Day Catholic Worker and Jonah House.

To help explain the absurd result of May 2, I have enlisted the aid of columnist Ethan Baron. Before I get to specifics, two things deserve special mention. First, Baron is a U.S.-born journalist who recently became a citizen after living here for 20 years. This was the first time he cast a vote in a federal election, and maybe his last.

Second, Baron’s column—a model of sobriety, candour and wit—appeared in the Province, without doubt the country’s most pathetic excuse for a newspaper. Its editors think so little of their readership, and have such little respect for the craft of journalism, that the front page, I was told, is not for reporting “news” stories but for reflecting what’s topical in the minds of its readers. This explains the endless spate of redundant full-page sports pics replete with inane headlines. I think the Province’s motto is: “No news is good news.”

I would love to reprint Baron’s entire column, but I’ll focus on one exquisite passage:

The actual explanation for the Conservative majority is more sinister than mere feeblemindedness. Canadians, in droves, turned up their noses at democracy, choosing a party that has attacked it at every turn. These voters made their electoral decision with one hand holding their wallets and the other flailing around from their eyes to their ears, willfully shutting out the endless evidence that it is the people, and not just Parliament, that Harper holds in contempt.

Pause a moment to take in the breathtaking genius of this passage. Harper’s assaults on Canadian institutions, the rule of law, and the democratic rights of Canadian citizens are public knowledge, which should have told voters that Harper is overtly subversive and a danger to Canadian sovereignty. In view of the Speaker’s finding of contempt of Parliament, Harper should even have been forced to resign his seat.

Lamentably, facts such as these did not matter come election day, nor did the idea that a political candidate had to have a modicum of intelligence to stand for office. On May 2, millions of voters looked at the “Conservative” label in their local riding, shut their brains off, internalized the negative propaganda, and cast a vote for Harper’s parrots and sockpuppets.

However, as in the U.S., party labels in Canada have long since ceased to have any useful meaning, yet “conservative” still evokes illusions of fiscal responsibility. As Baron mentioned, Harper racked up a $55.6 billion deficit in 2009-10—the highest in Canadian history. Not even the most spendthrift NDP government could have accomplished such a feat of wanton profligacy.

Baron is dead right—we did this to ourselves and did it willingly. A CTV poll even reported that 50% of respondents wanted a majority Harper government just so they wouldn’t have to vote in so many elections.

We chose fascism over democracy, and now our national traditions, civil liberties and the rule of law are vulnerable to the whims of a dictator who sees the public good as an obstacle to be overcome in the name of rampant corporatism. For example:

• The CBC, Canada’s public broadcaster has been a staple of Canadian identity and national unity since its creation as a Crown Corporation on Nov. 2, 1936. As a Crown Corporation the government of the day is forbidden to exercise operational control over it, yet Harper is talking about defunding it altogether. Meanwhile, a pro-Harper, Faux-News style disinformation channel (SunNews) was recently approved.

• The Charter of Rights guarantees freedom of opinion, yet the Israel-first Harper will doubtless try to criminalize dissent about Israeli war crimes and the Holocaust®. Already, scientists who warn of the dangers of man-made climate change have been muzzled.

Why so many Canadians “turned up their noses at democracy,” cannot be answered simply by reading the entrails of the May 2 vote. The answer goes back to 1980, when the radical individualism and unenlightened self-interest of “neo-conservatism” took hold as a secular religion. It began in the U.S. under the benighted corporatist presidency of Ronald Reagan, who successfully tapped into the cult of greed and visceral hatred of government that animates American individualism. Over the next four decades, public spending, civil liberties and the rule of law soon became treated as a moral evils.

In Canada, which was created specifically to resist the contagion of U.S. individualism, governments at all levels played an integral role in shaping and defining Canadian nationhood, and was respected for it. We had respect for the public good, but no more. Just as in the U.S., it is the norm to:

• attack public spending as tantamount to theft from “taxpayers,”
• condemn industry regulation as an attack on corporate profits,
• disparage political dissent, and
• embrace militarism and xenophobia, among other things.

Yes, Canada, you elected the first de facto fascist majority government in your history, and why? You were too lazy, indifferent or ignorant to take your electoral responsibilities seriously. You have no time for politics, and want politicians to think for you.

Welcome to Canada, Ethan Baron—make yourself at home!

Most readers are familiar with the military campaigns and siege by Israel against the Palestinians in Gaza. Fewer, however may be aware of the systemic campaign of arrest and detention carried out in the West Bank. According to Sahar Francis in the web journal Electronic Intifada, “The last year has witnessed continuing mass arrest campaigns… and the detention of high-profile protest organizers and leaders from the popular committees.” Many of those arrested are held on so-called secret evidence that neither the arrestees or their defense are allowed to see. The reasons for the arrests of these organizers are the same as the reasons it opposes the Fatah-Hamas agreement: Israel fears a united and popular resistance against its occupation. Simultaneously, these arrests and detentions isolate the organizers and paint them into the same corner as those Israel and the West call terrorists.

Meanwhile, in the United States, Federal Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and Attorney General Eric Holder are ramping up their attempts to indict and prosecute a number of antiwar and Palestinian support activists in the Midwest. Most recently, the U.S. government (via the Treasury Department) froze the bank accounts of the Arab-American Action Network’s Executive Director Hatem Abudayyeh and his wife, Naima. Neither of these individuals have been charged with a crime. However, both were part of the series of sweeps conducted in late 2010 by the FBI and US Justice Department against antiwar activists in the Midwest. These raids were conducted under the aegis of the PATRIOT Act and the Effective Death Penalty and Anti-Terrorism Act of 1996. Both of these laws intentionally obscure the differences between expressing support for popular struggles in other nations and providing “material support.” Of course, it is only activists supporting popular struggles opposed by the United States that face the possibility of prosecution. Those that give millions to Israel, the so-called rebel movements in Libya and other armed groups supported by Washington are hailed as supporters of freedom, much like those that traded cocaine for guns to support the contras in Nicaragua. Indeed, these latter endeavors are not only cheered but assisted by the federal government itself.

The driving force behind the subpoenas and accompanying harassment in the Midwestern cases is US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. Of course, he would not have gone forward with the raids and grand juries without the support of US Attorney General Eric Holder. Fitzgerald is perhaps best known as the prosecutor in the Valerie Plame case that resulted in the conviction of former Vice President Cheney’s aide Scooter Libby. However, Fitzgerald has prosecuted several other high-profile cases including the corruption cases of Illinois governor Dan Ryan and Rod Blagojevich. Fitzgerald’s prosecutions have been marked by a heavy reliance on circumstantial evidence and a prosecutorial interpretation of the defendants’ conversations and statements — a fact that has aroused some criticism. Of course, when one is interpreting political statements and associations, such interpretations easily open themselves to misunderstanding and suppositions based on the prosecutor’s own politics and fears. For example, one could easily share a speaker’s platform at a rally or meeting with a political organizer from a group whose only point of solidarity is that Israel’s occupation is wrong and so is Washington’s support of that occupation. This sharing of the podium does not condone a wholesale endorsement of every group that share the opinion regarding the occupation. However, the laws currently defining “material support” can be interpreted as meaning exactly that by a Justice Department intent on doing its part to destroy the Palestine solidarity movement. Fitzgerald’s previous reliance on circumstantial evidence to make his cases makes him the ideal prosecutor to go after political activists whose primary act is speaking out in favor of groups actively opposed to the foreign policy of the United States.

As of this writing (morning May 10, 2011), the assets of the Abudayyeh family remain frozen. This means that they can not buy groceries and pay their bills. The sheer pettiness of this act reminds this writer of similar actions taken by Tel Aviv against various Palestinians. In a May 9, 2011 press release from the Committee to Stop FBI Repression, they wrote: “The Midwest activists have been expecting indictments for some time. The freezing of the Abudayyeh family’s bank accounts suggests that the danger of indictments is imminent.” Mark Twain once wrote: “It is by the fortune of God that, in this country, we have three benefits: freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and the wisdom never to use either.” These folks have used their freedoms of thought and speech and are now being attacked by the government for doing so. Should these indictments come down, anybody interested in the first amendment should do whatever is in their power to oppose them. This entire case is nothing but an exercise in political persecution designed to silence those who have moved beyond their comfort zones to challenge a foreign policy based on murder, lies and greed.

UPDATE. The Committee to Stop FBI Repression released a statement Tuesday evening May 10, 2011 regarding the Abudayyeh’s acounts. Part of the statement read: “In a strange turn of events, the bank admitted today that they shut down the accounts, stating they no longer want to provide banking services to the Abudayyeh family. Simultaneously, TCF management informed the Abudayyehs today that they were issuing them a check for the value of their accounts….

Michael Deutsch, attorney for the family, said, “In my opinion, the bank did not act out of the blue. I suspect that the FBI and U.S Attorney investigation caused the bank to overreact and illegally freeze the Abudayyehs’ banking accounts that had been there for over a decade.”

In response to the seizing of the couple’s accounts, people across the country called the offices of US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald in Chicago, and those of the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) demanding the return of their money and an end to the repression.

A Code Pink activist from Washington, D.C., called Fitzgerald’s office and was told, “We’ve received hundreds of calls.” The OFAC office was bombarded as well, and journalists from a National Public Radio affiliate, Al Jazeera and other agencies contacted them for an explanation.

Pro-Israel lobbying. An Israeli Cabinet minister, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and a massive American-Zionist campaign have succeeded in pressuring Facebook into removing the third Intifada page, which clearly calls for an all-Arab uprising against Israel.

According to the Facebook “cause” page, the plan for the intifada would go as follows:

Friday, May 13th
In Egypt, the epicenter of the Arab world, the biggest Arab country and from Tahrir square at the heart of Cairo where the whole Arab spring has sprung and gained fervent momentum, this massive Arab intifada will be launched.

Millions will gather once again in Tahrir square at the heart of Cairo but this time to call for all Arab-march toward Israel.

This mass protest will come two days prior to the actual march, as a clear message to Israel and the rest of the world that liberating Palestine is the core cause for every Arab in the Middle East. And that restoring Jerusalem is all Arab’s sacred mission

Sunday, May 15th
To commemorate the Palestinian exodus day 1948 (Nakba) when well over 750000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled out of their home land by Israel, similar number of Thousands angry Arab protesters from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon along with their Palestinian brothers from Gaza and the occupied west bank will advance toward Israel in what they call, the third intifada.

In their march, they will be denouncing the ongoing Zionist occupation of the Arabic land of Palestine and calling for internationally recognized independent Palestinian state over its legitimate pre-1967 borders with Eastern Jerusalem as its capital.

Those fair Palestinian demands have been begged for by all ways known to diplomacy over the last 60 years. But since diplomacy has utterly failed the Arabs of Palestine and since politicians have granted them nothing except despair and Diaspora, they thought it was time they put their life into their own hands.

And what could be more timely than this Arab spring, which a lot of Arabs could not see or rather imagine approaching its full bloom without Palestine being included.

This revolutionary plan that has been publicly posted on a Facebook “cause” page and given the daring title “the third Palestinian Intifada” following two previous Palestinian Intifada uprisings. The first was sparked in 1987 and the second or what is known as the Aq’sa intifada in 2000; during both uprisings, Israel had to live through years of domestic unrest and worldwide condemnation of its apartheid and oppressive policy toward the Palestinians.

But as this “cause” page managed to attract almost 300,000 fans and an incredibly growing number of visitors in just a few days, Israel grew restlessly nervous about it. And nervously restless Israel acted in response.

What was worrying Tel Aviv is the fact that, so far, all Arab uprisings have been kicked off on Facebook pages. So, under the boiling situation in the Arab world this Facebook call couldn’t be underrated nor neglected.

Bullying Facebook

With the growing traffic to the Facebook page and the spread of the call for a third intifada Israel couldn’t just stand watching underneath its big sign that reads: “The only democracy in the Middle East.”

Quickly switching signs, Israel grabbed the “Israel-hating and anti-Semitism” sign and put on its despotic mask, and before the administrators of the third intifada knew it, Yuli Edelstein, Israel’s Minister of Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs, wrote Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook co-founder and told him,

the social network site has great potential to rally the masses around good causes, and we are all thankful for that. However, such potential comes hand in hand with the ability to cause great harm, such as in the case of the wild incitement displayed on the Third Palestinian Intifada page.

A Facebook statement said on Monday of the first week of April that while the “third Intifada” page “may be upsetting for someone, criticism of a certain culture, country, religion, lifestyle, or political ideology, for example — that alone is not a reason to remove the discussion.”

At that point it was clear to Israel that this Zuckerberg is not getting the message, Israel didn’t not seek his eloquent definition of the site’s terms for freedom of speech, removing the page that what Israel wanted. So Israel, with its Zionist lobbies and pro-Israel campaigns began to pull some strings and show some muscles and it did not take long before Mr. Mark Zuckerberg came to his senses and reevaluated the page as inciting violence against Israel.

And to make sure this will always be a lesson, learned the hard way, less than a week after facebook removed the intifada page; Zuckerberg was hit by a law suit seeking more than $1 billion in damages, for doing too little too late. The law suit has been filed by one of the American Zionist puppets by the name of Larry Klayman.

After the page was no longer available on Tuesday, ADL director Abraham Foxman commented,

By taking this action, Facebook has now recognized an important standard to be applied when evaluating issues of non-compliance with its terms of service involving distinctions between incitement to violence and legitimate calls for collective expressions of opinion and action. We hope that they will continue to vigilantly monitor their pages for other groups that call for violence or terrorism against Jews and Israel.

But that will be mission impossible, for how could Facebook go after thousands of Arab users who replaced their profile photos with the poster photo of the third intifada. Will Facebook be able to pull down the other pages that began to play the same intifada tune?

Why can’t Israel face the truth? It is crystal clear; it needs no terrorizing of Zuckerberg or Goldstone. Arabs will never accept Israel as a neighbor state as long as Palestine is being systematically wiped off the map by the Zionist military dictatorship.

Israel could intimidate Facebook but not the millions of awakening Arabs.

If Facebook is to block any page or any account that speaks unfavorably of Israel that will mean that Mr. Zuckerberg is going to sacrifice the hundreds of millions of Arabs and Muslims who are already using Facebook worldwide.

Could Facebook, contrary to its previous role in boosting the Arab uprisings, save the Israeli domino piece from falling?

They pressured the Hastings Board of Directors into an emergency meeting in which the board decided to “take all steps necessary to remove the UC Hastings name and brand” from the conference. Frank Wu, dean and chancellor, was barred from giving a welcoming talk; a major foundation withdrew funding.

Professors dislike academic intimidation, and this case is no exception. Nearly all of UC Hastings’ tenured professors signed a letter warning that the board’s capitulation to outside pressure on academic freedom risked “great damage to Hastings’ reputation.”

The elected student government, joined by 30 student organizations, charged the board with “stifling their academic freedom” and “prospectively chilling free speech” at future academic conferences.

They are right, of course. But there are bigger issues at stake.

Why were these mainstream Jewish organizations so troubled by the academic pursuit of legal approaches to securing Palestinian rights and freedom?

Perhaps for the first time in U.S. history, there is an aggressive challenge to a one-sided narrative that covers up or justifies ongoing Israeli repression of Palestinians, and U.S. culpability for that repression. The center of that challenge is on campuses, which is why those who have traditionally adopted knee-jerk defenses of Israeli policies are attempting to stigmatize or shut down alternative viewpoints.

In this case, the conference in question was about the legal rights of Palestinians. Its lead convener was former San Francisco public defender and Hastings law professor George Bisharat. He was joined by numerous legal scholars and human rights lawyers, including many Jews, from the United States and Israel.

Yet JCRC head Doug Kahn dubbed the conference, which was focused on nonviolent legal strategies to address the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, “anti-Israel.” He’s right, however, only if you regard Thurgood Marshall’s efforts on behalf of the civil rights movement to be “anti-American.”

Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, a lecturer at UC Santa Cruz, indicated in a letter of complaint that UC Hastings could lose federal funds if the conference proceeded.

Rossman-Benjamin, who has long tried to silence speakers and academics who are critical of Israeli policies, many of them Jewish and even Israeli, recently filed a complaint about alleged anti-Semitism at UC Santa Cruz focusing on educational programming related to Israel and Palestine. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, the target of a multi-year campaign to criminalize pro-Palestinian student activism led by the Zionist Organization of America, began an investigation. Ominously, such moves suggest that legitimate criticism of Israeli policy is being conflated with anti-Semitism.

If this is allowed to happen, then serious debate on Israel’s illegal actions in the Palestinian territories will be shut down. That is a threat not just to academic freedom but to American free speech and our ability to help secure the rights of everyone in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

As part of the secret state’s campaign against whistleblowers and transparency advocates, U.S. Magistrate Theresa Buchanan granted federal prosecutors access to WikiLeaks-related Twitter accounts.

The 20-page ruling, issued in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, upheld government demands that it be allowed to seize the Twitter accounts of WikiLeaks supporters Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a leftist member of the Icelandic parliament, computer security researcher Jacob Appelbaum and Rop Gonggrijp, the cofounder of the Dutch ISP XS4All.

Jónsdóttir was specifically targeted for her role in helping WikiLeaks release the Collateral Murder video last year that exposed the wanton slaughter of a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad, including two Reuters photojournalists, by a U.S. military Apache helicopter crew. Two children were also seriously wounded in the unprovoked attack.

The ruling also grants access to the Twitter accounts of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and Bradley Manning, the imprisoned and tortured Army private indicted for “aiding the enemy” over his alleged leak of incriminating documents that disclosed state crimes, charges which carry a potential death penalty.

Meanwhile, the cyber-guerrilla collective Anonymous, responsible for the HBGary hack that revealed plans by the Bank of America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to target WikiLeaks and Chamber opponents, “has promised to avenge Manning, and wage a media war with the U.S. military,” The Tech Herald reports.

Buchanan’s ruling ordered that the micro-blogging site cough-up information to the government about what internet and email addresses are associated with the whistleblowers, as part of an “ongoing investigation” by a federal grand jury believed to be seeking criminal charges against WikiLeaks supporters.

The judge rejected arguments by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and private attorneys representing the account holders, dismissing claims that there were First Amendment issues involved because the activists “have already made their Twitter posts and associations publicly available.”

In dismissing privacy concerns, Buchanan also ruled that the account holders had “no Fourth Amendment privacy interest in their IP addresses,” and that federal privacy law did not apply because prosecutors were not seeking the contents of the communications themselves, a spurious argument.

Denouncing the ruling, EFF noted in a press release that “secret government demands for information about the subscribers’ communications came to light only because Twitter took steps to ensure their customers were notified and had the opportunity to respond.”

The ACLU and EFF are also seeking from the court similar orders issued by the Obama administration to other companies, widely reported to include Google and Facebook.

When the story first broke, WikiLeaks demanded that Google and Facebook reveal the contents of subpoenas they may have received from the government. However both multibillion firms, chock-a-block with contracts from the secret state as disclosed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) have refused all comment, leading critics to assume they have already complied with orders to hand over the data.

The ACLU’s Aden Fine, a staff attorney with the group’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project said that Buchanan’s ruling “gives the government the ability to secretly amass private information related to individuals’ Internet communications.” Decrying the judge’s order, Fine commented: “If this ruling stands, our client may be prevented from challenging the government’s requests to other companies because she might never know if and how many other companies have been ordered to turn over information about her.”

EFF’s Legal Director Cindy Cohn added, “with so much of our digital private information being held by third parties–whether in the cloud or on social networking sites like Twitter–the government can track your every move and statement without you ever having a chance to protect yourself.”

Underscoring Cohn’s point, EFF revealed back in August that “a number of documents from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) highlighted the government’s ability to scour not only social networks, but record each and every corner of the Internet.”

Both privacy watchdog groups plan to appeal the ruling.

As Antifascist Calling reported last month, the secret state began a criminal investigation of WikiLeaks and founder Julian Assange last July after the secret-spilling web site began releasing a mountain of classified files on the imperialist Empire’s criminal invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.

That probe was accelerated after WikiLeaks Cablegate revelations began last November and the group threatened to release compromising files on a “major American bank,” believed to be the Bank of America.

While WikiLeaks hasn’t followed up, Zero Hedge reported Friday that Anonymous “is claiming to be have emails and documents which prove ‘fraud’ was committed by Bank of America employees, and the group says it’ll release them on Monday.”

CNET News noted that “Buchanan’s order isn’t a traditional subpoena. Rather, it’s what’s known as a 2703(d) order, which allows police to obtain certain records from a Web site or Internet provider if they are ‘relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation’.”

Investigative journalist Declan McCullagh reports that a 2703(d) order “is broad” and covers “connection records, or records of session times and durations,” and “records of user activity for any connections made to or from the account,” including internet addresses used.

In other words, the order covers “all records” and “correspondence” relating to the accounts and is also “broad enough to sweep in the content of messages such as direct messages sent through Twitter or tweets from a nonpublic account.”

According to EFF’s Cindy Cohn, the Justice Department narrowed their request “to avoid asking for content” so as to avoid a federal appeals court decision that a “a 2703(d) order is insufficient for content data and a search warrant is necessary.” Cohn told CNET “it sure seemed like the order sought” to sweep up message content as well.

Cohn told Bloomberg News even though Buchanan’s order didn’t involve content, “the judge downplayed what can be learned from non-content information that we give to third-parties all the time.”

In February, San Francisco-based attorney John Keker who represents Jacob Appelbaum, argued in court that “it is incredibly powerful to know who the opposition is and who they’re working with,” and that turning over such information to a grand jury would violate Fourth Amendment guarantees against warrantless searches and seizures by the national security state.

For their part, Assistant U.S. Attorney John Davis argued in court that the government’s request was “routine.”

Davis told the court, “this is a standard–as this court knows well–investigative measure used in criminal investigations every day of the year all over the country.”

As the Obama administration’s war on whistleblowers escalates, prosecutions and threats of the same have focused journalists and corporate watchdogs in their gunsights.

Secrecy News disclosed last week that former National Security Agency official Thomas A. Drake, charged last year “with unauthorized retention of classified information about controversial NSA programs, should not be allowed to argue in court that overclassification is widespread or that he was engaged in whistleblowing in the public interest.”

According to federal prosecutors, while “the defendant may claim that the current classification system is ineffectual or illegal and prevents his ability to air allegations of waste, fraud and abuse to the attention of the public,” the secret state is arguing that such concerns are “irrelevant.” Illegal or not, the defendant’s “obligation” was to “protect classified information.”

This from an administration that claimed one of its “top priorities” would be to “Protect Whistleblowers”!

As Salon’s Glenn Greenwald pointed out last year: “Most of what our Government does of any real significance happens in the dark.”

“Whistleblowers are one of the very few avenues we have left for learning about any of that,” Greenwald wrote. “And politicians eager to preserve their own power and ability to operate in secret–such as Barack Obama–see whistleblowers as their Top Enemy.”

“Hence,” the Salon columnist informed us, “we have a series of aggressive prosecutions from the Obama administration of Bush era exposures of abuse and illegality–acts that flagrantly violate Obama’s Look Forward, Not Backward decree used to protect high-level Bush administration criminals.” And, I might add, “high-level criminals” within his own administration.

As the World Socialist Web Site pointed out last month, “the aim” of the Obama administration “is not only to extract revenge for WikiLeaks having published thousands of US Embassy cables detailing Washington’s involvement in spying, torture and assassinations. It is also intended as a warning to any individual or group that tries to expose the dirty reality of imperialist diplomacy.”

With any semblance of public accountability, let alone justice, closed off by America’s capitalist elites, in and outside of government, whistleblowing web sites like WikiLeaks, Public Intelligence, Cryptome and Anonymous, may very well be the last line of defense we have for exposing state crimes against what little remains of our democracy.

During that speech Ray McGovern, a veteran who also served for 27 years as a CIA analyst, exercised his freedom of speech by standing and silently turning his back on Secretary Clinton. He was protesting the ongoing wars, the treatment of Bradley Manning and the militarism of U.S. foreign policy. He did not shout at the Secretary of State or interrupt her speech. He merely stood in silence.

See video here.

McGovern’s action was a powerful one and it threatened the Secretary of State. Two police officers roughed him up, pulled him from the audience and arrested him. As you can see from the pictures, the 71 year old McGovern, was battered and bruised; indeed, his attorney reports he was left in jail bleeding.

McGovern is not just a former CIA analyst. He did the daily intelligence briefing for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He also briefed the National Security Advisor, Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Cabinet on security matters. He has come to see that the current U.S. wars are about controlling natural resources, especially oil, positioning U.S. military bases in key areas and protecting the unusual alliance between the U.S. and Israel. So when he stood silently his speech was being heard.

And when Secretary of Clinton kept speaking about the importance of freedom of speech, as if nothing was occurring before her eyes, Ray McGovern’s voice became even louder. The hypocrisy of the United States became thunderous. Free speech was being snuffed out right before her eyes but she kept talking about freedom of speech, doing nothing to protect it while criticizing other countries, U.S. client states like Egypt and those enemies like Iran, for their failure to allow their people to speak freely.

On the same day that McGovern was roughed up and left bleeding by the police, independent journalist, Brandon Jourdan, returned from Haiti after being on assignment documenting the rebuilding of schools. When he returned to the United States, he was immediately detained, questioned about his travels and had all of his documents, computer, phone and camera flash drives searched and copied. This is the seventh time Jourdan says he has been subjected to lengthy searches in five years, and has been told by officials that he is “on a list.” Freedom of speech? Freedom of the press? Did Secretary of State Clinton say anything? No. She remained silent.

And on that same day, as he has for the last 8 months, Pfc Bradley Manning sits in solitary confinement, pre-trial torture, for the alleged crime of sharing with the media evidence of war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as crimes committed by agents of U.S. foreign policy. Included in the documents he is accused of leaking are diplomatic cables that show Secretary of State Clinton issuing a memorandum directing U.S. diplomats to spy, including illegally spying on UN diplomats. During his long pre-trial punishment has Secretary of State Clinton said anything about Pfc Manning’s illegal punishment before trial? No, she has remained silent.

Finally, a last example of many all of which I will not describe here, while Secretary of State Clinton was speaking, agents of the U.S. Department of Justice were trying to find a way to prosecute Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks. They claim this super-journalist, whose publication has released more classified documents than the Washington Post has in decades, is not a journalist. Some of the most recent publications of WikiLeaks helped to spark the revolution in Tunisia. And during the revolt in Egypt, WikiLeaks documents showed that Mubarak’s newly appointed Vice President, Omar Suleiman, was the choice of Israel to be Mubarak’s successor. This U.S. trained military and intelligence officer tortured people at the request of the United States. While Secretary of State Clinton has remained silent about the trumped up investigation of Assange, she did not remain silent about Suleiman. She made it clear, he was America’s choice as Mubarak’s successor.

Please write Secretary of State Clinton and urge her to put actions to her words. Urge her to stand up for freedom of speech in the United States. First, she should apologize for the treatment of Ray McGovern and seek to have the charges against him dropped. But, more importantly, she should ask that Bradley Manning be released for prison and the charges against him be dropped. His patriotic act of exposing war crimes and other criminal activity deserves plaudits from free speech loving Americans. Similarly, she should tell Attorney General Holder that the abusive investigation of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks should be halted. Secretary Clinton is at the center of numerous challenges to free speech in the United States. She could become a leader in reviving this first and foremost freedom in America, or she could remain silent. Click
here to urge her to put actions to her words.

Finally, Ray McGovern wrote me a day after his brutal ordeal saying: “The painful bruises are those for our country and its erstwhile ideals physically I hurt, but no broken bones, dislocated shoulders, or anything else that will not heal please pass word around.” If you share Ray’s concern for the direction of the United States, write Hillary Clinton and support efforts to change the direction of the country.

The epicenter of the struggle for the public university in Latin America is Puerto Rico.

– José Carlos Luque Brazán, professor and researcher of political science and urban planning at the Autonomous University, Mexico City.¹

The social conflict taking place at the University of Puerto Rico is polarizing this island to such an extent, that this United States’ possession, which used to be heralded as the “Showcase of Democracy” during the cold war ideological struggles, is now sliding into a system of widespread civil and human rights violations. The University of Puerto Rico, for the first time in decades, is occupied by police, political demonstrations are banned, summary expulsions of student leaders are common, and hundreds of students have been arrested, beaten and at times sexually assaulted or tortured. On February 9, after the riot squad violently intervened with students painting murals, 28 students were arrested, many were hurt and chaos ensued when pepper gas and batons were used to violently arrest students and bystanders. The police violence was of such magnitude that the faculty organization, the Puerto Rican Association of Professors and the Brotherhood of Non-Faculty Employees called for a 24-hour strike which was later extended. The university is closed and the president of the system, Jose Ramon de la Torres, after writing a letter requesting the removal of the police from the campus, announced he was resigning as president.

The coverage of this social movement by U.S. mainstream media is scant, and only Al Jazeera has begun to provide some international coverage. In addition, just like in Egypt, youth have created their own media in order to organize and tell the world what is happening in this territory of the United States. Hidden from the eyes of the world, and especially from the U.S. public, this island with 3.9 million inhabitants is experiencing the most intense struggle for democracy and public education since the 1960s. Since early April 2010 students of the most prestigious institution of higher education in the Caribbean, the University of Puerto Rico, are involved in a struggle to preserve a system of public higher education. This is the system that provides 95% of the research and development in Puerto Rico.

Neo-Liberalism in Puerto Rico

Since his landslide election in 2008, Governor Luis Fortuño, of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party, has implemented a series of neo-liberal measures which have polarized the island’s population and increased economic inequality. Gov. Fortuño is the first Puerto Rican governor who is an avowed member of the National Republican Party, despite the fact that the Republican Party as such does not participate in Puerto Rican election. Despite his electoral promises, he has fired 30,000 public workers, and reduced investments in social services and education. The unemployment rate in December 2010 was 14.7% which is lower than it was at the beginning of the fiscal year (July 2010 16.9), the reason behind this decline is not an increase in jobs but the discouraged worker effect, that is, workers who are dropping from the work force and either working in the informal economy or participating in social welfare programs. Puerto Rico also has one of the lowest labor participation rates in the world. The percentage of the able-bodied population which participates in the work force has declined dramatically. In July 1999, 47.8 per cent were in the labor force and in December 2010 it was 41.1 %. The labor participation rate in the United States in January was 64.2%.

In addition, efforts to privatize segments of public services including education, are being implemented through what the government call private/public partnerships. These are ways of providing the private sector public assets without the risks involved in the private market. Attempts to accomplish these partnerships include the building of a gas pipeline through some of the most environmentally fragile areas of the island and close to population centers. There is strong citizen opposition to this project, in light of the gas pipeline explosions in California, Pennsylvania and Ohio but the government is committed to its construction.

The privatization of higher education has involved another strategy to achieve the same objective. Funds for the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) since 1997 have been cut by $336 million. The university imposed an $800 fee hike on the students in order to solve the financial deficit of the system. What this increase will mean is that close to 10,000 students will not be able to attend the university. What seems to be behind the financial gutting of the university is the neo-liberal ideology supported by Governor Fortuño. From the academic year of 2001-02, to 2006-07, there has been a dramatic shift in the proportion of students who attend the public university. In the first period, only 117,714 attended private universities while 73,838 attended the UPR. By the second period, 158,031 were attending private universities and only 65,939 the UPR. On an island with a 47% poverty rate and a median family income of $20,425, a third of the United States median family income ($58,526), education is the only avenue toward upward mobility. But worse, the burden of educating the island’s youth will be shifted to private universities who rely more on federal Pell Grants. So, by expanding the role of private universities the neo-liberals are transferring Puerto Rico’s economic responsibility on United States’ taxpayers.

Ironically, poll ratings of Governor Fortuño, are extremely low yet he is steadfast in his implementation of draconian measures and in supporting the repressive measures used against the university community. The Department of Justice sent investigators in response to a request by the local branch of the American Civil Liberties Union and other interested parties for an investigation of civil rights violation by the Puerto Rican Police Department. But one reason behind his obstinate efforts may be that he is being courted by the National Republican Party as a way of attracting the Latino vote. Recently, Governor Fortuño attended a Heritage Foundation briefing in Simi Valley, California, he also attended the Koch brothers event in Rancho Mirage, California last month and has been proudly boasting of how he has established law and order in Puerto Rico. Last February 11, he was one of the speakers at the CPAC 2011 meeting in Washington, D.C. where he boasted about his neo-liberal policies. Toeing the Tea Party line, he spoke about reducing government, about how bonds’ ratings were higher but not about the collapse of the social fabric caused by his measures. Last year, Puerto Rico had 1,000 murders; already in January Puerto Rico has reached more than one hundred murders, and yet the police are at the campus of the University of Puerto Rico repressing freedom of expression. In the meantime, more than 200,000 Puerto Ricans have migrated to the United States, the highest number since the great migrations after World War II.

It seems that the strategy of neo-liberals in Puerto Rico is to transfer the social and public responsibility of providing for the Puerto Rican population by transferring segments of the population to the United States.

1. “More Violence in Puerto Rico as University Student Fee is Imposed,” Maritza Stanchich, Ph.D. Associate Professor of English, UPR, Posted: January 18, 2011 05:01 PM, Huffington Post

“How low will they (the Guardian) go?” asks the Zionist watchdog.

The Judeo-centric site defines Latuff as “one of the most prolific anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic.” It is also outraged  with Latuff depicting “Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas as a sinister looking (gun wielding) Orthodox Jew.”

The Jewish site claims that much of Latuff’s work “expresses anti-Semitic themes. Some of his caricatures seem to suggest that Israel is a unique and immutable evil in the world.” I am afraid to disappoint the Zionist watchdog; the Jewish State is uniquely evil, and this fact has been exposed numerous times in the last years by UN fact finding missions.

The Zionist blog claims that Latuff’s work “includes imagery frequently suggesting a moral equivalence between Israel and Nazi Germany – and he has explicitly acknowledged that this is indeed his political view.” Again this is far from being a revelation. We all see equivalence between the ‘Jews only State’ and Nazi Germany.

The Latuff cartoon above depicts Sharon kissing Hitler. Indeed this is an appropriate representation of  the Sabra and Shatilla mass murderer

The above Latuff cartoon was published by Indymedia on Holocaust Remembrance Day. Indeed the most appropriate way to criticise the transformation of Palestine into a set of isolated concentration camps.

The image above makes sure there is no doubt that the Jewish state has morphed into the new Nazi Germany by showing the tracks of the Israeli tank shaped like swastikas. Not many people realise that Zionism actually predates Nazism.

The cartoon above conveys  the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert cradling a dead Palestinian baby. It suggests that, not only do Israeli leaders intentionally kill Palestinian children, but also that such child murder is popular among the Israeli public and helps Israeli politicians get elected. Bearing in mind that 94% of the Israeli Jewish population supported IDF murderous tactics along Operation Cast Lead, Latuff seems to be overwhelmingly realistic.

This cartoon, comparing Zionism to the Ku Klux Klan. Indeed a necessary comparison considering the fact that the Jewish state is driven politically and spiritually by racist supremacist ideology.

And, finally, an Israeli so evil as to douse gas on a burning Lebanese child. This cartoon is in fact prophetic. It isn’t just Lebanon, it is the entire region.

Let’s hope that the Guardian will soon also liberate itself of its Zionist and war advocates. We need much  more Latuff and less Nick Cohen.

The reaction of those whose homes were raided and their supporters was quick and determined. The targeted activists, their attorneys, and local supporters held a couple of press conferences within days of the raids and original subpoenas and a national network organized protests at Federal Buildings in a number of US cities and towns. Resolutions attacking the raids and subpoenas and pledging support for the activists and the right to organize were introduced and passed by a number of city councils and antiwar and labor organizations. The office of the US Attorney for the Northern Illinois District under the direction of US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald temporarily withdrew the subpoenas. However, they were reinstated in December, leading to the aforementioned refusal of those subpoenaed to appear in front of the grand jury. Several more subpoenas were served on other activists. In fact, nine more activists have been ordered to testify before the grand jury on January 25, 2011 in Chicago.

A sidebar regarding Patrick Fitzgerald might be beneficial here. If that name seems familiar, it is because he is associated with many high profile cases. He helped prosecute Scooter Libby in the case known as the Valerie Plame affair. For those who don’t remember this case, it involved members of the George Bush White House releasing the name of a CIA agent to the media–a federal offense. Although Libby was convicted of the crime, it has always been believed that others in the White House, including Vice President Cheney, were involved in its commission. This demands the question as to why no one else was prosecuted and how much the prosecutor (Fitzpatrick) was involved in limiting the prosecution to one individual, thereby sparing the White House from a criminal investigation. Patrick has also been involved in many other high profile cases, including the prosecution off Illinois governors Ryan and Blagojevich in separate corruption cases and a case involving torture by the Chicago police that resulted in the conviction of Chicago detective Jon Burge.

In another investigation targeting leftist, anarchist and antiwar political activists in the Twin Cities, several homes and offices were raided before, and during, the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minneapolis. If one recalls, that convention also saw the arrest of media members including Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, brutal attacks on protestors by police and private “contractors” working with police, and a lockdown against free speech activities in certain areas of the city. Several hundred people were arrested and many were beaten. Nine organizers were eventually charged with acts of terrorism. During their trial it became clear that the organizations these individuals were affiliated with had been infiltrated by government informers.

Similarly, last week the AntiWar Committee (one of the organizations targeted in the September raids) of the Twin Cities discovered that they too had had an informer in their midst since 2008. Going by the name Karen Sullivan, this woman claimed to be a single parent and a lesbian who did not get along with her child’s father. According to statements from members of the AntiWar Committee that appeared in the press, the group’s members were sympathetic to her cover story and, despite an initial concern by some members, accepted and befriended the woman. Also, since the AntiWar Committee (AWC) believed their meetings and activities to be covered by the first amendment and were always open to the public, there was little concern for secrecy.

“Ms. Sullivan” involved herself in AWC activities and meetings, even chairing some of them. She was also one of three AWC members that traveled to Palestine. As soon as they reached Israel, the members were told they would be detained unless they turned back. Two chose to stay and were detained while “Sullivan” went back to the US. It turns out that the Israeli authorities had prior knowledge of the visit and the intention of the group to meet with Palestinian women. While no one in the group could figure out how this was so, it seems apparent now that the “Ms. Sullivan” had provided this information to her handler who had in turn provided it to US officials, who then passed it on to the Israeli government.

In the wake of the January 8, 2011 shooting in Tucson, Arizona there have been calls by a number of politicians, media commentators and others suggesting the need for new laws limiting political speech in the United States. Meanwhile, efforts are underway in Congress to renew sections of the PATRIOT Act that are due to expire soon. History tells us that when laws designed to curb political speech are enacted in the US, they are used primarily against groups and individuals on the left side of the political spectrum. There is no need for more laws. Instead, there is a need for more free speech. Laws like the PATRIOT Act and The Effective Death Penalty and Anti-Terrorism Act of 1996 and the subsequent interpretation of those laws by the courts have criminalized political activities that were previously legal. The investigation that the raids and grand juries discussed here are an example of this.

The intention of the government in this and other similar investigations is to intimidate people into keeping silent so they can carry on their business with a minimum amount of attention from the public. As the discovery of an informer in the AWC shows, they will stop at nothing in their attempt to silence protest against their imperial designs. It doesn’t matter if they get any convictions or even an indictment out of their fishing expedition. If they have intimidated those who oppose imperial war and support people around the world in their struggle against military occupation, they will have accomplished their goal. This is reason enough to support those currently targeted by the FBI in the investigations discussed here. It is more than enough reason to attend the protests against the grand jury on January 25, 2011 around the US.

The last thing we need is local religious leaders piling on when a tiny humbug alliance simply places a few ads that suggest that if you don’t buy into this particular holiday, that doesn’t make you a bad person and you’re not alone.

If Christmas is truly a season of giving, then I, for one, would like Christians to give the rest of us a break. Local church leaders are practically speaking in tongues because an atheist group called the DFW Coalition of Reason placed an ad on city buses that says “Millions of Americans Are Good Without God.” Some Christians find that message offensive, and they’re calling for a boycott of the bus system. Others are buying their own ads to shout down secular outreach. Will they replace the metallic Christian fish eating a Darwinian symbol with a fish chomping on a human brain? And speaking of fishy symbols, have any of these zealous souls looked at a quarter or a dollar bill lately?

All of our legal tender says “In God We Trust” — except not all of us trust in God. We skeptics know it’s probably unconstitutional for inaccurate Christian assertions to appear on governmental promissory notes, but we choose our battles. If homage to a therapeutic apparition helps our fellow citizens feel better about the sins of capitalism, that’s OK. It’s arguably akin to putting biblical scripture on the barrel of a gun, but we’re more than happy to oblige if it keeps the peace. Deep down, we know if things ever get really dire and scary again, our God-fearing neighbors will probably storm our doors with torches and burn us in the town square. We defer to Christians in most aspects of our lives, but that deference shouldn’t be taken for granted.

Christians carry on like they’re persecuted in this country, but it’s an almighty myth. The Americas were conquered under the Christian flags of greed and prejudice. The American way of life is perceived and justified through a Christian lens. And the entire system we live under clearly rests on Judeo-Christian underpinnings. To imply that Christians are mistreated in this country is like saying the white man was wronged by the Indians.

If an atheist winds up in court and refuses to swear on a Bible, three-quarters of any jury will believe he is guilty of something. If a high school athlete refuses to pray with her team before the game, she is immediately an outsider no matter how well she plays. And if an atheist runs for public office and doesn’t swallow his skepticism and falsely proclaim his love for Jesus, the only thing he’ll be presiding over is a bag of hate mail.

The only faction more persecuted and unpopular in this country than atheists is homosexuals. But we may see a gay Christian president before we see an openly atheist president.

We humbugs swim against an almost impossible tide, and if one of our tiny alliances wants to extend a comfort to kindred brethren, it shouldn’t be condemned. It takes a lot more courage to be an atheist than a Christian in our country, and anyone who chooses this path of most resistance shouldn’t be crucified. It’s pretty easy to sit back and believe an omnipotent benefactor is watching, guiding, and offering you immortality and a cozy place by his side if you’ll just do as you’re told. It’s much harder to live and work without a spiritual net.

Christians don’t have a monopoly on righteousness, kindness, or love at Christmas. Holiday cheer can originate from secular sources, and it shouldn’t be too much to ask for the Christian “Goliath” to defer to us lowly atheist “Davids” in this instance.

For better or worse, ours is not yours, blasphemy is a relative term and heresy is sometimes healthy and necessary, as millions of Protestants should recognize. Saying some folks are good without God shouldn’t threaten those who do believe. It’s simply a different gospel.

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you

— Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Call to Freedom” (1819)

My film deceptions and the works of others document the many lies and the hypocrisy that our politicians and government have foisted upon us. However, the public has begun to wake up. They are beginning to realize that 9/11 revelations will be the first of many cascading dominoes as conspiracy theory will morph into cover-up, over and over again.

When it comes to a fresh investigation of 9/11 Democrats have joined Republicans to “keep a lid on it.” They know they will also be flattened once this snowball begins to roll; their duplicity, their culpability cannot be blamed entirely on the Republicans. A great unraveling is just beginning.  When the final spin, the final unraveling occurs, the Fed, the IMF, the World Bank and Media will all be left standing and the public will then know who has been in control all along.

Much of this unraveling and the public’s awareness have come from the Internet which is the last bastion of free speech left on the planet. If Leahy’s Law becomes law, freedom of expression on the Internet could well become an endangered species. It is called Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeit Act (COICA) S.3804.  He introduced it on Sept 20 and promptly referred it to the Judiciary Committee which he also chairs. This law is being fast tracked, flying under the radar and almost in total darkness. When money is involved it is amazing how fast bipartisan support can be found. This legislation could be out of committee and headed for a full vote in Congress, with almost no input from the public, in just a few weeks. Amazing.

As proposed, COICA can blacklist, control or close down thousands of watchdog websites, sites like mine, bloggers, even You Tube for engaging in “infringing activities.” With no due process or legal oversight this law would empower the Attorney General (not the aggrieved party) to initiate blacklisting activities and prevent access to infringing sites. It is a dangerous and ill defined piece of legislation that at the very least should be publicized and thoroughly discussed in the open.

Counsel from Senator Leahy’s office was recently in contact with me. He assured me at great length that this bill was targeting the bad guys, counterfeiters and criminals that were re-selling American products or services often from abroad, a fact I do not doubt. I said to him “great,  I agree – go get em.” I then asked for an example of an infringing organization that was not also a counterfeit company. The example cited played movies and TV shows that were not authorized by the copyright holders. This example illustrated to me how You Tube and other sites could be inadvertently snared by this legislation.

Our quest to get the counterfeiters and criminals should not also give government the power to blacklist thousands of innocent sites for expressing the infringing words of others as determined -  not by the original copyright holder – but by government. The rights of the public should not get trampled by big money’s quest to stop the bootleggers from redistributing their music, film, drugs and designer jeans.

In spite of these facts and a letter sent to Mr. Leahy expressing serious concerns about this legislation from the American Civil Liberties Organization, The Center for Democracy and Technology, The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Freedom House, Human Rights Watch and others, Leahy was honored as Vermont’s civil libertarian of the year by the Vermont’s ACLU, that’s right,  the ACLU. It is kind of like giving Obama the Noble Peace Prize while he commits 30,000 more soldiers to Afghanistan.

“Doublespeak, doublethink, thought control and the Ministry of Truth”  are no longer Orwellian book terms, as Nineteen Eighty-Four is becoming a living reality in 2010.

Wake up Mr. John Q Public.

Money not public opinion drives party politics and the legislative process. Did I mention that the multibillion dollar media conglomerates of Time Warner, Disney Co and the Vivendi (a French corporation) have been three of Leahy’s largest financial contributors for the last five years?

“Terrorists Watch – No Fly Lists” does it sound familiar? And we all know how well that one has gone.

Contact Leahy.

Petition the Senate.

Hard to imagine that the same man who could say:

I commend Secretary of State Clinton for reaffirming our nation’s deep commitment to openness and freedom of expression on the Internet. The Internet has become a vital tool to protect and ensure the rights and basic freedoms of Americans and the human rights of people everywhere.

Released by Leahy’s Office in January 2010

–or–

Why did 9/11 happen on George Bush’s watch when he had clear warnings that it was going to happen?…. Had there been an independent congress, one that could ask questions, these questions would have been asked years ago. We’d be much better off….

U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy — interview with Amy Goodman, 9/29/2006

is now proposing legislation that will allow the government to blacklist and close down websites engaged in “infringing activities.”

Although “infringing activities” are ill defined by this legislation, it appears that websites engaged primarily in copyright infringement are targets. Websites like mine and thousands of bloggers and documentarians who use the copyrighted material of others to develop their work could well be in Leahy’s cross hairs.

As a Citizen Journalist and a Citizen Filmmaker, I was so appalled by what I saw first under Republican rule and now under Democratic leadership that I produced a film, deceptions, with zero background and for less than $1,000. I then made this film available to the public on a website I created called www.deceptionUSA.com. Rady Ananda reviewed deceptions as a “brilliant clarion to save the Internet.”

If Leahy’s proposed legislation becomes law, however, my site could be closed down by the DOJ (Dept of Justice) for engaging in an “infringing activity.” You see I am not a professional movie man with oodles of film making know-how and financial backing. I am a citizen who would not have been able to produce this documentary without the use of material developed by others. What is missing from Leahy’s bill is any mention of “Fair Use,” which is part of section 107 of the Copyright Law and protects sites like mine where information is freely being rendered. I think it is called freedom of speech.

Under this provision the use of copyrighted material is not an infringement of copyright law if used for such things as the criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship and research. Think about it, almost every invention, every non-fictional piece and many fictional works are based on someone else’s efforts. Most of the world’s advancements have occurred by standing on the shoulders of others. Up there we have a better view of what has happened or can prognosticate better about what might happen.

Without ‘fair use’, citizen journalists, citizen filmmakers, scholars, political satirists and several authors, composers and inventors would not have been able to produce much their work. This is why the ‘fair use’ provision exists and why it has survived years of court challenges. Hmm ….I wonder how You Tube, a website which relies heavily on copyrighted material uploaded by everyday citizens, would fair under Leahy’s Law?

Now, I have absolutely no problem with closing down sites that sell and profit from another’s work. That is called plagiarism and, last I knew, it is well condemned under intellectual property law. However, sites like mine and others, which exist solely for the purpose of engaging the public in critical thinking and awareness, should not be terminated by the government.

Come on! I am making NO money from other peoples work. I am a one man show, a registered non-profit; a tiny little David trying to fight a corporate Goliath and an ultra elite who are now attempting to control words as effectively as they have money.

Let’s add it up. If the original copyright holders do not have an issue with ANYTHING I have said and I am not profiting in any way, why should an appointed government official be blacklisting my domain and shutting down my website? There is only one reason for such an action and that is to prevent controversial viewpoints from being seen or heard.

CNN quotes Al Franken a Senator from Minnesota saying that net neutrality “is the foremost free speech issue of our time”

Leahy’s Law is a giant step into the Dark Ages of government censorship, a view which is shared by most open Internet advocates and a law that stands in sharp contrast to Leahy’s professed support of free speech.

But perhaps myself and thousands of others are all wrong, so tell me, Mr. Leahy, where does my website fall? Look at the film, look at the site, look at the credits and render your opinion. You are a lawyer, a former prosecutor and this is your legislation. This film and this site rely heavily on ‘fair use’ and the works of others. It definitely is engaged in infringing activities – should it be blacklisted and shut down? Or was your intention just to go after the counterfeiters? Please advise.

To Contact Senator Leahy’s office and join me in a clarification simply follow this link: http://leahy.senate.gov/contact/

You can also Petition the Senate.