The sudden appearance of "news stories" talking about Solar Eruptions that "can take out the Internet for weeks" leads many people to think they're going to do exactly that - on purpose -- to stop the flow of information.
What is described as an "Urgent warning over intense solar storms strong enough to cripple the world's internet for WEEKS" from NASA , which says we've hit the explosive peak in the sun's 11-year cycle.
Scientists have confirmed that solar maximum has officially arrived, and it could continue for the next 12 months. So while opportunities to see the aurora will ramp up, so too will the chance of a global internet blackout.
In a teleconference this week, NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the Solar Cycle Prediction Panel confirmed that the sun has reached its solar maximum period, which could continue for the next year. 'During solar maximum, the number of sunspots, and therefore, the amount of solar activity, increases,' said Jamie Favors, director of NASA's space weather program
This morning, the world was also warned "INCREASING CHANCE OF FLARES: New sunspot 3856 has developed a 'beta-gamma-delta' magnetic field that harbors energy for strong explosions. NOAA forecasters estimate an 80% chance of M-class flares and a 20% chance of X-flares on Oct. 17th. The sunspot is directly facing Earth, so any flares will be geoeffective."
HAL TURNER ANALYSIS
Blogger's note: WEF is getting their way in NYC as they are widening the sidewalk on Fifth Avenue. It will make traffic MORE congested. That also is predictive programming for the eventual closure of Fifth Avenue to autos.
Bangladesh has been rocked by weeks of social unrest as thousands of university students protest against inequality, poverty, and the lack of job security in the South Asian country. The unrest worsened this week, forcing the government to shut down the nation's internet service to prevent further student organizing and unrest.
Zunaid Ahmed Palak, the country's junior telecommunications minister, told AFP News that the nationwide shutdown of the country's mobile internet network began on Thursday. He said the shutdown was to "ensure the security of citizens."
Around 1245 ET, internet observatory Netblocks wrote in a post on X that Bangladesh "is now in the midst of a near-total national internet shutdown."
"The new measure follows earlier efforts to throttle social media and restrict mobile data services, and comes amid reports of rising deaths at student protests," Netblocks said.
Hall Of Shame II: Thanks To Congress, The NSA Is ‘Just Days From Taking Over The Internet’
You might remember when AT&T willingly partnered with the NSA to set up listening (“peering”) posts inside the main switching centers around the country. The initial discovery was made in San Francisco, and the world was aghast. Like two illicit lovers caught naked in bed with each other, both AT&T and the NSA swore that they would never cheat on the American people again. Everyone assumed that this transgression was dealt with and that the partnership was dissolved.
Fat chance. Not only was the San Francisco operation NOT dismantled, but others were discovered in Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Seattle, Washington, DC, New York City, and Atlanta. These comprise the “backbone” of AT&T’s network in the U.S.
According to The Intercept
A body of evidence – including classified NSA documents, public records, and interviews with several former AT&T employees – indicates that the buildings are central to an NSA spying initiative that has for years monitored billions of emails, phone calls, and online chats passing across U.S. territory.
The NSA considers AT&T to be one of its most trusted partners and has lauded the company’s “extreme willingness to help.” It is a collaboration that dates back decades. Little known, however, is that its scope is not restricted to AT&T’s customers. According to the NSA’s documents, it values AT&T not only because it “has access to information that transits the nation,” but also because it maintains unique relationships with other phone and internet providers. The NSA exploits these relationships for surveillance purposes, commandeering AT&T’s massive infrastructure and using it as a platform to covertly tap into communications processed by other companies.
All of this spying activity on Americans was patently illegal, and everyone knew it. It is still illegal, but who is going to tell the NSA what to do? It is totally rogue, chock full of Technocrats who answer to no one.
This backstory in critical to understanding the legislation up vote on April 19. It is the physical part of the Internet that is being handed over to the NSA. It will grandfather in all the previous illegality that was allegedly “voluntary” between AT&T and the NSA, but now it will give legal authority to the NSA to force mandatory cooperation by anyone who has access to the physical hardware of the Internet.
This is why famed NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden recently said “The NSA is just DAYS from taking over the Internet, and it’s not on the front page of any newspaper — because no one has noticed.” ⁃ TN Editor
The United States National Security Agency (NSA) is only days away from “taking over the internet” with a massive expansion of its surveillance powers, according to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
In an April 16 post to X, Snowden drew attention to a thread originally posted by Elizabeth Goitein — the co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice — that warned of a new bill that could see the U.S. government surveillance powers amplified to new levels.
The bill in question reforms and extends a part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) known as Section 702.
Currently, the NSA can force internet service providers such as Google and Verizon to hand over sensitive data concerning NSA targets.
However, Goitein claims that through an “innocuous change” to the definition of “electronic communications surveillance provider” in the FISA 702 bill, the U.S. government could go far beyond its current scope and force nearly every company and individual that provides any internet-related service to assist with NSA surveillance.
Additionally, the people forced to hand over data would be unable to discuss the information provided due to hefty gag order penalties and conditions outlined in the bill, added Goitein.
The bill initially received heavy pushback from privacy-conscious Republicans but passed through the U.S. House of Representatives on April 13.
Part of the pushback saw the bills’ proposed spying powers time-frame cut from five years to two years, as well as some minor amendments to the service providers included under the surveillance measures.
However, according to Goitein, the amendment did very little to reduce the scope of surveillance granted to the NSA.
In her view, the amendment could even see service providers such as cleaners, plumbers and IT service providers that have access to laptops and routers inside people’s homes be forced to provide information and serve as “surrogate spies,” claimed Goitein.
The bill has seen strong pushback from both sides of the political aisle, with several government representatives claiming the bill violates citizen’s constitutional rights.
Democratic Senator Ron Wyden described the bill as “terrifying” and said he would do everything in his power to prevent it from being passed through the Senate.
Republican Congressperson Anna Paulina Luna, who voted against the bill in the House of Representatives, said Section 702 was an “irresponsible extension” of the NSA’s powers. Luna added that if government agencies wanted access to data, they must be forced to apply for a warrant.
The bill is slated for a vote on April 19 in the U.S. Senate.
Source: technocracy.news
March 7, 2024
Last week, a video clip of Francis Fukuyama went viral. In the clip, the political scientist called freedom of speech and a marketplace of ideas “18th century notions that really have been belied (or shown to be false) by a lot of what’s happened in recent decades.”
Fukuyama then reflects on how a censorship regime could be enacted in the United States.
But the question then becomes, how do you actually regulate content that you think is noxious, harmful, and the like—and do it in a way that’s consistent with the First Amendment? Now, I think you can push the boundaries a bit because the First Amendment does not allow you to say anything you want. But among liberal democracies, our First Amendment law is among the most expansive of any developed democracy.
And you could imagine a future world in which we kind of pull that back and we say no, we’re going to have a law closer to that of Germany where we can designate—the government can designate something as hate speech and then prevent the dissemination of that. But the question then is, politically, how are you going to get there?
Putting aside the fact that the censorship regime Fukuyama is talking about is already here, it’s important to consider the admission behind his words.
Francis Fukuyama is often associated with the neoconservative movement. And that’s for good reason. He was active in the neoconservative Project for a New American Century and helped lead the push for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But he later turned against the war and renounced neoconservatism, so he can perhaps better be understood as an intellectual proxy for the Washington establishment.
Fukuyama is best known for his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man. The book argues that liberal democracy represents the endpoint of humanity’s ideological evolution and the final form of government because of its defeat of fascism and socialism and its supposed lack of inner contradictions.
If there was ever a time when this idea would resonate, it was 1992. The Soviet Union was gone, and the US government, fresh off its sound defeat of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, was the most powerful single entity in history.
But at the same time, an entirely new medium for information was quickly emerging. In 1996, a software engineer named Dave Winer decided to host his newsletter on the World Wide Web. The result was the first web log, or blog. He called it DaveNet. As blogs began to catch on, writers could reach their readers directly without filters, editors, or space constraints.
It is hard to understate the effect of this development. But it’s best explained by Martin Gurri in his 2014 book The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium. Gurri posits that throughout human history “information has not grown incrementally… but has expanded in great pulses or waves which sweep over the human landscape and leave little untouched.”
According to Gurri, the first information wave came with the invention of writing. The second was set off by the development of alphabets. These waves gave rise to governments and societies led by literate bureaucratic and priestly castes. The third wave came with the invention of the printing press. Suddenly, the ancien régime’s monopoly on information was shattered. The result was sweeping political change—most notably the Protestant Reformation and the American and French Revolutions.
Central to Gurri’s thesis is the idea that these revolutions did not come about because of a sudden change in the public’s sentiments but because abrupt changes in the information space allowed sentiments that were already there to spread and develop outside of the ruling classes’ control.
The fourth wave came with the adoption of broadcast media—radio and television—during the twentieth century. While this wave was certainly disruptive, the government’s early takeover of the airwaves made it easier for the political class to retain control over the information space.
But the same could not be said of the fifth wave—the digital revolution. Only two years after the launch of DaveNet, another blog, the Drudge Report, would go around the establishment press and break the story that got Bill Clinton impeached.
Ten years later, as yet another financial crisis gripped the country, the internet allowed true grassroots opposition movements to organize and spread—Occupy Wall Street on the left and the Tea Party on the right. It also allowed candidates like Ron Paul to run popular campaigns critical of the Washington establishment.
The internet didn’t just allow people to see and hear dissenting views; it allowed them to see that those views were popular.
And because of that, from the Arab Spring to the passage of Brexit, the weakening of political control over the information space began leading to real change across the world. But in the United States, after Donald Trump won the White House, the political class woke up to what was happening. And they decided to do something about it.
At first it was Russian disinformation, then hateful domestic extremists, and later covid skeptics. The establishment has used whatever boogieman or strawman they thought could scare the public into accepting more political control over the online space. Which brings us back to Fukuyama.
In a sense, he’s right. It was a lot easier for the Washington establishment to act as though they were supportive of freedom of speech and the free exchange of ideas when they controlled the information space. But now that the internet has partially rolled back their control, these ideas have been “belied” in their eyes.
For those like Fukuyama, who want the Washington establishment to keep up its ever-escalating interventionism at home and abroad—funded by unsustainable debt and inflation—the digital revolution is cause for concern. But for those of us who understand that our economic, geopolitical, and cultural issues require radical change, it’s a reason to have hope.
UNESCO Seeks To Regulate All Internet Content
This is Orwellian Double-Think at its worst, promoting free speech that is anti-free speech. The "major threat to stability and social cohesion" is all about their stability and the social cohesion they want to force on the world. Now UNESCO will spawn a feeding frenzy of eager NGOs and government tyrants to promote and defend the globalist narrative. ? TN Editor
Digital technology has enabled immense progress on freedom of speech. But social media platforms have also accelerated and amplified the spread of false information and hate speech, posing major risks to societal cohesion, peace and stability. To protect access to information, we must regulate these platforms without delay, while at the same time protecting freedom of expression and human rights.
UNESCO's action plan is the result of a consultation process on a scale unprecedented within the United Nations system, with over 10,000 contributions from 134 countries collected over the last eighteen months. Over forty pages, it outlines the principles which must be respected as well as the concrete measures which must be implemented by all stakeholders: governments, regulatory authorities, civil society and the platforms themselves.
Reported By Robert Lee
Blogger's note: Defund the UN!
The White House is literally fighting in court for the right to censor lawful speech on the internet.
twitter.com/greg_price11/status/1676754872484462593?s=46&t=T37mFTn9E_HUaxN1rB76Hw
The government is now openly admitting it doesn’t care about the 1st amendment. They are out-in-the-open displaying their desire to censor lawful speech online.
There is no reason the WH needs a direct line to social media companies. “Hate speech” is merely speech government hates.
h/t EuphoricTrilby
Source: https://citizenwatchreport.com/the-white-house-is-literally-fighting-in-court-for-the-right-to-censor-lawful-speech-on-the-internet/
