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The End of Internet Freedom

With respect to our recommendation that readers should please download and retain as many copies of scanned Gospel Magazine publications as possible, and not rely on the future accessibility of this project, the Website Secretary has been asked to provide further brief comment - comment which is it hoped will serve as no more than an invitation for readers to pursue their own more comprehensive research into the matter - on the subject of the possible end of the present freedoms of expression and access that internet users enjoy.

“The Director of National Intelligence testified before the Congress on February 19, 2009, that ‘a growing array of state and non-state adversaries are increasingly targeting-for exploitation and potentially disruption or destruction-our information infrastructure, including the Internet, telecommunications networks, computer systems, and embedded processors and controllers in critical industries’ and these trends are likely to continue.”

111th US Congress

Threats to the Future of the Present Internet

There are a number of substantial threats to the continuance of the Internet as we know it, namely:

The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 - see wording of the Act here

This is essentially a still very unpopular act proposed by the US Senator Jay Rockefeller, (the great grandson of John D Rockefeller), which would bestow powers on the US President to ‘turn off’ the internet at any moment of his choosing, on the grounds that it’s continued use would pose a severe threat to US national security. Since the intelligence on which the president would act would likely be secret, it would not be necessary or practicable that the precise nature of the threat be made public, or be explained, and permission from Internet users be sought, prior to turning off the Internet. Should this Act succeed, in the event of circumstances that were judged by the US President to constitute a sufficiently serious threat, Internet users could immediately lose all access to the Internet and would likely have to wait for an indeterminate amount of time until technicians and government-controlled computer programmes trawled through the entire Internet ensuring that no objectionable or dangerous content were still present.

Obtaining a pretext to justify ‘turning off’ the Internet

Were the UK either to follow suit with a similar bill, or else pledge their cooperation to the USA, a likely scenario in which the Internet could justifiably be turned off instantly would be if yet another civil servant were to leave their laptop computer unattended on the London Underground that perhaps contained secret data obtained via the ECHELON intelligence sharing agreement that the UK and USA enjoy. If, for arguments’ sake, some of these documents contained sensitive material relating to US national security interests - such as locations of covert forward operating bases behind enemy lines in a country that the US was about to invade, and which the UK Director of Special Forces was required to coordinate movement of his own assets between - and the laptop happened to be found or subsequently purchased by a technically-literate anarchist, the sensitive material could be uploaded simultaneously to several thousand websites that were not traceable to the anarchist, creating mayhem.

Three years ago The Times reported that an estimated 1 in 10 websites were infected with ‘malware’. This malware allows criminally-inclined programmers to capture information from the computer of the person who has visited the infected site, in the event that the malware has managed to successfully install itself on the reader’s computer while he was visiting the website. The information captured by this process and made available to the criminal usually includes file transfer protocol details - if the infected computer belongs to someone who is responsible for maintaining a website. Once the criminal has FTP details for many different websites, it is a simple matter for him to write a programme that simultaneously uploads unauthorised content to many different websites that his malware programme has already collected data about. If this criminal is not discovered or he is able to erase proof of his activities off his hard drive, then it is impossible for the authorities to know how many computers may now be hosting this highly sensitive content, content which if obtained by the enemy nation, could directly compromise the intended imminent successful war effort and allow the enemy to launch a pre-emptive defensive strike against the US and its allies. With the current situation in the Middle-East being what it is, it could be argued that such a strike would likely be nuclear.

While we hope that such a scenario is extremely unlikely, it is one of many possible scenarios that could justify invoking the Cybersecurity Act and losing the present Internet. Were the present Internet to be lost, the world of commerce would be thrown instantly into chaos and disorder. But it is likely that the Americans would not ‘want a serious crisis go to waste’, and such a scenario would likely be used to justify the accelerated implementation of measures that appear already to be on the horizon, but which will require a difficult, expensive, and highly unpopular process of transition - absent a suitably serious crisis. These proposed measures include:

The Imminent End of Net Neutrality - (looking likely [in spite of Mr Obama’s professed opposition] in the light of a federal court ruling finding in Comcast’s favour)

Net Neutrality is the concept of giving all Internet users equal access to bandwidth. The idea is however opposed by many Internet Service Providers on the grounds that certain popular websites to which all users enjoy free access, commandeer a disproportionately high volume of bandwidth, effectively slowing down the Internet for other users. These large ISP’s argue that a fairer system would charge users for what they use, rather than effectively ask low bandwidth users to essentially subsidise the costs of heavy users who regularly download high volumes of data, such as illegal pirated films. The argument is the same, in principle, as advocating water meters for all households, so that those who waste water are not subsidised by those who conserve it. While this may sound a fair argument, what will likely concern readers of this website are the facts that a) this website will likely become expensive to view - if it is permitted to continue, and b) in order to achieve the end of Net Neutrality, law makers will likely ask Internet Service Providers to achieve the work in collaboration with other bodies who have already succeeded in persuading the US legislature (who effectively control the Internet) that additional changes and upgrades to the present Internet should be effected. One of these influential organisations is the Anti-Defamation League, and some of the upgrade measures are described below, under the title, ‘Internet 2’.

Those interested in looking further into the matter are encouraged to read Duke’s Law and Technology Review article, ‘The End of Net Neutrality’.

The Work of the Anti-Defamation League

The mission of The Anti-Defamation League is “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people, to secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike”, which of course, sounds most excellent. Having obtained very great influence with lawmakers worldwide, the ADL is appealed to to protect the interests of many groups which consider themselves to be maligned, unfairly treated or negatively discriminated against. In an effort to protect these groups the ADL sends delegates to show presentations that demonstrate the characteristics of websites that they wish to close down. On the ADL’s own website they describe these seminars as follows:

At sessions such as these, hate-filled Web Sites typically are projected on a screen for all to see. Some of the Web Sites deny the Holocaust and espouse virulent anti-Semitism; others portray gays and lesbians as subhuman in the guise of promoting so-called "family values"; and still other Web Sites contain racial epithets and caricatures. Audience members almost always have the same reaction to what they see. When they are finished shaking their heads in disbelief and after they say "disgusting," audience members frequently are heard to exclaim: "There oughta be a law."

Christopher Wolf, Chair of the Anti-Defamation League Internet Task Force and

Chair of the International Network Against Cyber Hate

In spite of these calls from their audiences for a law to close down websites such as those that marginalise sodomites, the ADL is not engaged in pressing for such a law as they believe that it will be ineffective since it will require too much policing, as it is a simple matter for a website author to modify his content to become objectionable or offensive after it has already been approved. Instead the ADL believe that the most effective means of eliminating offensive and hurtful content from the Internet is to use their enormous influence to work closely with Internet Service Providers to ensure that all ISPs will soon have in place security measures and filtering software that suspends any hosted websites that host objectionable content until such time as the author removes the offending material. It is envisaged that the software will have word-string filters that red-flag certain clauses for the attention of moderators, as well as reader-interactive regulation, similar to the processes currently involved when a reader wishes to edit a Wikipedia article. That is to say that a website author may write an article in response to a request that argues, for example, that homosexuality is sinful and that were a person to request to become a member of a church and partake of Communion, he should properly be refused, then a reader who found such a notion objectionable, offensive, hateful, or hurtful, would have the power to report this article as offensive and a moderator would either remove the new web page or suspend the entire website, until the matter was resolved and the website author agreed to be compliant with the largely ADL-formulated ISP’s Terms of Use, ie. their conditions of hosting of websites. Readers who are interested to further research the work of the ADL are encouraged to begin their research here.

Replacing the present Internet with ‘Internet 2’

In developed and many developing countries, a comprehensive network of fibre optic cables is being installed in preparation for Internet 2, a much faster Internet that will replace the present version and which will allow high resolution video conferencing with CD sound quality. It is our understanding however, that subscription and usage charges will be high and that websites will only be able to be hosted as subdomains of larger ISP’s websites. As such they will be required to conform to the ISPs Terms of Use which, again, will be sensitive to the goals of the ADL and will likely restrict religious websites from expressing ideas that may be construed as exclusivist, hateful, hurtful, or offensive.

The Relationship between Applied Digital Solutions and The White House

On 25th June 2010, the White House published the following announcement on its website:

Today, I am pleased to announce the latest step in moving our Nation forward in securing our cyberspace with the release of the draft National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC). This first draft of NSTIC was developed in collaboration with key government agencies, business leaders and privacy advocates. What has emerged is a blueprint to reduce cybersecurity vulnerabilities and improve online privacy protections through the use of trusted digital identities.

The NSTIC, which is in response to one of the near term action items in the President’s Cyberspace Policy Review, calls for the creation of an online environment, or an Identity Ecosystem as we refer to it in the strategy, where individuals and organizations can complete online transactions with confidence, trusting the identities of each other and the identities of the infrastructure that the transaction runs on. For example, no longer should individuals have to remember an ever-expanding and potentially insecure list of usernames and passwords to login into various online services. Through the strategy we seek to enable a future where individuals can voluntarily choose to obtain a secure, interoperable, and privacy-enhancing credential (e.g., a smart identity card, a digital certificate on their cell phone, etc) from a variety of service providers – both public and private – to authenticate themselves online for different types of transactions (e.g., online banking, accessing electronic health records, sending email, etc.). Another key concept in the strategy is that the Identity Ecosystem is user-centric – that means you, as a user, will be able to have more control of the private information you use to authenticate yourself on-line, and generally will not have to reveal more than is necessary to do so.

While currently this level of security is generally only desirable by Internet users to secure their online transactions and avoid thieves stealing money from their bank accounts or misusing their identities, apparently The White House wants future users to be required to verify their identities prior to being able to send and receive emails. Since most Internet users’ daily transitions between their emails and Internet browsing are frequent, repeated and seamless, it appears that realistically, all Internet usage will soon be monitored and that the security services will know with certainty, (as opposed to currently capturing only IP address details), which websites have been frequented by a particular person, or who has accessed a particular website that the security services have deliberately allowed to remain live so as to be able to monitor the identities of those who have an interest in the dangerous or objectionable content that the red-flagged website contains.

While many of our readers will not find the notion objectionable that the security services will know which websites they are looking at, the probable future method of identity verification is probably a source of greater concern.

Although the above announcement only mentions the possibility of a ‘smart identity card’ and a ‘digital certificate on their telephone’, it is the ‘etcetera’ to which we would suggest that attention be drawn. In the UK it will be remembered that in 2008 some papers were accidentally leaked by the Home Office which described coercive measures to persuade UK citizens to accept an ID card. The document went on to state that once 80% of the public had accepted ID cards, then ID cards would become mandatory in the UK for anyone wanting to renew their passport or drivers licence.

It will also be remembered that the former head of the UK Security Service , Dame Stella Rimmington, criticized plans for the proposed ‘smart card’ or radio-frequency identity card, claiming that information that is contained on it can easily be copied and replicated by criminals, as well as the obvious objection that it could be stolen and used to gain access to the victim’s banking details.

By the time of Hurricane Katrina, the Americans had already developed a solution to the problem of the ease with which an RFID card could be lost or stolen. Instead of tagging the dead bodies of victims before they decomposed and were impossible to identify, The White House awarded Applied Digital Solution’s Verichip Corporation (which is since operating as PositiveID, having merged with Steel Vault) a contract to work with FEMA to inject implantable microchips into the bodies of victims. These microchips were housed inside cylindrical glass phials inside a cellulose sheath that is not rejected by muscle tissue, and measured around 13mm by 3mm. The microchip contained a sixteen digit number which could be read by passing an RFID reader within some 30cm of the location on the person’s body where the microchip was injected. The reader was connected to a computer that housed a database that recorded the personal details of the deceased so that the body could be returned to the family correctly, without the risk of misidentification.

The same RFID subdermal microchipping system is now used by some members of Mexican government and law enforcement officials to authorise them to enter certain areas that only they have security clearance to access. And nowadays, many young people are injecting themselves with these microchips so as to be able to secure their cars, houses, and computers. It appears only a matter of time before such methods of verification become commonplace.

Once the microchip has been inserted into the hand and the wound healed, it is envisaged that the Internet Service Provider will supply an RFID-enabled mouse. A prototype of such a mouse is demonstrated in the video at right. This user has manufactured his own mouse but once mass-produced industrially, most mice will likely be RFID-enabled and will look no different to a normal USB or wireless mouse in use today.

Cashless shopping with implantable microchips and RFID tagged products

As the majority of Internet users obtain implantable ID verification, it appears that IBM will be working to get their cashless technology into most large shops to simplify the process of buying and selling. (Use of this technology is demonstrated in their advertisement at right). This technology will require that every product in the shop have an ECT or electronic coded tag embedded in the packaging. There are at least two different types of tag that we are aware of being in current use; one is about the size of a grain of sand and is imperceptible in most forms of packaging, and is used in products such as Gillette razors; the other has a coiled antenna hidden behind an adhesive label. RFID readers currently installed in shops such as Walmart and ASDA are able to process the passage of up to 300 different products through the RFID arch in one second. This proposed new system will therefore allow someone with an implanted microchip not only to own and manage a website, and trade online, but also to buy products by simply picking them up and walking out of the shop with them. The computer that is linked to the RFID scanning arch under which the shopper walks in order to exit the shop will be able to debit funds directly from the account that the shopper has pre-nominated to the shop.

While the concept of accepting an implant is probably obnoxious to many people, it is apparent that employees of US mainstream media companies - who are often co-owned by Internet Service Providers (such as AOL Time Warner & CBS Corporation; Microsoft & NBC; Comcast / Time Warner / NBC Universal, etc, etc) - have been instructed to encourage people to consider the possibility that perhaps everyone will soon have a microchip implanted in one of their hands. Please see the closing seconds of the video at right for an example of this. It is also interesting to note that ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Company.

While the prospect of many people becoming microchipped may at present seem a good five or six years off for UK residents, it is interesting to note that the US President’s new Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 proposes that American’s be injected with an implantable microchip. The Act proposes that:

``(g) (1) The Secretary shall establish a national medical device registry (in this subsection referred to as the ‘registry’) to facilitate analysis of postmarket safety and outcomes data on each device that—

``(A) is or has been used in or on a patient; and

``(B) is—

``(i) a class III device; or

``(ii) a class II device that is implantable, life-supporting, or life-sustaining.

Page 1004 of the same document describes what the term "data" means in paragraph 1, section B:

14 ‘‘(B) In this paragraph, the term ‘data’ refers to in15

formation respecting a device described in paragraph (1),

16 including claims data, patient survey data, standardized

17 analytic files that allow for the pooling and analysis of

18 data from disparate data environments, electronic health

19 records, and any other data deemed appropriate by the

20 Secretary"

This ‘class II device that is implantable’ refers to the FDA-approved "implantable radiofrequency transponder system for patient identification and health information." The purpose of a class II device is to collect data in medical patients such as "claims data, patient survey data, standardized analytic files that allow for the pooling and analysis of data from disparate data environments, electronic health records, and any other data deemed appropriate by the Secretary." For further information on this device please see this document provided by the FDA.

It is therefore evident that there is a coordinated drive amongst owners of ISPs and media companies, as well as the White House, to drive through measures that will require implantable microchips whose use is advocated on many grounds such as healthcare, personal security, financial security, etc, etc.

While it hoped that these undesirable measures should be slow to be implemented, we would nonetheless reiterate our encouragement for as many readers as possible to copy our magazines onto their own hard drives, while we are still able to have an online presence, since we will be unable to continue this website once even a few of the above measures begin to be implemented.

The above article was published on 29th June 2010.

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