... sometime within the next 10 years.
I don’t know about anyone else but I cannot imagine waking up one day and finding myself totally cutoff from the world of Dkos and other progressive sites that I depend on every single day to find out what’s really happening in the world. That said, our government (at least how it stands right now) is bound and determined to control the free flow of information in and out of this country. They've already decimated the tv and radio airwaves and the print media; the tubes are next.
In fact, they’re so determined to control the collective narrative of this country, our government is said (by a very credible source) to have already drafted a Patriot Act-type document to enact (sound vaguely familiar?) in the case of a major terrorist attack on the internet.
Tech visionary and 2008 NetRoots Nation panelist Lawrence Lessig made a sobering prediction Tuesday at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech Conference.
"There’s going to be an i-9/11 event," he said, "an event that demonstrates the instability of the Internet, and that inspires the government to a response."
Stanford Law School professor and founder of the Center for Internet and Society (CIS), Mr. Lessig went on to tell the conference that his conclusion came as a result of a discussion he had recently with former federal counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke.
The article comes via Fortune Magazine/CNN Money.com:
Lessig said Clarke told him that the Justice Department had already written up much of the Patriot Act before the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, and that there is a similar proposal on the shelf in case of an Internet catastrophe.
"Advocates of Internet openness will not be thrilled about its contents," Lessig said. "Vint Cerf is not going to like it very much," Lessig recalls Clark saying.
It just happened that Cerf, an Internet pioneer who now works for Google (GOOG), was in the audience. And the warning obviously got his attention.
The prediction was part of 2018: Life on the Net, a panel with tech thinkers Lessig, Joichi Ito, and Philip Rosedale. Conversation topics ranged from copyright policies to virtual worlds to mobile economies. The panelists were generally optimistic about how the Internet will develop – Rosedale, founder of virtual world Second Life, made an unsurprising prediction that virtual environments like his would comprise the majority of Internet traffic in a decade, for example. But their discussions about the potential pitfalls were a bit more entertaining.
Entrepreneur and venture capitalist, Joichi Ito, himself had some words of warning to deliver to the conference. He told his audience that the money companies make from their ideas tends to "get plowed back" into the innovation economy – inevitably seeding startups like Facebook and Twitter – in today’s fixed-line internet. It seems in Silicon Valley, successful entrepreneurs and companies usually keep the money circulating.
But no one should assume mobile will work the same way in the U.S.: Just look at Japan, where the mobile Internet is big. There, just as here, the wireless carriers who own the networks want a piece of the transactions that happen on their networks. The result is that in Japan, carriers have taken a sizable chunk of the spoils from successful ideas and sunk them into their own "bloated R&D labs," Ito said.
Business as usual.
Anyway, getting back to the prognosticated cyber attack false-flag attack; there’s no doubt there is a whole lot of money behind this nefarious usurpation. But we have foreknowledge this time, and with it, we have the power to not only elect Congress critters who’ll protect our internet interests, we also have the information necessary to force the government to come clean as far as naming the source of any such attack, and present clear, unambiguous evidence thereof.
No more "Trust us."
And, no I don't think Obama would do something like this. But, we'll never know when something like this will happen. It could be 2018 or it could be tomorrow. For now, Congress needs to hold hearings with both Mr. Lessig and Richard Clarke testifying as to what they know. Once this information goes viral, perhaps we'll have enough power to thwart this heinous plot from ever getting off the ground at all.
Demand answers. Stay vigilant. The internet is our salvation... but only if we can hang onto it.
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