Open The TPP — SEND A MESSAGE TO TPP OFFICIALS
openthetpp.net
September 6, 2012
This week, government representatives from around the world are meeting with over 600 industry lobbyist “advisors” to negotiate an extreme agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).1
They’ve shut ordinary citizens out of the process, but we know from leaked documents2 that the TPP:
- Threatens Internet freedom by giving media conglomerates new powers to impose fines on Internet users, block websites, collect your private online information, and even cut off your access to the Internet.3
- Undermines our liberty and democracy by restricting our ability to make democratic decisions at a national and local level.4
We deserve to know what binding rules are being negotiated in these secretive TPP meetings, and we deserve to have our voices heard.
Send your message using our easy-to-use tool to the right [HERE], and we’ll put it on display right in front of TPP officials this Sunday. Supporters of our campaign have a table inside the TPP meeting space, and we’ll project your comments on the walls for all to see.
Let’s open the TPP together. Add your comment now
The TPP threatens your Internet freedom and democratic rights. Use this editable form to send your message and we’ll put it on display right in front of TPP officials this week.
Brought to you by OpenMedia, working with other members of the StopTheTrap.net Coalition
Footnotes
[1] The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a secretive multi-nation trade agreement that seeks, among other things, to rewrite the global rules on intellectual property enforcement. It is being negotiated behind closed doors by a group of 600 industry lobbyist “advisors” and un-elected government trade representatives.
[2] Public interest groups have obtained the February 2011 draft of the TPP’s Intellectual Property Rights Chapter and the TPP text on copyright Limitations and Exceptions. The text shows that the TPP would criminalize many everyday uses of the Internet, and give Big Media more Internet lockdown powers.
[3] See analysis from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, or infojustice.org.
[4] The TPP lacks transparency, public participation, and democratic accountability. In this letter, a number of U.S. civil society organizations detail and decry the opacity of the process.
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[hat tip: What Really Happened]
Al Jazeera website hacked by Syria’s Assad loyalists
thestar.com
September 4, 2012
DUBAI—The website of Qatar-based satellite news network Al Jazeera was apparently hacked on Tuesday by Syrian government loyalists for what they said was the television channel’s support for the “armed terrorist groups and spreading lies and fabricated news.”
A Syrian flag and statement denouncing al Jazeera’s “positions against the Syrian people and government” were posted on the Arabic site of the channel in response to its coverage of the uprising against President Bashar Assad, which began in March last year.
Al Jazeera took the lead in covering the uprisings across the Arab world, and Qatar, one of the Sunni-led states in the region, publicly backed the predominantly Sunni rebel movement in Syria against Assad’s Alawite-led government.
Opposition activists on Twitter blamed the hacking on Assad loyalists.
Jazeera officials were not immediately available for comment.
The hacking attack, claimed by a group calling itself “al-Rashedon”, is the latest in a wave of cyber attacks on news agencies and energy companies, carried out by hostile governments, militant groups or private “hacktivists” to make political points.
[CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE]
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[Potent News Editor’s note: Below is how the site looked to my cousin in Syria when this happened. Click image to enlarge.]
POTENT NEWS is now on TWITTER and FACEBOOK
PotentNews.com
September 4, 2012
Potent News is now on TWITTER and FACEBOOK.
http://twitter.com/potentnews
http://facebook.com/potentnews
If you aren’t already familiar with the fact that these things are also used as government spy tools, then have a quick look at our surveillance and internet sections here at Potent News (under tyranny, via the top menu).
That said, if you already use these social media tools and will not leave them anytime soon then feel free to tweet and use the fascist-book to share any Potent News posts that you find valuable.
The fight for internet freedom is always raging and we are truly in an information-war. There are victories but only if we remain vigilant in our quest for the truth.
Truther Cyber Conference This Weekend! (Free) [video]
The Truther Girls
August 31, 2012
I will be participating in this cyber conference this weekend and I would like to invite you to join me by signing up. A lot of people will be hosting rooms there including Prophetic Seer, Dutchsince, SheilaAliens, Doc Marquis, BelieversUnderground and many more. Conference is free but if you choose to make a donation and would like part to go to me, select ‘thetruthergirls’ from the drop-down menu.
More info here:
http://propheticseer.com/conference.html
and here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Noh9JnM171Q
I will be updating you in my FB group about when I will be there
http://facebook.com/TheTrutherGirls
Please send me your questions or topics you’d like me to cover via youtube message, FB message, or post them on my FB wall.
8/29/2012 — Cyber Summit 2012 — promotional [videos included]
ＤＵＴＣＨＳＩＮＳＥ = ＳＩＮＣＥＤＵＴＣＨ
August 29, 2012
The conference is FREE !! Three days of multiple speakers, videos, and presentations.
Labor day weekend — September 1-3, 2012 — the first ever “truther” conference — online via chat room… multiple speakers including:
http://www.youtube.com/dutchsinse
http://www.youtube.com/sheilaaliens
http://www.youtube.com/believersunderground
http://www.youtube.com/propheticseer
http://www.youtube.com/thetruthergirls
Also Doc Marquis, and possibly Intelhub !
Here are the links:
http://propheticseer.com/conference.html
here is the direct link to my conference room for this coming weekend:
http://tinychat.com/sincedutch
donate here:
https://payment.secure-ehost.com/cart_donations/?pcode=6af20a7a9000984e65328b363c632c97
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How Google and Apple’s digital mapping is mapping us
Digital maps on smartphones are brilliantly useful tools, but what sort of information do they gather about us – and how do they shape the way we look at the world?
by Oliver Burkeman
The Guardian
August 28, 2012
Over the last few years, at the kinds of conferences where the world’s technological elite gathers to mainline caffeine and determine the course of history, Google has entertained the crowds with a contraption it calls Liquid Galaxy. It consists of eight large LCD screens, turned on their ends and arranged in a circle, with a joystick at the centre. The screens display vivid satellite imagery from Google Earth, and the joystick permits three-dimensional “flight”, so that stepping inside Liquid Galaxy feels like boarding your own personal UFO, in which you can zoom from the darkness of space down to the ocean’s surface, cruising low over deserts, or inspecting the tops of skyscrapers. (The illusion of real movement is powerful; your legs may tremble.) You can swoop down to street-level in Cape Town, spot ships in the Mekong river, or lose yourself in the whiteness of Antarctica.
But you don’t, of course. What you do – or what I did, anyway, but watch anyone using Google Earth for the first time, and you’ll see they do the equivalent – is to hurtle across continents to the semi-detached house on the outskirts of York where you grew up, to peer down at a street you know well. In an era of previously unimagined opportunities for exploring the far-off and strange, we want mainly to stare at ourselves.
It is a testament to the rate of change in the world of mapping, though, that Liquid Galaxy is now essentially old hat. Google has much, much bigger plans. In June it revealed that it had already started using planes – “military-grade spy planes“, the New York senator Charles Schumer claimed – to provide more detailed 3D imagery of the world’s big cities. It also unveiled the Street View Trekker, a bulky backpack with several 15-megapixel cameras protruding on a stalk, so that operatives can capture “offroad” imagery from hiking trails, narrow alleyways or the forest floor. Almost every month, new kinds of data are incorporated into Google Maps: in June, it was 2,000 miles of British canal towpaths, complete with bridges and locks; it was bike lanes. And for the first time, Google’s dominance of digital mapping faces a credible threat: Apple has announced that it will no longer include Google Maps on iPhones or iPads, replacing it with an alternative that, an Apple source told the tech blog All Things D, “will blow your head off”.
“I honestly think we’re seeing a more profound change, for mapmaking, than the switch from manuscript to print in the Renaissance,” says the University of London cartographic historian Jerry Brotton. “That was huge. But this is bigger.” The transition to print gave far more people access to maps. The transition to ubiquitous digital mapping accelerates and extends that development – but it is also transforming the roles that maps play in our lives.
Breaking: Judge Orders Release of US Marine Detained for Facebook Posts
theintelhub.com
August 23, 2012
A judge has ordered the release of patriot marine Brandon Raub after he was essentially abducted and held against his will for posts he made on Facebook that the government deemed suspicious.
The petition put forward by the state was deemed devoid of ANY factual allegations and the judge was actually shocked that Raub had been held with no legitimate grounds to do so.
The judge as well as the Rutherford Institute should be applauded for their quick action in support of Raub’s first amendment protected rights.
From RT:
On the basis that there was zero reason to detain a retired Marine and commit him to a medical facility for psychiatric evaluation, a Virginia judge has demanded that Brandon Raub be released from custody immediately.
Raub, 26, had his home visited one week earlier by FBI, Secret Service and local law enforcement agents who expressed concern over a series of Facebook posts he had made on his public social networking profile.
They detained him without charge and admitted him to a local hospital for evaluation.
“The petition is so devoid of any factual allegations that it could not be reasonably expected to give rise to a case or controversy,” reads a signed statement by Circuit Judge W. Allan Sharrett, which was provided to the Richmond Times-Dispatch Thursday afternoon.
Judge Sharrett adds that he was shocked to find that a magistrate did not include any grounds at all for holding Raub, who was placed in custody for a full week without any charges being pressed.
Earlier in the week, attorneys representing Raub from the Rutherford Institute attacked the mishandling of the case by suggesting that the entire ordeal was a war on their client’s constitutional rights.
“This is not how justice in America is supposed to work — with Americans being arrested for doing nothing more than exercising their First Amendment rights, forced to undergo psychological evaluations, detained against their will and isolated from their family, friends and attorneys.
This is a scary new chapter in our history,” Rutherford Institute President John W. Whitehead says in a statement released on Tuesday this week.
“Brandon Raub is no different from the majority of Americans who use their private Facebook pages to post a variety of content, ranging from song lyrics and political hyperbole to trash talking their neighbors, friends and government leaders.”
Days before he was detained, Raub had made a series of posts that reportedly worried the authorities.
His most recent postings included critique of the investigation of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and other messages, such as, “The Revolution will come for me. Men will be at my door soon to pick me up to lead it” and “Sharpen up my axe; I’m here to sever heads.
“The bottom line is his freedom of speech has been violated,” Raub’s mother, Cathleen Thomas, told the Associated Press after her son was detained.
On Thursday, she told the Times-Dispatch that the entire ordeal has been “phenomenal” and that others could be considered because, “This could have happened to anyone.”
“This has never been about anything but freedom of speech…. We’re going to continue to post on Facebook,” Thomas continued, adding that she considered her son a “true patriot.”
Raub served in both Iraq and Afghanistan and says he had been considering reenlisting before last week’s events.
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