Obama designates even the existence of the program a secret, which means our democratic representatives and all of official Washington are barred by the force of law from commenting on it or even acknowledging that a CIA drone program exists (a prohibition enforced by an administration that has prosecuted leaks it dislikes more harshly than any other prior administration). Quote from Glenn Greenwald's article : Snapshots of Washington’s essence by Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com, December 28, 2011
#OWS Update:
Occupy movement helps protect US family home from bank
Uploaded by AlJazeeraEnglish on Dec 26, 2011
Al Jazeera has been meeting families across the world as part of a series about how ordinary people have been affected by some of the biggest events of 2011.
Christmas with #Occupy Wall Street
Uploaded by OccupyTVNY on Dec 27, 2011
Christmas 2011 came on the 100th day of Occupy Wall Street, and was celebrated in Zucotti Park with music, gifts, food, and a Mass led by Father Clyde Kuemmerle of Ecclesia Ministries, which serves people in the parks of New York City.
The SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act ) is a dangerous and insidious attack on Internet freedom and on Freedom Of Speech. It is a Trojan Horse as it were defended by both government and Big Business and those in the Entertainment who have been duped into defending these new regulations.New regulations for the internet will shut down many sites including Bloggers such as this blog . This is being done by the Obama administration under the guise initially of protecting copy-rites which enables government intrusion and censorship of the content of blogs and websites. The government will hold the major search engines such as Google liable for infractions of the law. This will lead at the least to a chilling effect in which if for instance Goggle is uncertain about a particular blog for self-preservation they may shut it down in fear of prosecution. It is as they say "the thin edge of the wedge". It will create and environment in which government and private industry can take control of what is posted on the internet supposedly to defend National Security, Copyrite and any critique of government or Big Business, Wall Street etc.
SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) is the End of Us, say Bloggers | Common Dreams
also see: GoDaddy withdraws SOPA support in face of massive protests By Nilay Patel at TheVerge.com, December 23, 2011
and:
How SOPA Will Destroy The Internet by Mark Jeftovic on December 22, 2011
I finally got around to reading the text of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) today. While the ostensible intentions are to combat online piracy and the sale of counterfeit goods, the bad news is that the legislation contains elements which basically puts every single domain registered under generic TLDs under the authority of the United States Attorney General.
We have already seen in cases of the ICE domain seizures, improper takedowns and overreach resulting in the takedown of tens of thousands of websites when a single one was the target.
and: All About SOPA, the Bill That Wants to Cripple Your Internet Very Soon by Adam Dachis at lifehacker.com, December 16,2011
SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act, is another one of those bills that sounds like it's going to do something mildly positive but, in reality, has serious potential to negatively change the internet as we know it. It puts power in the hands of the entertainment industry to censor sites that allegedly "engage in, enable or facilitate" copyright infringement. This language vague enough to encompass sites you use every day, like Twitter and Facebook, making SOPA a serious problem. Here's how it works and what you can do about it.
How Does SOPA Work, and Why Should I Care?
The idea behind SOPA sounds reasonable. It came about in order to try to snuff out piracy online, as the entertainment industry is obviously not excited about the many people downloading their product without their permission. The issue is, however, that it doesn't really matter whether you're in support of piracy, against it, or just don't care. SOPA makes it possible for companies to block the domain names of web sites that are simple capable of, or seem to encourage copyright infringement.
This means that if Lifehacker happened to have an article or two that could be interpreted as piracy-friendly, our domain could be blocked so it's unaccessible by visiting lifehacker.com.
And the Obama administration is attacking freedom of speech in other ways by insisting on even more secrecy in government and making examples of Whistleblowers with indefinite detention and labeling them as "traitors" or even Cyber-terrorists.
Obama Makes it illegal to even discuss the secret Drone Killing Program.
As Glenn Greenwald points out the quisling Democrats and the mainstream Media and Obama supporters fail to criticize the use of drones for targeted killings which more often than not turn into Massacres of innocent civilians.
So if it is illegal to discuss in the media or public the super-secret Drone attacks and targeted assassinations then this censorship by the Obama administration could be extended to social networking sites ie Facebook ,Twitter and even YOUTUBE and Bloggers and Websites etc.
For instance the Occupy Movement is highly dependent upon its message getting out through the internet since the Mainstream Media is reluctant to give comprehensive coverage to the movement.
So like the Chinese government and Egyptians, Saudis, Syrians etc. the U.S. government and its supporters see the Internet 's fairly free transmission of information as a real threat to America's security and as a threat to the 1% who control the levers of government and private concerns.
Snapshots of Washington’s essence by Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com, December 28, 2011
...In sum: the President can kill whomever he wants anywhere in the world (including U.S. citizens) without a shred of check or oversight, and has massively escalated these killings since taking office (at the time of Obama’s inauguration, the U.S. used drone attacks in only one country (Pakistan); under Obama, these attacks have occurred in at least six Muslim countries). Because it’s a Democrat (rather than big, bad George W. Bush) doing this, virtually no members of that Party utter a peep of objection (a few are willing to express only the most tepid, abstract “concerns” about the possibility of future abuse). And even though these systematic, covert killings are widely known and discussed in newspapers all over the world — particularly in the places where they continue to extinguish the lives of innocent people by the dozens, including children — Obama designates even the existence of the program a secret, which means our democratic representatives and all of official Washington are barred by the force of law from commenting on it or even acknowledging that a CIA drone program exists (a prohibition enforced by an administration that has prosecuted leaks it dislikes more harshly than any other prior administration).
...The Most Transparent Administration Ever™ not only prevents public debate by shrouding the entire program in secrecy — including who they’re killing and why, and even including their claimed legal basis for these killings (what Democratic lawyers decried during the Bush years as the tyranny of “secret law”) — but they then dispatch their own officials to defend what they’re doing solely under the cover of anonymity so there is no accountability.
...Obama officials love secret, targeted killing far more even than Bush officials did. They’re “always ready to step on the accelerator” (and, of course, they went further than Bush by even targeting U.S. citizens far from any battlefield). Only Admiral Blair raised objections, and was fired for them, and is now reduced to explaining in Op-Eds that these killings at this point do relatively little to harm Al Qaeda but rather do the opposite: they increase the risk of Terrorism by fueling anti-American hatred, predictably left in the wake of the corpses of innocent men, woman and children throughout the Muslim world piled up by the Obama program.
also see:
"Secrecy Defines Obama’s Drone War"
by Karen DeYoung at CommonDreams, December 20, 2011
Since September, at least 60 people have died in 14 reported CIA drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal regions. The Obama administration has named only one of the dead, hailing the elimination of Janbaz Zadran, a top official in the Haqqani insurgent network, as a counterterrorism victory.
The identities of the rest remain classified, as does the existence of the drone program itself. Because the names of the dead and the threat they were believed to pose are secret, it is impossible for anyone without access to U.S. intelligence to assess whether the deaths were justified.
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