How Much Control Does The Government Have Over The Internet

I cant believe that with all the government has done in the past that they dont have huge projects going to take complete control over the internet. Not only do I feel they have tried, I think they have made alot of breakthroughs.

I say this based on a few points that I am realing off from the top of my head:

1) Controlling people, especially subversives has always been their goal. I believe they are creating mirror worlds that look like the internet, and have live feeds from the internet but are in actuallity controlled environments through which government agencies can isolate and control the activity of members of the public.

2) I believe there is an inherent element in society that has historically been a 'slave' class ie, the general worker. This worker how ever is no longer reliant on a work environment in order to make friends as they can go to the internet, and even figure out a way of leaving the area they are enslaved in. Huge topic, but in a nutshell, I believe the government realise their workforce is liable to become enlightened and leave and they are doing everything they can stop that. Primarily by seperating male from female electronically. I know you can find people, but I believe alot of them are artificial intellengences based on real people. The actual people you meet never get your messages. Example, no one will ever actually see what I am typing before it has been edited by a government agency. I'm not saying its 100% but it would work in quaranteen environments where the government no longer wants a person to be 'at large' on the net.

3) An observation regarding spam. Have you ever noticed the virulence of spam, how it always finds you in regular volumes saying the same stuff. I am convinced that most spam is government controlled or ksourced from governement agencies. All my spam is 'peculiar' in that it promotes pills, sex, introducations, business opportunities and urgent orders. This is in contrast to what I would consider to be normal spam. Why do we not get more slightly vieled political spam, hate spam, spam from criminal, murderers and spam from real idiots? It seems that all spam I get has a subliminal 'government' slant to it, to the end that I am actually a Nigerian looking to con the world with bank transfers, my private member is 1" and I am hopeless with girls, that I am tired, fatigued and getting old, and other stuff to undermine, degrade and belittle me. What i'm saying is that spam is carefully designed to transmit a subliminal demoralising message to its recipient.

4) Search engines. I believe that search engines are controlled by the government. I believe that the government has instructed the major search engines to provide a high level secure access through to their system under predefined conditions that allow them to rouute traffic, seperate and show 'personalised' search results to 'surfers'. ie, as a free thinker I believe that the government has some how taken control of my immediate surfing route and is modifying the results I recieve. certain things will never show whilst others will get high rankings. This means I am more likely to find certain items, and to never find other stuff. In particular I am thinking about finding like minded people.

5) ISP and Telcos. Each computer is tracable and most people dont roam that much. I believe that the government has a high level agreement with every ISP in their country to reroute certain users to their top secret data centre where they take control of your access to the world. This means they can filter all my e-mails and see everyplace I have been on the net and what I am doing and what I am organising.

6) I have alot of trouble actually trying to surf outside of my own country, like there are electronic barriers in place.

7) viruses. It strikes me that some of these virsuses and their timing can only come from highly controlled organisations, like Microsoft, places that understand the very finite mechanics of a computer. I am IT literate but I dont have a clue how to create viruses. I believe the government has a viruses department responsible for sending debilitating viruses to subversives, at home and overseas.

These are all just thoughts really, and i'm guessing, but i'm convinced that the government, that has historically does so much worse, has tried to 'maintain their ability to control the country' through elicit control of the internet. All I have done is think over the last 2 years, 'how would they do it'. In my opinion, of course they would try to do it. When you think about it, there are not alot of people in the world with great IT skills. There are alot of people, but most people in business are too busy running their business, kids too busy being kids. When you think about it, there is a finite level of high risk elements. For example, when I consider my street, there are very few people that I would consider to be IT literate. As a percentage extrapolated to the real world it would make sense to try to put in some governemtn control measures.

Any thoughts on all this? Sorry for spelling mistakes. I have three white vans parked outside my home and all the neigbours have been replaced by government agents, and its all putting my under alot of stress. Spelling is not a high priority.

I don't want to refute your points in as much as I want to give you a different perspective on them.

#1,#2,#4 & #5: While I am in agreence with you on the desire for the government, and I'm assuming you're referring to the US Government, to control the citizenry, I doubt it occurs in the method you outline. The sheer scope of such as a project would be too massive to undertake. We do know that the government scans e-mails & other electronic communications (The "Eschelon System" ATS Thread on Echelon) though. This is probably enough for their purposes. To developed a "contained world" for only certain individuals to use while having the impression they are interacting with the real world seems, well to be honest, pointless. If the government found someone to be such a threat or they desired to surveil them that much, they could just arrest them. Under the Patriot Act, they can.

#3 You're right, your spam is directed at you personally, but not in the way you think. ATSer Twitchy pointed that out us in this thread. If you use Yahoo! or GMail, they monitor your searches. Some spyware monitors the types of sites you go to, then tailors your spam to that. I bought a new home, and before I did some searching for real estate. For several months after, all of my spam was "home purchase" related. You must do a lot of political searches to get political spam.

#6 Search engines like Yahoo! and Google have advanced searching pages where you can change the primary country you are searching from and your results are tailored accordingly. If I search for "baseball" under US settings, I'll get US pages. If I change it to Korea, I'll get Korean pages.

#7 Viruses are unfortunately, relatively easy to create in and of themselves. The massive viruses, the ones that make the news, are much more difficult to pull off and you may be on to something about government creation, or at least involvement in them.

I have three white vans parked outside my home and all the neigbours have been replaced by government agents, and its all putting my under alot of stress.

I hope that this last part was in jest. You bring up some very good possibilities in your post. However remember Occam's Razor: the most simple solution is the most probable. If the government wanted you, they'd have you.

Cheers for the reply. I was unaware of the Echelon stuff. However, thats sort of what I was thinking about, but I think thats a bit too institutional to the extent that it appears focussed on large corporates. What i'm hedging on is a very simple solution that harnesses the power of the internet. For example, I cannot load Google.com, it keeps defaulting to Google.co.uk. I recently tried to find a list of all the global Googles and couldn't. I do make progress, but the point is, I think the government has a finger in controlling how all that works. It doesn't have to be full proof because no one will notice. If I spend an evening surfing the web, a typical history page in my browser will contain 20-50 sites that i've visited. As a result I believe that I have seen the whole world. The Way Back machine has tried to copy the internet and they work on a budget. A determined government program could do far more. I believe Microsoft map the internet at an incredible rate and mirror/cache it in their huge datawarehouses for a variety of reasons. But the simplicity of the solution that I think must have been thought about caters for error. Like a coastal laggon that feeds from the ocean, the fish there never get out, but they think they see all there is to see.

To put it more clearly, if you think about child molesters and murderers and real potential criminals, dont you think the governemnt of any western nation would have a minister to whom they expect awnsers to such questions as, 'WTF are we going to do about it?' ie, how are we going to control it. So, reverse that argument, lets not monitor the bad guys, lets monitor the good guys and protect them. How do you stop your children being abducted? Take that approach, the need to defend the most valued assets we have, our people, alot of whom are gullable, niave and unaware of the full dangers, and clearly there is an imperitive to do something, and then extend that to how far reaching it could lay, so far that it could encompass all the ATS members. A simple system would tag ip's on this site. That system could internally flag them up as amber, then, if they keep coming up, flag them as red, etc etc, all binery, so what we have is a computer system logging a wide range of user activity so much so that if you have been to 20 different high risk sites then you are monitored? The government could easily set lures and traps on sites made to look like normal sites in the same way they have girls posing as hookers in the US streets in order to get the low down. THe project could produce no immediatly tangable results, but would provide a test bed of intelligence on how it could be done and the sort of results that can be achieved. Combine this with high level security systems in routers, the ip protocol and such and you have the potential for quite alot.

Personally I believe like you that what i'm saying is a lot of bull as i'm just a regular dude that is no real threat to anyone, but the reason for this thread is to pause to think about the potential, and speculate about what could be done. I think the Echelon project is the tip of the iceberg. Like any high level system, there will always be the AREA 51 magnets that everyone thinks are where the action is at, but a real government program would probably be very simple, distributed and capable of being easily covered.

One extra point that I thought about was e-mails. I run a few sites and never have I ever had an e-mail that has led to a positive development in my life. I'm not complaining as they are mostly rubbish, but the point is, after 5 years online, I would have expected someone somewhere to have e-mailed me saying 'hey, we have a common interest, lets do something'. Now I often think that a government agency is blocking any e-mails like that. Of course it could be that I really am unpopular, but i'm not convinced. Moreover, when I have sent e-mails to people in similar positions, I have never recieved a reply. Now all that sort of says to me that there is a higher force at play.

Regarding your spam reply. I get spam that has no relevence to what I have been looking for. I dont get spam for anything related to death, murder, terrorism or anything, but I get alot of e-mails about school girls and their horses. I dont have a fascination for death at all, but after researching the 911 events I found myself in all sorts of places like Rotten, and sites with jumpers, Idi Amen, and Charles Manson. After searching all that it sort of became clear to me that its an isue that must have been addressed at some level.

Finally, regardsing the white vans. Its true. I dont really think they're full of reconiscence people as I believe they would be far more discrete, but it makes me think. I go out at 2am in the morning and just as I leave the door, there it is pulling up to park. At 2am in the morning!!! Nothing unusual about that, but with everything else, I do get paranoid. Pissed off more than anything.

One last point, I think you have to bear in mind the fabric of society, how society has formed over the years, the structure of the social order, and the impact that that has had on people. I think understanding that is key to understanding why they would want to control the internet as much as possible. and that revolves around the small end of the equation. Control of the regular dudes like, er, me.... You might be a government agent for all I know!!!!

Another thing. Developing a contained world is not that hard. You dont create borders, you just, make certain places very hard to find. And you dont need to do that by attacking what you dont want seen, you do that by promoting what you do want seen. Promoting sites that say the right stuff. Driving traffic, controlling it. I got this idea from a book on php which introduces the subject of secure logins with a conditional look that asks for your sex. It then routes all the girls to the main area with the message HELLO, and all the blokes to another area where it says PLEASE TALK AMONGST YOURSELF HERE. It goes on forever, but I need to go to the pub and enjoy a snippet of this great summer evening!!!

Just a little thing to be added down there.

NSA Echelon system based on key-word capture features working on mail, searching, homing internet systems, EDGE - UMTS - WAP - Cellphones transmition systems (GPRS), still can't display every information brought up everywhere in the world. They are concentrating on a target-land or an area where they might be able to obtain valuable and reliable datas. If the NSA had to keep an eye on every mail containing the word "Bomb", even a Cray MX supercomputer wouldnt be able to filtrate everything.

About google: I dont know how it works in UK, but here in Switzerland, I connect to witchever google search homepage I want. And there is a homepage for every country in the world. even for iceland (350'000 inhabitants, www.google.is) or for cameroun (76'450 computers plugged to the internet www.google.cm). Don't think there's a governemental control to the pages you access. There's a root configuration of your browser when you specifiy what country you're living in, which makes you use the "english" search motor, but nothing opposes you to reinstall windows in russian or dutch and use www.google.ru or google.nl

About the american eye on the web: there are a few things that have been set up about criminal acts on the net, considering the terrorists and the pornography, the hacking and piracy and the information control.
There's NO tom clancy's Net force-like agency in the USA to control the web.

NCA (net criminal agreements) specifies that the FBI or any agency in the US (mostly DIA) can access to computers via the net which are supposed to contain against-law data. Then it's like for phone surveyance. Of course it's illegal. But they do so. So why not for the net.

So I groundly agree with you. It's possible for the governement to access to the data sent and received on PCs. But theres NO international organisation that can access your datas. But maybe Microsoft!

Captain Cute: I'm very intrigued by the things you are saying regarding your experiences on the 'net. Please share any more specifics if you feel you can. Don't worry, I'm not a government agent!

If you'd like to see the international versions of google go to the bottom of this page.

It should have each nations individual Google site. If you can't use it, well, then you just may be on to something.

I know I could get foriegn stuff whenever, but the fact that my particular set up is defaulting to .co.uk is just symbolic. My point is that most people, especially the less savy, wont bother and will revert to whats easiest. They have been channeled into the UK. Its keeping the stupid people in their place type thing. The sheep wont wonder.

El Topo. I couldn't care if there were government agents here. I have nothing to hide. My beef is with the way governments work, or my 'aprehensions'. I know they do stuff. For example, I know they support fear as its a tool to keep the sheep in their place. In England the government support over 100 Gypsy camps that so that gypsys of no fixed abode can wander the land robbing people and find almost anywhere to stay. People are scared of them, they cause fear, they cause terror, they are terrorists, and the UK government supports them. They do the same on the internet. They support things that'll cause you concern, its called e-government, and the idea is to ply propoganda to appise the masses. Personally I have not experienced anything directly that I can recall, but I am sure that alot of spam comes from government sanctioned sources. The idea is that spam is supposed to be damaging, but its always passive in a distant sense, always from Nigeria or India. Why? Because that fits their model. But if people really wanted money wouldn't they try less ludicrous things? Who is going to buy a powder drug off of the internet? No one, who are they kidding? Its untracable and causes a 'fear' or hassle. The thing that springs directly to mind is dating agencies. I know this might sound gay, but it makes sense to do something like MySpace in the UK, but they dont. I believe if anyone tried to create a system that helped liberate people from the isolated tyranny of their immediate surroundings by meeting people the government would come right down on top of them and they would soon be out of business. Instead though you can pay to join dating sites that are full of promise and so lame that you know no one is using them, so how do they stay in business? Government nods here and there. I'm not saying theres a government paper on dating agencies, I know i'm on thin ice, but its a good example. People need certain things. The government controlled people in certain ways historically, but now there is a big hole because of the internet, people can escape, but the reality is a bit different. And when I use the word government I use it loosley to encompass company directors and land owners etal. They are jointly controlling 90% of the UK economy which relys on control, control which they are loosing grip on. The people are no longer dependent on jobs to survive. They need money, but alot of people are finding there is potential to make a living off of the internet. They are free of the state, and the state doesn't like that because the people making it big are not managers, but the existing 'working class'. Those that would otherwise have had to work for the managers in their big houses. Now the roles are reveresed and the managers are useless because there is no one to manage and they would sooner die than stack boxes in a warehouse, and so there is a power struggle, and the government plays its cards and who do you think will help.... Er, better start helping business thats going to put the people in their place, support anything lame, lame job hunter business start ups full of the promise of a happy enslavement under a government sanctioned corporate mandate, er, packing boxes. I dont have much evidence, but I can see it all with my minds eye. There is a shift. People , kids, are walking around having made huge earnings from the internet, and alot of people dont like that, and those that dont that are in power are not just sitting there taking it all up the ass. I dont guess its any different to how its always been regarding small business, but theres a huge shift and people are realling. One things for sure, theres a lot more wide spread condemnation of government, especaiily amongst the disadvantaged, and thats just going to get bigger and bigger. Before the internet, people were passive about TV, now people dont watch TV or absorb all that shift, the power elite of TV creators has dies, and people create their own entertainment, an example of which is ATS. Were not going to change the world by anything said here, but this is all different.

I'm ranting now. But really, i'm sure they are fucing with the internet, I just cant put my finger on it. Of course we cant confuse government wiht plain ass capatilist scam merchants, same #, just a different order. etc etc etc yawn yawn yawn. The internet represents freedom, creativity, and individualism, and no governmant likes that. Mention the word INTERNET to most company directors and they get scared because the truth of their managenet could be up there. They cant afford to do what they used to do. They might not end up in court, but they and their company could certainly end up on the internet in front of the whole world. They dont like that, its a threat. My money is on the fact that the government would bring in, if they could, internet regestration and tax. In the UK they tax the TV!!!! They charge a tax for watching video images!!! Why, because they can. TV is a joke now, and so is government. And, er, small nations have been invaded for laughing at big governemts, Checkoslovavia, or however its spelt was invaded by Russia. I am scared of the British Government, and I dont trust them. And doing stuff to the internet is just their cup of tea, if they were clever enough.

I know I could get foriegn stuff whenever, but the fact that my particular set up is defaulting to .co.uk is just symbolic. My point is that most people, especially the less savy, wont bother and will revert to whats easiest. They have been channeled into the UK. Its keeping the stupid people in their place type thing. The sheep wont wonder.

El Topo. I couldn't care if there were government agents here. I have nothing to hide. My beef is with the way governments work, or my 'aprehensions'. I know they do stuff. For example, I know they support fear as its a tool to keep the sheep in their place. In England the government support over 100 Gypsy camps that so that gypsys of no fixed abode can wander the land robbing people and find almost anywhere to stay. People are scared of them, they cause fear, they cause terror, they are terrorists, and the UK government supports them. They do the same on the internet. They support things that'll cause you concern, its called e-government, and the idea is to ply propoganda to appise the masses. Personally I have not experienced anything directly that I can recall, but I am sure that alot of spam comes from government sanctioned sources. The idea is that spam is supposed to be damaging, but its always passive in a distant sense, always from Nigeria or India. Why? Because that fits their model. But if people really wanted money wouldn't they try less ludicrous things? Who is going to buy a powder drug off of the internet? No one, who are they kidding? Its untracable and causes a 'fear' or hassle. The thing that springs directly to mind is dating agencies. I know this might sound gay, but it makes sense to do something like MySpace in the UK, but they dont. I believe if anyone tried to create a system that helped liberate people from the isolated tyranny of their immediate surroundings by meeting people the government would come right down on top of them and they would soon be out of business. Instead though you can pay to join dating sites that are full of promise and so lame that you know no one is using them, so how do they stay in business? Government nods here and there. I'm not saying theres a government paper on dating agencies, I know i'm on thin ice, but its a good example. People need certain things. The government controlled people in certain ways historically, but now there is a big hole because of the internet, people can escape, but the reality is a bit different. And when I use the word government I use it loosley to encompass company directors and land owners etal. They are jointly controlling 90% of the UK economy which relys on control, control which they are loosing grip on. The people are no longer dependent on jobs to survive. They need money, but alot of people are finding there is potential to make a living off of the internet. They are free of the state, and the state doesn't like that because the people making it big are not managers, but the existing 'working class'. Those that would otherwise have had to work for the managers in their big houses. Now the roles are reveresed and the managers are useless because there is no one to manage and they would sooner die than stack boxes in a warehouse, and so there is a power struggle, and the government plays its cards and who do you think will help.... Er, better start helping business thats going to put the people in their place, support anything lame, lame job hunter business start ups full of the promise of a happy enslavement under a government sanctioned corporate mandate, er, packing boxes. I dont have much evidence, but I can see it all with my minds eye. There is a shift. People , kids, are walking around having made huge earnings from the internet, and alot of people dont like that, and those that dont that are in power are not just sitting there taking it all up the ass. I dont guess its any different to how its always been regarding small business, but theres a huge shift and people are realling. One things for sure, theres a lot more wide spread condemnation of government, especaiily amongst the disadvantaged, and thats just going to get bigger and bigger. Before the internet, people were passive about TV, now people dont watch TV or absorb all that shift, the power elite of TV creators has dies, and people create their own entertainment, an example of which is ATS. Were not going to change the world by anything said here, but this is all different.

I'm ranting now. But really, i'm sure they are fucing with the internet, I just cant put my finger on it. Of course we cant confuse government wiht plain ass capatilist scam merchants, same #, just a different order. etc etc etc yawn yawn yawn. The internet represents freedom, creativity, and individualism, and no governmant likes that. Mention the word INTERNET to most company directors and they get scared because the truth of their managenet could be up there. They cant afford to do what they used to do. They might not end up in court, but they and their company could certainly end up on the internet in front of the whole world. They dont like that, its a threat. My money is on the fact that the government would bring in, if they could, internet regestration and tax. In the UK they tax the TV!!!! They charge a tax for watching video images!!! Why, because they can. TV is a joke now, and so is government. And, er, small nations have been invaded for laughing at big governemts, Checkoslovavia, or however its spelt was invaded by Russia. I am scared of the British Government, and I dont trust them. And doing stuff to the internet is just their cup of tea, if they were clever enough.