Kiss Your Internet Goodbye!

If the U.S. government was going to prevent public access to the Internet, they would have done it in the early 1990's. As the old saying goes, "You can't put the genie back in the bottle." It's too late to do so now, even if the U.S. government wanted to...

They would have to shut down the entire telephone network to do it. That would kill all business activity in the US stone dead. It would be impossible. to do.

It's like saying close down the entire postal system because someone might write something naughty.

The PTB would love to shut it down because they can no longer control free speech. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle. People no longer believe what they see on TV or read in the newspapers. The internet is way ahead, and without censorship.

I truly believe that the internet is something the PTB did not anticipate, and it is what will eventually screw them.




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Originally posted by mpeake
Boy, think of the horrible things that would happen without the internet for a short period of time. Kids would be forced to go outside and see the sun, fathers could take thier boys fishing over the weekend, husbands and wives wouldn't be able to cheat online, people would have to write out and mail thier own letters, creepy old men couldn't stalk young children online, you might actually have to to to the library to look something up.

Boy, I don't know if I'd mind a break from the internet, especially if meant I was being protected in the meantime from terrorist attacks.

But you wouldn't be protected, at least not in any reasonable sense of the word. By that definition, the international community helped "protect" part of Czechoslovokia by giving it up to Germany in the late 30s.
On top of that, terrorists aren't attacking us. It's all a scam engineered to help big brother do things they openly admit "we've wanted to do for the last 10 years". I have posted in the past about the many simple operations to destroy America's way of life that a CIA trained multi-millionaire supervillian like Osama could easily carry out if he were the real enemy, and I consider the peace we currently enjoy at home to be evidence of the truth.

As for the library... do you intend to deny that the internet has revolutionized access to information? It has only taken me a few hours today to compile a wealth of information about the likely causes and treatment of gulf war syndrome. I am confident that if I were suffering from it myself, I could have identified the problem and self-treated thanks to the information online- information which the press has rejected in favor of the government's explanation of that it is psychological.

The suppression of the internet will take vast ammounts of information away from the average person and restrict them to more tightly controlled media.
When the FCC limit on holdings of TV and radio stations was lifted, I had a great idea... the kind of idea that would make sure a persons name was positively immortal (and infamous).

Suppose I'm Ross Perot, and I'm bored. I can pick out a small rurual area, for example the small farming community of Los Banos, CA. I can buy up the local cable company, radio stations and UHF TV stations, and the utilities provider. Now I create "technical difficulties" which shut down network TV to the town. All of my radio stations and UHF TV stations proceed to report on a brewing conflict in North Korea and nuclear saber rattling (all of it entirely fraudulent). Finally, I announce that the president will be going live to make a "significant announcement" regarding the conflict. Then I announce a delay because of a change of plans causing the broadcast to be made from Airforce 1. Then I kill my TV stations and several radio stations, and report from a hand full of radio stations that there has apparently been a nuclear attack on a major US city.

Why can't I trick a small city into thinking the apocalypse is upon us for a brief time? 1. Ham and CB radio. 2. The internet. 3. inter-city communications by phone, travel, correspondence.

Now check this out... what if I was powerful enough to do this to the WHOLE COUNTRY. I could take away the internet. Lead, distract, and threaten the major news networks, gain the cooperation of the UK, coerce the cooperation of nations which rely on America economically or politically, and demonize dissenting nations like France, Germany, Russia, and even the UN. (I'm not saying those nations are right in the present situation, i'm just saying the stage is set so that if they ARE right against the US gov't some day, nobody will listen!) Who could keep America out of my control then? Even if the internet was there for that matter, who could do it? A few faint voices in the unfathomable roar of traffic on the internet would be unlikely to threaten me unless I was far too bold anyway.

Think about it... if there was no internet- no mass communication of ideas and information without respect to borders- and America then forced Afghanistan to pay tribute in oil, how would Americans ever know?
-The Germans, French and Russians would shout it from the rooftops though, right? THEY'RE DOING THAT RIGHT NOW, and Americans hate them for it because we don't believe when they say that we fought for oil alone.
-The media would find out and report it, or somebody in congress would blow the whistle... they dont sit in a smokefilled room planning to conquer the world... i watch C-SPAN... I know. BUT CONGRESS DOESN"T EVEN READ THE BILLS THEY PASS and THE MEDIA MERELY RECORDS WHAT POLITICIANS AND MILITARY LIASONS TELL THEM!
-The Afghan people would fight! You can't hide a war, can you? SURE YOU CAN, JUST DONT LET ANYONE PHOTOGRAPH THE COFFINS! If you take heavy casualties you can have training accidents or aircraft crashes... extend the unit's stay overseas but take them out of action so you can gradually let the accidents build up to explain the casualties.

How do we know anything? Frankly we dont. The internet is a strong tool to reduce the chance that we are decieved though. We can't be sheep about this. "It'll be OK, we can all go play outside now". How naive... we'll just buy playstations and you know it, and if we do play outside we'll be doing it in blissful ignorance, because we can't check facts for ourselves online! Mark my words, your sunny day at the beach that is supposed to replace the internet will swiftly turn into a scene from The Dead Kennedy's "Moon Over Marin".


One last thought... an incredible illustration of the use of the internet. I defy you to PROVE that nuclear weapons exist. I want you to go find somebody who as actually constructed a bomb out of plutonium and set it off and seen its power and can explain exactly how it works. Guess what, there are almost none of those people, and if the test ban holds for another 30 years there may not be -ANY-. Do you have the influence to get half an hour with a scientist from Los Alamos? I don't. But I can look up their credentials online, read their work online, maybe watch the bomb being detonated online, and find out if there is anyone what so ever who disputes them, and if there is I can find out how qualified the dissenting person is. I can do all of that before you had found your way through the card catalogue to the first book on the subject.

If it weren't for the internet, it would be VERY easy for many people to claim (convincingly) that nuclear weapons don't even exist and that the entire cold war was a scam.

Originally posted by Warpspeed
They would have to shut down the entire telephone network to do it. That would kill all business activity in the US stone dead. It would be impossible. to do.

It's like saying close down the entire postal system because someone might write something naughty.

The PTB would love to shut it down because they can no longer control free speech. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle. People no longer believe what they see on TV or read in the newspapers. The internet is way ahead, and without censorship.

I truly believe that the internet is something the PTB did not anticipate, and it is what will eventually screw them.

I don't know how, but North Korea has successfully quarantined their internet I believe.

Now I need an IT person to correct me if I'm wrong, but IP addresses are essentially coordinates, right? Your computer sends coordinates which route your request to the proper location on the phone grid and you access the computer there, right?

If that was the case, then monopolizing the phone system and equipping it with stations designed to disregard any unrecognized packet (no exceptions) would make it possible to confine access to approved computers, and the only way to hack through would be to disguise your request as a voice conversation, which would require the adoption of an entirely new kind of encryption, which both sides of the data exchange would have to have before they could communicate. All you'd have to do is find a way to keep a new encryption system from being spread over your "approved internet"- the obvious way to do this is by making the internet read only except from locations with the proper security clearance.

Hacking isn't a magic wand afterall. If you don't provide a computer with the means to do something, the hacker can't trick it into doing that. So you set up a simple computer... more like a complex relay or solenoid really, which by its very design can only communicate a few selected messages... all others messages simply would be terminated.

It's not impossible to set up... it would just take a large number of extremely intelligent people who aren't willing to quit just because it continuously fails to function for the first 10 years.

North Korea is a very poor country with little resources. Whereas here in the US we have an abundence (sp?) of technology at our disposal. In order to shut the internet down we would literally have to take our economy and our way of doing things back 20 to 30 years. Like I said previously, the internet just doesnt 'shut off' we cannot just replace every person in the united states with a dumb computer which will only relay certain messages and information. Hell, my PDA has more processing power than half the 3rd world countries computers! It would be damn near impossible for the govt to be able to do this and if they tried, they would have to pry my laptop from my cold dead hands

first off i would be very pissed if they took the internet away. one thing though, the internet is world wide so they couldn't shut down the whole thing. i'm no computer nerd, but isn't there ways to hook up via satelite even in areas where it is unavailable otherwise?

To all who have contributed to this debate, I just wanted to say it's been very interesting. I hope it continues. I found this article today; it talks about how the feds could deem the net a terrorist tool. The effect would be complete control over it. So just how free are we, anyway?

Pushing Fear for Total Control of the Internet and the End of Freedom of Press and Speech



Cyberspace Gives Al Qaeda Refuge

Los Angeles Times/August 15, 2004
By Douglas Frantz, Josh Meyer and Richard B. Schmitt Times Staff Writers

ISTANBUL, Turkey � In December, Al Qaeda operatives posted a manifesto on the Internet calling for attacks inside countries allied with the United States in Iraq ( news - web sites ). Spain, with elections approaching, was singled out as a target.

On March 11, terrorists set off bombs on four commuter trains in Madrid and killed 191 people. Three days later, Spanish voters replaced the pro-war government with a party whose leader had promised to withdraw the country's 1,300 troops from Iraq.

The posting of the strategy and the timing of the Madrid bombings shocked even the most hardened Al Qaeda watchers recently when they reviewed the little-known manifesto.

"It's quite extraordinary in that you have a group of people � talking about influencing a political process and then having it happen," said a U.S. national security official who analyzed the 54-page posting and spoke on condition that his name not be used. "Reading through this thing, it is just mind-blowing."

Since Osama bin Laden ( news - web sites ) and his followers were driven from their bases in Afghanistan ( news - web sites ), the Al Qaeda terrorist network has demonstrated an increasing ability to exploit the Internet as it reconfigures itself as a semi-leaderless global extremist movement far more elusive than the original incarnation.
www.infowars.com...

i dont think we r truly free
i think that they prob already monitor the internet...if they shut it down completely imagine how much info they would lose
they would.IMO.prefer 2 be able to monitor than have another avenue of information shut down....what do u think the chatter that the gov`s listens to is..its not just internet peeps...its ham radio all the way down the plain posted letters...as well as monitoring peeps reading intersests
no we are not truly free...IMO
p.s...i assume that IMO means in my opinion?

I can't see the world internet being controlled or stopped by the USA. However I could accept the possiblity that all incoming traffic to the USA could be stopped and that all out going traffic from the USA could be blocked.

Scary thought mind you.

China's internet is completely controlled.

If we were no longer able to use the internet, the government and related agencies would still have the ability (internal). So, they'd be uneffected.

One big cyber attack or an attack blamed on internet terrorists and they'd go into full wolf mode. All they need is their little pretext.

Originally posted by EastCoastKid
China's internet is completely controlled.

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Yes, that is why I posted what I did. I know it is possible. However sattelite links would be hard to stop, if not impossible, if the user has good knowledge of how the technolgy works.

But, 99% of users have no idea.

I could be wrong, but the internet was designed such a way that it would be almost invulnerable against anything and we see that even with viruses and what not it just keeps chugging along. The world wide web is just that and I think the only way to stop the internet is to destroy the telephone system. Who would benefit from that.

Maybe I don't know enough, but I just don't see it happening. No one owns the internet.

Originally posted by EastCoastKid
China's internet is completely controlled.


that`s right eck the prime word being "controlled"..not shut down
do u think maybe there have been arrests in china for trying to send(what the chinese gov thinks is)material that is of a danger to the gov of china?
i dont know m8 ...maybe we can look in2 it
that then is censorship for reasons that the gov thinks that censorship should be used...i.e..in cases of threat to the populace etc
but not complete shutdown


[edit on 16-8-2004 by Heratix]

[edit on 16-8-2004 by Heratix]

A lot of other things would probably be thrown into play, too. Internet access could become very hard for most people to come by at that time. If you could get it, tap into it, or whatever, it would be thoroughly controlled.

I thought Vagabond's comments were definitely worth chewing on, for example.

Originally posted by Heratix
that`s right eck the prime word being "controlled"..not shut down

Any number of things could happen. We're talking about extraordinary events and measures. One thing I learned in the Army: things can ALWAYS get worse. We could sustain (controlled) power outages, for example. Grids can be destroyed.. Use your imagination - as Bush sez they do.

do u think maybe there have been arrests in china for trying to send(what the chinese gov thinks is)material that is of a danger to the gov of china?

You can bet on it.

then is censorship for reasons that the gov thinks that censorship should be used...i.e..in cases of threat to the populace etc
but not complete shutdown

I can understand censorship when you're dealing with things military/intel, for example; but, as far as the public's concerned - we have every right to privacy and free exchange of ideas. (1st Ammendment) When the government controlled anything is a BAD idea. Too many folks in positions of power are more than willing to abuse it.

Originally posted by EastCoastKid


I can understand censorship when you're dealing with things military/intel, for example; but, as far as the public's concerned - we have every right to privacy and free exchange of ideas. (1st Ammendment) When the government controlled anything is a BAD idea. Too many folks in positions of power are more than willing to abuse it.

i think we think on the same level m8...too much power in the hands of small minded peeps who dont represent the majority
but maybe u could enlighten me a bit on...is it called the patriot act?
from what i understand(and i am very likely wrong..as u will understand if u read my welcome to ats message)it just about nullifies the first amendment?
sry to bother u with this but i am welsh(u.k)so i dont quite understand your gov type...lol

Not a problem! Glad I can (try) and be of some help.

I know the Patriot Act has basically nullified the 4th and the 6th, if I'm correct. We still supposedly have the right to free speech. From what I hear, it depends on where you're at and whose snoopin on you. It's insane.

The one that really pisses me off is (Search & Seizure) now they can just pop into your pad secretly, steal whatever possession of yours they want and then tell you or not down the road (use it against you). Asscroft and his band of lunatics are the worst thing that's ever come down the American pike!

I'll tell you about American freedom. Americans are as FREE as their bank accounts are big.. or small. If you have no extra money after bills, fines, taxes (you name it) - you are not FREE. You are a SLAVE.

maybe i am lucky then dude that i live in the u.k
we r monitored and we r kept in check...i.e flouride in the water,we also have a prob at the moment with prozac in the water..
what u think of that 1?
but we tend to find that some of the conversations that are held here, we in my country would talk about quite freely...maybe not shout them of a soapbox but we would talk about them..thats why i dont think any free thinking gov can shut down the internet...there would be uproar

No one is just going to shut down the internet. Come on. Who'd let them?

Originally posted by EastCoastKid
I'll tell you about American freedom. Americans are as FREE as their bank accounts are big.. or small. If you have no extra money after bills, fines, taxes (you name it) - you are not FREE. You are a SLAVE.

The one thing you are still free to do is emigrate.