by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger

(NaturalNews) The US government has issued a new report that recommends blocking access to popular websites during a pandemic outbreak in order to preserve internet bandwidth for investors, day traders and securities clearing house operations. The concern is that a pandemic would cause too many people to stay at home and download YouTube videos and porn, hogging all the internet bandwidth and blocking throughput for investment activities, thereby causing a stock market meltdown.

This isn’t an April Fool’s joke. It’s all based on a public report issued by the Government Accounting Office (GAO), available from their website athttp://www.gao.gov/new.items/d108.pdf

In this article, I’m going to explain how a pandemic outbreak could theoretically bring down Wall Street. But to get to that, you’ll first need to find out what the GAO said in its curious report (see below). Parts of this article are presented as satire, but the underlying facts quoted here are all true and verifiable (links are provided to all sources).

This report in question is entitled, “GAO Report to Congressional Requesters, INFLUENZA PANDEMIC” and includes this subtitle: Key Securities Market Participants Are Making Progress, but Agencies Could Do More to Address Potential Internet Congestion and Encourage Readiness.

As the report explains:

In a severe pandemic, governments may close schools, shut down public transportation systems, and ban public gatherings such as concerts or sporting events. In such scenarios, many more people than usual may be at home during the day, and Internet use in residential neighborhoods could increase significantly as a result of people seeking news, entertainment, or social contact from home computers. Concerns have been raised that this additional traffic could lead to congestion on the Internet that would significantly affect businesses in local neighborhoods, such as small doctors’ offices or businessemployees attempting to telework by connecting to their employers’ enterprise networks.

Can Hulu, Twitter and porn destroy Wall Street?

To translate this concern of the GAO, what they’re saying is that if too many people stay home and use the internet, Wall Street might not be able to function smoothly. Therefore, in order to protect Wall Street (because as you know, our government does everything possible to bail out Wall Street), the feds might need to shut down some popularwebsites.

But where, exactly, is all the bandwidth usage really coming from? Twitter uses virtually no bandwidth, given that it’s a short, text-based messaging service. Text articles also don’t use up much bandwidth. In terms of clogging the internet’s “series of tubes” (to use a hilarious term coined by a U.S. Senator), the real culprits are videos. While a Twitter text message might be less than 1k in size, a typical video is 350MB, or roughly 350,000 times larger than a Twitter message.

So where, exactly, are people getting video downloads? The most popular non-porn video destinations today are MySpaceTV.com, YouTube.com, LiveLeak.com, Yahoo Video and Hulu.com. But as it turns out, even these highly popular websites may not account for most internet traffic.

P2P traffic uses the most bandwidth

According to this TechRepublic post (http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/t…), the majority of internet traffic is actually P2P traffic. Anywhere from 49 to 89 percent of all internet traffic reportedly falls into this category.

Read the rest at this link.

by Paul Joseph Watson

High-tech fascism straight out of V For Vendetta on the horizon

In the 2005 movie V For Vendetta, a film about a totalitarian society ruled by a fascist government with an iron surveillance fist, there’s a scene where state spooks drive down a residential street with a gadget that records the conversations people are having inside their homes and gives them a rating on how antagonistic towards the authorities they are.

A frighteningly similar scenario is now on the horizon with the news that the CIA’s investment arm In-Q-Tel is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a company that monitors the output of social media, in order to “Read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon,” reports Wired News.

Of course, the fact that the U.S. government and the military have been overloading the Internet with pro-war propaganda and trolls who are paid to cheerlead for the war on terror and attack critics is an admitted part of their cyberwarfare agenda, and Israel has done the same.

However, the prospect of the CIA closely monitoring social networking websites, whose content largely comprises of inane gossip and sophomoric blabber, shows just how afraid the establishment is of rising popular opposition to their agenda.

“Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords,” according to Wired.

The software scores whether each post is positive, neutral or negative on a particular topic and can judge who the most influential poster is in a conversation, for example on a comment board or forum.

According to In-Q-Tel, it wants to use the technology to see how international issues are playing out in foreign media, but as the report notes, “Of course, such a tool can also be pointed inward, at domestic bloggers or tweeters. Visible already keeps tabs on web 2.0 sites for Dell, AT&T and Verizon. For Microsoft, the company is monitoring the buzz on its Windows 7 rollout. For Spam-maker Hormel, Visible is tracking animal-right activists’ online campaigns against the company.”

Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists warns that the software could be used to track and target critics of the government, as well as political figures and journalists.

“Intelligence agencies or employees might be tempted to use the tools at their disposal to compile information on political figures, critics, journalists or others, and to exploit such information for political advantage,” Aftergood told Wired.

Visible chief executive officer Dan Vetras said that the CIA was just one of several government clients that were using the technology and that more were on the horizon.

by Phil Gilaldi, C4L

Those of us who rely on the internet for alternative news and viewpoints should be concerned about some recent developments.  New legislation in Germany reported in the highly respected newspaper “Die Zeit” will require all internet users to be licensed with a backtracking feature that will enable the government to determine where any internet transmission originated.  The new regulations will apparently require all users to have a tamper proof internet ID and will be enforced by special police.  In Germany all telecommunications data, to include both internet and telephone, is already being retained by the government for six months under a law that has been in effect since 2008.  It is of particular interest to note what German politicians and officials have said in supporting the legislation.  One commented that it is necessary to stop the internet from becoming a “lawless chaos room.”  Another described the internet as a “source of criminality, terrorism, and much similar filth.”  Yet another said “What is illegal offline is also illegal online.”

Governments in many European countries and also in the US already read and monitor internet traffic.  Some countries like China and Iran already control the servers for internet as well as the cell phone centers in their country and have not been shy about shutting down communications when threatened with what they perceive to be civil disorder.  In many public places in Europe internet services are frequently screened by software that blocks certain websites and the use of words or phrases that are considered objectionable.  This screening is also becoming common in hotels and other public places that offer internet services in the United States.  But what is really dangerous is the development of technologies that make it possible to monitor the internet combined with legislation that gives the authorities the ability to go after users who can then be charged with illegal behavior, such as is happening in Germany.

AN OBAMA OFFICIAL’S FRIGHTENING BOOK ABOUT CURBING FREE SPEECH ONLINE

When it comes to the First Amendment, Team Obama believes in Global Chilling.

Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law professor who has been appointed to a shadowy post that will grant him powers that are merely mind-boggling, explicitly supports using the courts to impose a “chilling effect” on speech that might hurt someone’s feelings. He thinks that the bloggers have been rampaging out of control and that new laws need to be written to corral them.

Advance copies of Sunstein’s new book, “On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done,” have gone out to reviewers ahead of its September publication date, but considering the prominence with which Sunstein is about to be endowed, his worrying views are fair game now. Sunstein is President Obama’s choice to head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. It’s the bland titles that should scare you the most.

“Although obscure,” reported the Wall Street Journal, “the post wields outsize power. It oversees regulations throughout the government, from theEnvironmental Protection Agency to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Obama aides have said the job will be crucial as the new administration overhauls financial-services regulations, attempts to pass universal health care and tries to forge a new approach to controlling emissions of greenhouse gases.”

Sunstein was appointed, no doubt, off the success of “Nudge,” his previous book, which suggests that government ought to gently force people to be better human beings.

Czar is too mild a world for what Sunstein is about to become. How about “regulator in chief”? How about “lawgiver”? He is Obama’s Obama.

In “On Rumors,” Sunstein reviews how views get cemented in one camp even when people are presented with persuasive evidence to the contrary. He worries that we are headed for a future in which “people’s beliefs are a product of social networks working as echo chambers in which false rumors spread like wildfire.” That future, though, is already here, according to Sunstein. “We hardly need to imagine a world, however, in which people and institutions are being harmed by the rapid spread of damaging falsehoods via the Internet,” he writes. “We live in that world. What might be done to reduce the harm?”

Sunstein questions the current libel standard – which requires proving “actual malice” against those who write about public figures, including celebrities. Mere “negligence” isn’t libelous, but Sunstein wonders, “Is it so important to provide breathing space for damaging falsehoods about entertainers?” Celeb rags, get ready to hire more lawyers.

Sunstein also believes that – whether you’re a blogger, The New York Times or a Web hosting service – you should be held responsible even for what your commenters say. Currently you’re immune under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. “Reasonable people,” he says, “might object that this is not the right rule,” though he admits that imposing liability for commenters on service providers would be “a considerable burden.”

But who cares about a burden when insults are being bandied about? “A ‘chilling effect’ on those who would spread destructive falsehoods can be an excellent idea,” he says.

“As we have seen,” Sunstein writes, having shown us no such thing, “falsehoods can undermine democracy itself.” What Sunstein means by that sentence is pretty clear: He doesn’t like so-called false rumors about his longtime University of Chicago friend and colleague, Barack Obama.

Read the rest at this link.