An astonishing, wonderful, spectacular - or, dare I say it, "Colberrific" act of sedition... (MUST SEE VIDEO!!! :-)

Now this, this, my friends, is an extraordinary act of sedition.

Sedition comes from Latin seditio, sedition-, "a going apart," hence "revolt, insurrection," from se-, "apart" + itio, ition-, "act of going," from ire, "to go." (Dictionary.com)

In an unbelievable show of crater-creating cojones, Mr. Stephen Colbert told truth to a power that's trying to destroy irony.

And yet, ironically, power understood.

Mr. Colbert is now "Must See TV" (screw you NBC) for serving up the most biting and inviting satire on the planet. He has right-wingers on playing it straight who don't know he's being ironic.

And, ironically, many don't even care when they figure it out.

Fascinating.

I'm not sure how he got this gig, closing out the White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington D.C., carving up the cadre of scared shitless sycophant scribes shyly sniveling in attendance, and roasting George W. Bush like he was a giant talking ham.

Ahhh, Dubya.

What were you thinking?

That he was so close you could've spitballed him?

That you want Daddy to have him and everyone laughing killed?

That this is the last time you appear in front of any but the converted or sedated?

Worry not, for while you had to bear witness to the bareback sodomy of your record ironically celebrated in being comically castigated, and from 10 feet away at that, the strained laughter of the masses of mass-media asses will ensure they make sure that this too passes.

The press is already pressing ahead with their attacks, and for a list of funky facts, check here:

Colbert Shocks the Media Silent

By Greg Mitchell, Editor & Publisher. Posted May 4, 2006.

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/35804/

But first, you've gotta check this out, and if this doesn't give you faint hope for a fearless future, then dream dammit, dream... :)

Stephen Colbert At The White House Correspondents Dinner

http://video.freevideoblog.com/video/AAC7FA18-2DDC-4D3E-B1BB-9D6CBD83E27F.htm

Cheers,
BK

_____________________

...

Black Krishna Brand

Philosophy - http://blackkrishna.blogspot.com/

Music - http://www.soundclick.com/bands/0/blackkrishna.htm

...









BONUS: "Remember the internet? Yeah, that was pretty cool. I remember back in the day when I Googled Loose Change 2nd Edition and watched it. Wow. It blew my mind. And... I guess that's when everything else made a lot more sense."

Infowars.com

The Internet is Dead, Long Live the Internet

Total regulation rules are close at hand, a new internet will kill free speech and weed out anything deemed "inappropriate"

Steve Watson / Infowars | May 2 2006

In the space of a few months debate has gone from "pressure on internet service providers" to make available user records to calls for all out mandatory ISP snooping on all US citizens.

In a display of bi-partisanship, both Democrats and Republicans are calling for such measures.

“Last week, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, a Republican, gave a speech saying that data retention by Internet service providers is an ‘issue that must be addressed.’ Child pornography investigations have been ‘hampered’ because data may be routinely deleted, Gonzales warned,” reports Declan McCullagh of CNET News.

Now Democratic member of the Congressional Internet Caucus, Diana DeGette, wants an an amendment that would make such data deletion illegal.

DeGette says that any Internet service that ‘enables users to access content’ must permanently retain records that would permit police to identify each user. The records could not be discarded until at least one year after the user's account was closed.

This may mean that any normal website or blog would have to fall into line with such new rules and suddenly total web regulation would become a reality.

The excuse for this as either a standalone measure or as an amendment to a broad telecommunications bill that is moving rapidly through the House, is that it is designed to protect children.

We are being led to believe that a vast army of maniac pedophiles are on the loose and we must do away with all forms of privacy in order to stop them. This is akin to saying that blanket cctv prevents crime. As if to say "if we film everyone all the time, even innocent people, then no one will ever commit any crimes."

Increasingly we are seeing this in every aspect of our lives. Recording, tracking and retaining our data in the name of keeping us all safe. Everyone is now treated as guilty until proven innocent.

In reality the amendment would mean that such data would be accessible to any local or state law enforcement official investigating anything from drug possession to tax evasion.

Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the free-market Cato Institute, said: "This is an unrestricted grant of authority to the FCC to require surveillance."

"The FCC would be able to tell Internet service providers to monitor our e-mails, monitor our Web surfing, monitor what we post on blogs or chat rooms, and everything else under the sun,"

We have previously exposed how moves are also afoot to clamp down on internet neutrality and even to designate a new form of the internet known as Internet 2.

This would be a faster, more streamlined elite equivalent of the internet available to users who were willing to pay more for a much improved service. providers may only allow streaming audio and video on your websites if you were eligible for Internet 2.

Of course, Internet 2 would be greatly regulated and only "appropriate content" would be accepted by an FCC or government bureau. Everything else would be relegated to the "slow lane" internet, the junkyard as it were. Our techie rulers are all too keen to make us believe that the internet as we know it is "already dead".

Let's take a look at the possible effects that such moves would have on websites such as infowars and prisonplanet.

Given that they are already blocked by many regular filters because they are deemed to contain "inappropriate content" (even though 90% of our material is simply mainstream news) we would face the prospect of not being able to stream audio or video or of being locked out entirely if a telecom disagreed with our content.

Without the ability to stream our material we would have to rely on newsletters and mailing lists. However, the first steps in a move to charge for every e mail sent have already been taken. Under the pretext of eliminating spam, Bill Gates and other industry chieftains have proposed Internet users buy credit stamps which denote how many e mails they will be able to send. This of course is also the death knell for political newsletters and mailing lists.

With demands placed upon us to provide records of all our visitors, streaming audio and video gone, our ability to mass mail our content killed off and our position on Internet 2 DENIED, the sites would virtually be shut down.

The move to demonize the Internet and tar its reputation has been underway for a long time. The boom in blogs and alternative news websites has plunged the mainstream media into a panic. Their newspaper sales and hits to their websites are plummeting as people seek their own information from multiple sources. The mainstream has engaged in a desperate attempt to paint the internet as a dark place where criminals and weirdos are everywhere and all information is inaccurate and unbalanced.

AOL is still running ads equating Internet users with terrorists. In the next few years we may see a staged Internet shutdown which is blamed on cyber terrorists.

In reality it is the mainstream that is inaccurate and unbalanced, providing a one sided story firmly rooted in the past on printed paper or the nightly news.

For the aspiring dictator, the Internet is a dangerous tool that has been seized by the enemy. We have come a long way since 1969, when the ARPANET was created solely for US government use. The Internet is freedom's best friend and the bane of control freaks. Its eradication is one of the short term goals of those that seek to centralize power and subjugate the world under a global surveillance panopticon prison.

- INFOWARS: BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND -

REAL SOURCE - http://infowars.net/articles/may2006/020506ISPs.htm


(...)

Infowars / CNET

FCC approves Net-wiretapping taxes

CNET | May 03, 2006
By Declan McCullagh

WASHINGTON--Broadband providers and Internet phone companies will have to pick up the tab for the cost of building in mandatory wiretap access for police surveillance, federal regulators ruled Wednesday.

The Federal Communications Commission voted unanimously to levy what likely will amount to wiretapping taxes on companies, municipalities and universities, saying it would create an incentive for them to keep costs down and that it was necessary to fight the war on terror. Universities have estimated their cost to be about $7 billion.

"The first obligation is...the safety of the people," said FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, a Democrat. "This commission supports efforts to protect the public safety and homeland security of the United States and its people."

Federal police agencies have spent years lobbying for mandatory backdoors for easy surveillance, saying "criminals, terrorists and spies" could cloak their Internet communications with impunity unless centralized wiretapping hubs become mandatory. Last year, the FCC set a deadline of May 14, 2007, for compliance. But universities, libraries and some technology companies have filed suit against the agency, and arguments before a federal court are scheduled for Friday.

"We're going to have a lot of fights over cost reimbursement," Al Gidari, a partner at the law firm of Perkins Coie, who is co-counsel in the lawsuit, said in an interview after the vote. "It continues the lunacy of their prior order and confirms they've learned nothing from what's been filed" in the lawsuit, he said.

The original 1994 law, called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, authorized $500 million to pay telecommunications carriers for the cost of upgrading their networks to facilitate wiretapping. Some broadband and voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers had hoped that they'd be reimbursed as well.

Jonathan Askin, general counsel of Pulver.com, likened Wednesday's vote to earlier FCC rules extending 911 regulations to VoIP. "It essentially imposed a mandate on the industry without giving the industry the necessary support to abide by the rules--and the same thing seems to be happening here," Askin said.

Even without the CALEA regulations, police have the legal authority to conduct Internet wiretaps--that's precisely what the FBI's Carnivore system was designed to do. Still, the FBI has argued, the need for "standardized broadband intercept capabilities is especially urgent in light of today's heightened threats to homeland security and the ongoing tendency of criminals to use the most clandestine modes of communication."


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The American Council on Education, which represents 1,800 colleges and universities, estimates that the costs of CALEA compliance could total roughly $7 billion for the entire higher-education community, or a tuition hike of $450 for every student in the nation. Documents filed in the lawsuit challenging the FCC's rules put the cost at hundreds of dollars per student.

But during Wednesday's vote, commissioners dismissed those concerns as unfounded. "I am not persuaded merely by largely speculative allegations that the financial burden on the higher-education community could total billions of dollars," said FCC Commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate, a Republican.

The FCC's initial ruling last fall had left open the question of whether broadband and VoIP providers would be reimbursed for rewiring their networks and upgrading equipment to comply with CALEA.

Another open question is what portion of a university's or library's network must be rendered wiretap-friendly. One possibility is that only the pipe (or pipes) connecting a school with the rest of the Internet must be made CALEA-compliant. Another is that the entire network would be covered.

The FCC adopted its second order on Wednesday but released only a two-page summary, which didn't offer much clarity. In its initial ruling last year, the FCC said only that it had reached "no conclusions" about exactly what universities and libraries would have to do, prompting a flurry of comments filed with the agency and the federal lawsuit. (Plaintiffs in the lawsuit include Sun Microsystems, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the American Library Association, the American Council on Education and VoIP firm Pulver.com.)

Commissioner Copps acknowledged that there is "still some clarity to be provided" for library and university network operators, but he suggested that additional clarity would not be forthcoming from the FCC. Instead, "all those agencies and offices of government who are involved in CALEA implementation should be working together to provide clarity there to avoid confusion and possibly expenses for these institutions," Copps said.

At the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference here Wednesday, John Morris of the Center for Democracy and Technology said libraries and universities are still left with more questions than answers.

"There's some serious uncertainty about how it will really play out for universities," Morris said. Even if the FCC technically calls for Internet interception at the edge of a campus network, that likely won't be enough to satisfy law enforcement demands for all of an individual student's network traffic, including on-campus activities, he added.

Injecting additional uncertainty is whether the FCC's action is legal. It represents what critics call an unreasonable extension of CALEA--which was designed to address telephone features such as three-way calling and call waiting--to the Internet.

A House of Representatives committee report (click here for PDF) prepared in October 1994 emphatically says CALEA's requirements "do not apply to information services such as electronic-mail services; or online services such as CompuServe, Prodigy, America Online or Mead Data (Central); or to Internet service providers."

When Congress was debating CALEA, then-FBI Director Louis Freeh reassured nervous senators that the law would be limited to telephone calls. "So what we are looking for is strictly telephone--what is said over a telephone?" Sen. Larry Pressler, R-S.D., asked during one hearing.

Freeh replied: "That is the way I understand it. Yes, sir."

Two of the four FCC commissioners who voted for the initial CALEA ruling last fall acknowledged that the federal government was on shaky legal ground. The FCC's regulation is based on arguing that the law's definition of "telecommunications carrier" applies to broadband and VoIP providers.

Then-FCC Commissioner Kathleen Abernathy, a Republican, said, "Because litigation is as inevitable as death and taxes, and because some might not read the statute to permit the extension of CALEA to the broadband Internet access and VoIP services at issue here, I have stated my concern that an approach like the one we adopt today is not without legal risk."

The FCC is no stranger to having its decisions rejected by a federal appeals court that can be hostile to what it views as regulatory overreaching. Last May, for instance, the FCC's "broadcast flag" was unceremoniously tossed out by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

- INFOWARS: BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND -

REAL SOURCE - http://www.infowars.com/articles/bb/wiretapping_fcc_approves_net_surveillance_taxes.htm