White House bypasses Senate to ink agreement that could allow Chinese companies to demand ISPs remove web content in US with no legal oversight.

Months before the debate about Internet censorship raged as SOPA and PIPA dominated the concerns of web users, President Obama signed an international treaty that would allow companies in China or any other country in the world to demand ISPs remove web content in the US with no legal oversight whatsoever.

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement was signed by Obama on October 1 2011, yet is currently the subject of a White House petition demanding Senators be forced to ratify the treaty. The White House has circumvented the necessity to have the treaty confirmed by lawmakers by presenting it an as “executive agreement,” although legal scholars have highlighted the dubious nature of this characterization.

The hacktivist group Anonymousattacked and took offline the Federal Trade Commission’s website yesterday in protest against the treaty, which was also the subject of demonstrations across major cities in Poland, a country set to sign the agreement today.

Under the provisions of ACTA, copyright holders will be granted sweeping direct powers to demand ISPs remove material from the Internet on a whim. Whereas ISPs normally are only forced to remove content after a court order, all legal oversight will be abolished, a precedent that will apply globally, rendering the treaty worse in its potential scope for abuse than SOPA or PIPA.

A country known for its enforcement of harsh Internet censorship policies like China could demand under the treaty that an ISP in the United States remove content or terminate a website on its server altogether. As we have seen from the enforcement of similar copyright policies in the US, websites are sometimes targeted for no justifiable reason.

The groups pushing the treaty also want to empower copyright holders with the ability to demand that users who violate intellectual property rights (with no legal process) have their Internet connections terminated, a punishment that could only ever be properly enforced by the creation of an individual Internet ID card for every web user, a system that is already in the works.

“The same industry rightsholder groups that support the creation of ACTA have also called for mandatory network-level filtering by Internet Service Providers and for Internet Service Providers to terminate citizens’ Internet connection on repeat allegation of copyright infringement (the “Three Strikes” /Graduated Response) so there is reason to believe that ACTA will seek to increase intermediary liability and require these things of Internet Service Providers,” reports the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The treaty will also mandate that ISPs disclose personal user information to the copyright holder, while providing authorities across the globe with broader powers to search laptops and Internet-capable devices at border checkpoints.

In presenting ACTA as an “international agreement” rather than a treaty, the Obama administration managed to circumvent the legislative process and avoid having to get Senate approval, amethod questioned by Senator Wyden.

“That said, even if Obama has declared ACTA an executive agreement (while those in Europe insist that it’s a binding treaty), there is a very real Constitutional question here: can it actually be an executive agreement?” asks TechDirt. “The law is clear that the only things that can be covered by executive agreements are things that involve items that are solely under the President’s mandate. That is, you can’t sign an executive agreement that impacts the things Congress has control over. But here’s the thing: intellectual property, in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, is an issue given to Congress, not the President. Thus, there’s a pretty strong argument that the president legally cannot sign any intellectual property agreements as an executive agreement and, instead, must submit them to the Senate.”.

26 European Union member states along with the EU itself are set to sign the treaty at a ceremony today in Tokyo. Other countries wishing to sign the agreement have until May 2013 to do so.

Critics are urging those concerned about Obama’s decision to sign the document with no legislative oversight to demand the Senate be forced to ratify the treaty.

*********************

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.

Source: Prison Planet.

Facial recognition is becoming a bigger part of law enforcement and homeland security. It’s also growing in the commercial sector, which has all kinds of privacy and ID misuse implications. That’s why the Federal Trade Commission recently held a workshop to explore the issues.

Amanda Koulousias, a staff attorney in the Division of Privacy and Identity Protection at the FTC, spoke to The Federal Drive with Tom Temin Tuesday morning about the who, what and why of this gathering.

“One of the things that we learned at the workshop … is what are the privacy concerns here and are the technologies currently being implemented in a way that raises additional privacy concerns or are they being implemented in a privacy-sensitive way,” said Koulousias. “And since we don’t fully know the answers to that, it’s very hard to predict where we’ll go.”

Workshop participants included technologists, privacy and consumer advocates, academics and representatives of companies implementing facial recognition in their products. They discussed the privacy concerns relating to two separate technologies — facial detection and facial recognition.

One way that companies are now using facial detection is in commercial signs. “It’s detecting the age range and the gender of the person who is looking at the sign,” Koulousias said. “It can then target an ad to that person based on the demographic characteristics.”

Facial recognition, on the other hand, is being used in various photo-tagging applications. Representatives from both Google and Facebook were among those at the workshop discussing how their social networks were using the technology.

“Facial recognition is also one of the things we talked about with possible future uses, which are numerous,” Koulousias said. These include using facial recognition to unlock a cell phone or to detect a consumer’s emotional reaction to an ad.

One of the workshop attendees, Prof. Alesandro Acquisti, spoke about a study he recently conducted to determine if facial recognition technology could be used to identify previously anonymous photos online, such as ones found on dating websites.

For many of the privacy and consumer advocates at the workshop, the main issue was whether consumers were aware of how facial recognition technology was being implemented and what degree of consumer control, if any, is built into these products.

“With facial detection in digital signs, is there a notice to consumers that the digital sign is using a camera that implements facial detection?” Koulousias asked. “Is there a notice if the ads are being targeted based on that?”

Under Section 5 of the FTC Act, the agency has the ability to bring cases if an act is deemed unfair or deceptive. At this point, though, the agency is in an information-gathering mode. “We’re really trying to figure out what’s going on in this space, how it’s being used, where it’s going [and] bring everybody together to discuss these issues,” Koulousias said.

The FTC is soliciting public comments on these technologies through Jan. 31 on its website. “Once we get the responses and see what the responses to our questions are, we will decide where to go from there,” she said.

Source: Federal News Radio.

*Written by Rob Rimes.

*This article is broken into five parts with each being released a few days apart. This is due to the size of the article. PART I can be found here.

3. Stage Two – Woodrow Wilson and the Rise of Wilsonian Tyranny:

“You are not here merely to prepare to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget this errand.” – Woodrow Wilson

After Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson is probably the worst president in history. Although FDR is pretty close. What makes Wilson so bad? Well, he was instrumental in creating the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade Commission. He also kick-started the income tax system that we have today. Additionally, Wilson intervened in the first World War, which had absolutely nothing to do with the United States. His actions in that war created the snowball effect that eventually became World War II. Sure, Hitler was a sick and twisted fucksack but there is a huge chance that he would’ve never gained power in Germany if it weren’t for the heinous actions of Woodrow Wilson. Shit, the fact that Wilson could have inadvertently caused the Holocaust probably makes him worse than Lincoln.

Wilson’s first order of business was the creation of the Federal Reserve. Contrary to popular belief, the Federal Reserve is not a government entity. The Fed is a private central bank that has the power to print money. Instead of having currency with actual value, Woodrow Wilson birthed a non-governmental establishment that has the power to control, regulate and print paper money! This was a way for the government to control and meddle with the flow of currency. Instead of letting the free market and free trade dictate the cost of goods and the value of money, Wilson thought it best to have supreme control over the monetary system. Many historians, the world over, credit the Federal Reserve and it’s meddling with the American economy as being a major catalyst for the Great Depression as well as our nation’s current economic peril, inflation and the devaluation of the dollar. John Maynard Keynes didn’t see it this way and the progressives of Wilson’s era all the way up to today, still trust in Keynesian economic theory.

Looking past the issue of the Federal Reserve, which is a monstrous issue, I want to put some emphasis on Wilson’s lesser-known progressive follies. The next thing on the docket is the Underwood Tariff Act, also known as the Revenue Act of 1913. What this act did was it lowered basic tariff rates from 40% down to 25%. That may seem positive but tariffs in general are just bad economic policy. Read some Mises, Rothbard, Hayek or Friedman if you don’t believe me.

Apart from the reduction of tariffs, the Underwood Tariff Act created something much worse. In order to off set the loss of revenue from the decreased tariffs, the federal income tax was reinstated. What was once created to pay for the Civil War, was brought back fifty years later to help create a pot of money for the growing progressive agenda. The income tax was previously deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1894 but that obstacle was overcome by the creation of the 16th Amendment, which made a federal income tax constitutional. Wilson used the Underwood Tariff Act as a tool to justify the creation of the federal income tax, which was now within the government’s power to legally implement.

The next piece of shitty progressive legislation to look at is the Clayton Antitrust Act. In a nutshell, an antitrust law is a law that attempts to prohibit monopolies from forming while trying to eliminate unfair business practices. Just like everything pimped by progressives, it sounds like a good idea based off of good intentions but it is counterproductive to what it is trying to accomplish and it essentially creates that in which it is trying to regulate or destroy. It helps the federal government pick winners and losers and thus, kills true capitalism only to replace it with a crony clone wearing the same title.

The Clayton Antitrust Act was created to double up on the control of rogue capitalists that started with the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. These acts created a style of legislation that is still be used today. For whatever reason, lefties on the Hill can’t seem to wrap their heads around the fact that these practices hurt the economy. Maybe I am being unfair here, as the righties have adopted these practices as well. Because of that, we’re all fucked.

Anyway, the Clayton Antitrust Act was setup to restrict mergers between companies as well as controlling price competition. To restrict mergers is incredibly foolish and borderline chaotic. This punishes the end consumer because the product or service he would receive, may not be as good because of these restrictions. See, two companies merge when they feel that by combining their efforts they will improve their ability to create superior results with whatever good or service they offer. When companies see a greater value in merging, it is the end consumer that really reaps the benefits of that extra value. Often times, mergers happen because the company that is committing the “hostile takeover” of its competitor believes that the smaller company could be more efficient if better run. They believe that they can run it better and if they can, this benefits everyone involved. Well, except for maybe the shitty employees. Should we reward them with jobs in the new company for running the old company into the ground? Often times these “hostile takeovers” are an alternative to bankruptcy.

Like a typical progressive “Trustbuster”, Wilson didn’t just stop with the Clayton Antitrust Act. He also created the Federal Trade Commission or FTC. Today, the FTC is the “National Nanny”. For decades it has overseen and meddled with our economy. Now it is defining the rules and regulations of the Internet. The only truly free thing left in the world is being tyrannized by this archaic progressive institution that has done nothing apart from stifling the free market.

The next piece of legislation to come across Woodrow Wilson’s desk was the Smith-Lever Act of 1914. This act created subsidies for agricultural education and research. Is that a waste of tax dollars? I’ll let you decide.

Following that was another pro-agricultural law, the Federal Farm Loan Act. This established a system that would provide an increase in credit to rural, family farmers. This was achieved by the creation of a federal farm loan board, as well as twelve regional farm loan banks. Essentially, cooperative farm loan associations were able to get long-term loans at very low interest rates (under subsidized terms of course). This was to help smaller farmers “survive” against the harsh competition of larger farmers (or better farmers, depending upon your reality). Farmers were able to borrow up to 50% of the value of their land and 20% of the value of any improvements. This evolved into today’s monstrous Farm Credit System, which received a $4 billion bailout in 1987 that  created a new arm for the beast, the Farm Credit System Financial Assistance Corp.

Wilson then attacked child labor with the Keating-Owen Act of 1916. I know that the vast majority of the lefties and righties are all for child labor laws but in reality, they have very negative consequences. Luckily, at the time, the Supreme Court recognized this and deemed the Keating-Owen Act unconstitutional. Because of the child labor laws that did eventually pass, it is technically illegal for you to give a minor $20 for fixing your computer. However, the government decided that we had to save the children from a Charles Dickens nightmare. Never mind that many of the children of the 19th and early 20th centuries worked to help provide for their poor families. As time progressed, parents made more money and they were able to send their kids to school. The free market was working towards destroying child labor before the progressives created laws to completely eliminate it in all its forms.

In 1916, Woodrow Wilson was faced with a serious dilemma from the railroad unions. The railroad brotherhoods threatened to shut down the railroads. Wilson attempted to get the angry unions and the “evil exploitive” management to work together to find a solution to the labor issues. No compromise was made, so our progressive hero created the Adamson Act which forced railroad management to limit the work day to 8 hours and to pay overtime if the maximum hours were exceeded. Because of this, a strike was avoided but the railroad companies now had a gun to their head. There was no negotiation. The federal government, led by Woodrow Wilson, forced management to comply with these demands.

Wilson initially tried to keep us out of the first World War. However, his know-it-all meddling progressive attitude couldn’t be tamed. Because of that, he tried to mediate the conflict, just like he tried to do but failed with railroad unions and railroad management. The result here was no different and Mr. Fix-it had egg on his face again. That snotty yolk must have left a bad taste in his mouth because Wilson showed that he wasn’t really an objective party when it came to the War. In fact, he demanded the Germans quit their bullshit. As far as the British went, he slapped them on the hand and they called his bluff, continuing to do what they were doing because they knew Wilson didn’t really mean it.

With his first term coming to a close, Woodrow Wilson ran for reelection with the slogan “He kept us out of war.” Funny, because it wasn’t long before his anti-war message was replaced with a pro-war attitude. Kind of reminds me of what Barack Obama is doing now. Damn progressives.

After narrowly winning reelection against Republican Charles Evans Hughes, it wasn’t long before Woodrow Wilson brought us into a war that we had no business whatsoever being in. He built a massive military through conscription. What that means is that young men were forced to fight because Woodrow Wilson said so. The war was bloody and hard-fought. At one point, the life expectancy of a soldier on the front lines was 21 days! These men, just like the soldiers during Vietnam, were practically being shipped overseas with a death sentence. All it took was a gun to the head to force a gun in the palm.

Lives weren’t the only cost of war; the war was incredibly expensive monetarily and this strained the economic stability of America. So, not only were Americans now paying income tax, now those taxes were being raised to fund our idiotic involvement in the war. The progressive-led government also insisted that people eat less, this way more food could be sent to soldiers. The government also tried pimping out war bonds and manufactured a mass amount of pro-war propaganda that pretty much told people that they were traitors and assholes if they didn’t support the war effort. Apparently, you weren’t a patriot unless you were a drone to your progressive masters and their ever-growing collectivist society.

Apart from the war, Wilson had us involved in other foreign affairs. He proposed that U.S. vessels traveling through the Panama Canal would be exempt from paying tolls. This angered the British as well as many others.

Wilson also wanted to avoid trampling on Latin America, as he believed Teddy Roosevelt had done, so he apologized to Columbia for the United States’ role in the Panama Revolution during Teddy’s reign. That must’ve been an inspirational moment for Obama, the Great Apologizer.

Woody then meddled with Latin America, trying to “teach” the Latin American countries on how to “elect good men.” Wilson had troops stationed in Mexico, Nicaragua, Haiti, Cuba and Panama.

Wilson’s soldiers in Nicaragua forced the country to pass the Bryan-Chamorro Treaty after they selected the nation’s president. Haiti was forced to choose the presidential candidate that Wilson hand-picked. They were also forced to adopt a constitution that Wilson wrote! Wilson had our troops go into the Dominican Republic after their president resigned. The American military aligned themselves with wealthy landowners and fought brutally against any resistance they encountered. Wilson’s foreign policy with our closest neighbors was abhorrent!

After World War I, Woodrow Wilson made his famous “Fourteen Points” speech that introduced the world to the idea of a “League of Nations”, his anti-American globalist dream and the precursor to the United Nations. The League of Nations was officially created with the Treaty of Versailles. That treaty also gave birth to the “Stab-in-the-back Legend” that the Nazis latched onto and spread like wildfire, as they rose to power in a Germany crumbled by war. There are many other factors associated with Wilson and his involvement in WWI that inadvertently helped the Nazi cause but that is an article for another day.

After all of this awesome foreign intervention, the Norwegian Nobel Committee showed that they were pranksters of the world when they gave the Nobel Peace Prize to Woodrow Wilson. Funny, that is another parallel to Obama. Maybe I should write an article about all their similarities.

Following the Treaty of Versailles and the formation of the League of Nations, Woodrow Wilson’s presidency was winding down. As soldiers were coming home, they were faced with harsh times due to the effects of Wilsonian policy. There was poor planning, very little money and next to no benefits for the four million soldiers who returned to the States. The economy was in serious trouble and the Wilsonian Era nearly caused a depression in 1920 (I wrote about it and how the problem was resolved in “The Forgotten Depression of 1920“).

Wilson’s wartime progressive politics caused the farmland prices bubble to burst, which left many farmers bankrupt or drowning in serious debt. His meddling with the unions and their bosses caused strikes in the coal, steel and meatpacking industries. Class warfare was at an all-time high as race riots broke out in dozens of cities throughout the U.S., most notably Chicago and Omaha. This was the legacy Woodrow Wilson left behind. Well, in reality. The left has deified him with the other ex-POTUSes in this article and for whatever reason, he is heralded as one of the greatest American leaders of all-time. That’s fucking hogwash!

Woodrow Wilson was shit. I don’t think that it can be any fucking clearer. He took the progressive ball and ran with it, completely disregarding what worked in this country, trading it in for a nation wrapped in chains. Wilson did have some second thoughts on his policies however, but it was too little too late.

He had this to say about the creation of the Federal Reserve, after he realized his mistake:

“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.”

If only he had listened to Andrew Jackson.

4. Stage Three – Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal:

“The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” – Franklin Delano Roosevelt

This article is continued in PART III

*Taken from NY Daily News. Video at the link.

Maybe he’s a MySpace guy.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange called Facebook ”the most appalling spying machine ever invented” in an interview with Russia Today, pointing to the popular social networking site as one of the top tools for the U.S. to spy on its citizens.

“Here we have the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations, their communications with each other and their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to US Intelligence,” he said. “Facebook, Google, Yahoo, all these major U.S. organizations have built-in infaces for US intelligence.

“Everyone should understand that when they add their friends to Facebook they are doing free work for the United States intelligence agencies,” he added.

The comments were a bit strange, coming from the founder of a website best known for pushing spilling secret information.

In an email to the Daily News, a Facebook spokesman denied the company was doing anything that they weren’t legally obligated to do, saying that “the legal standards for compelling a company to turn over data are determined by the laws of the country, and we respect that standard.”

“We don’t respond to pressure, we respond to compulsory legal process,” the spokesperson wrote. “There has never been a time we have been pressured to turn over data — we fight every time we believe the legal process is insufficient.”

In any event, many Facebook users have been increasingly concerned about the sharing of their information.

In 2010, three Democratic senators asked the FTC to look at the social networking site’s information-sharing policies.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that popular Facebook apps like Farmville and Causes also shared users’ information with advertising and tracking companies.

Concerns about information-sharing has seemingly done little to dissuade the more than 250 million people who use Facebook – including someone who created an official WikiLeaks page on the site.

More than 1.72 million people clicked that they like it.

Assange is currently in England, awaiting extradition to Sweden to face sexual assault charges.

*Taken from Politico.

Microsoft asked European regulators Thursday to go after Google on antitrust grounds, accusing the search giant of trying to “entrench its dominance” on the Web.

It’s a major escalation in the war between the two tech titans.

Microsoft and other Google foes say Google’s powerful search engine and its move into other markets — from advertising to mobile phones to travel — has stunted industrywide competition. Google has described itself as under siege — the victim of a Microsoft-led “anti-Google industrial complex.”

In an early-morning blog post Thursday, Microsoft executive Brad Smith said the company’s European Commission filing accuses Google of having “engaged in a broadening pattern of walling off access to content and data that competitors need to provide search results to consumers and to attract advertisers.”

Smith offered a litany of examples of what he describes as Google’s anticompetitive practices — arguing, for instance, that Google has disadvantaged competitors in video search, promoted its search boxes through exclusivity deals and sought to leverage its size over competitors in the neophyte e-book market.

“We readily appreciate that Google should continue to have the freedom to innovate. But it shouldn’t be permitted to pursue practices that restrict others from innovating and offering competitive alternatives,” Smith said. “That’s what it’s doing now. And that’s what we hope European officials will assess and ultimately decide to stop.”

“We’re not surprised that Microsoft has done this, since one of their subsidiaries was one of the original complainants,” Google officials said in a statement. “For our part, we continue to discuss the case with the European Commission and we’re happy to explain to anyone how our business works.”

The complaint filed with European Union regulators, the first time Microsoft has formally alleged antitrust violations by a competitor, comes as Google is under increased scrutiny back home — from the Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission and among state attorneys general.

Last week, a federal judge validated some of the claims of Google antitrust critics by blocking the company’s plans to create a universal digital library, partly because those plans would preclude competitors from doing so. DOJ has spent months scrutinizing how Google’s $700 million purchase of travel software firm ITA would affect the online travel market.

Texas last year launched a broader investigation into whether Google manipulates its search results to hurt competitors.

On Wednesday, the FTC announced a settlement with Google over the launch of the company’s Buzz social network. Under the settlement, Google will have to submit to outside monitoring of its privacy policies over the next two decades.

Now the fight intensifies in Europe, where regulators since late 2010 have eyed Google for potential threats to industry competition.

A number of small but notable players have weighed into that battle, but Microsoft’s new filing is likely to add an even more heightened level of intensity to the European Commission’s antitrust investigation — the first of any sort targeting Google internationally.

In his 1,500-plus-word blog post describing Microsoft’s concerns, Smith directly challenged Google’s common retort to critics: that consumers are “a click away” from using a different search engine if Google disappoints. There are numerous other ways, Smith argued, that Google can entrench its dominance in both search and search advertising.

“Their defense ignores the hugely important fact that there are many other important ways that search services compete,” Smith wrote.

“Search engines compete to index the Web as fully as possible so they can generate good search results, they compete to gain advertisers (the source of revenue in this business), and they compete to gain distribution of their search boxes through Web sites,” Smith continued. “Consumers will not benefit from clicking to alternative sites unless all search engines have a fair opportunity to compete in each of these areas.”

According to Smith, Google maintains a 95 percent share of the European market — and, as a result, has immense leverage over search and advertising. Even efforts in Washington to check Google’s growth have failed to stop “the spread by Google of new and disconcerting practices in the United States,” Smith wrote, noting the marketplace is “worse” in Europe because Microsoft in the United States “serves one quarter” of searches through both Bing, its network and its partnership with Yahoo!

Smith said there are several ways in which Microsoft believes Google is impeding competition — from degrading access to YouTube for Bing and Windows Phones, to making it difficult and expensive for companies to format their advertising campaigns on Google to Bing and other search advertising platforms.

Other instances of unfair play by Google, Smith added, include search bias, or the manipulation of search algorithms so that competing sites rank lower. He also charged that Google uses exclusivity agreements to ensure that popular European websites use only Google-powered search boxes.

Microsoft also took aim at the Google Books settlement, recently nixed in federal court, charging that it threatened to lock out competitors from the e-book industry. Moreover, the Redmond giant alleged Google “discriminates against would-be competitors by making it more costly for them to attain prominent placement for their advertisements” — an argument similar to criticism levied by opponents to the merger of Google and travel-software company ITA.

The remarkable turnabout for Microsoft — from antitrust poster child to antitrust complainer — was not lost on the company.

“Having spent more than a decade wearing the shoe on the other foot with the European Commission, the filing of a formal antitrust complaint is not something we take lightly,” Smith wrote. “This is the first time Microsoft Corp. has ever taken this step. More so than most, we recognize the importance of ensuring that competition laws remain balanced and that technology innovation moves forward.”