Killing Net Neutrality: The Republican 'Internet Freedom Act' Is Designed to Destroy Net Neutrality

Every time the Republicans want to rip you off or steal your liberty, they shout the word "Freedom"

The Republicans want the kind of Internet depicted on the right.

By Ben Collins
All but two of the 31 co-sponsors of a House bill to kill net neutrality received thousands from telecoms in just the last election cycle. Is their cash enough to end a free Web?

“The Internet Freedom Act” is a House bill intended to destroy newly instituted Net Neutrality rights. And of the bill's 31 co-sponsors, all but two of them received money from a major telecom or its lobby in 2014 alone.

The 29 co-sponsors received over $800,000 from AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and their lobby, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA).

The legislation would invalidate rules instituted by the FCC last week that declared the Internet a public utility and disallowed telecoms from forcibly slowing or blocking Web traffic to competitors, or separating the Web into artificial, cable package-like tiers for lower-paying users. The bill was brought to the House floor by Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and 30 Republican colleagues.

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Now That Obama Is Pushing For Net Neutrality, Pro-Neutrality Internet Giants Get Quiet: With Friends Like These, Who Needs Enemies?

Barack Obama explains his position on net neutrality. (Screen capture from video)

By Farhad Manjoo
Silicon Valley’s giant companies have been quiet lately on the question of whether the government should protect an open Internet, which they’ve previously argued is vital to innovation. Don’t count on them staking out a stronger position even though President Obama has stepped into the fray, and Washington looks to be gearing up for an epic battle over the rules that govern the Internet.

On Monday, Mr. Obama offered his support for a strict set of rules that, among other proscriptions, would prohibit broadband carriers from blocking online content, and would restrict them from giving priority access over their lines to companies that pay an extra fee.

In another era, the White House’s position might have elicited squeals of joy from the technology giants, which have long maintained that the future of innovation online depends on such strict net neutrality rules. But Google, which was once the industry’s most ardent supporter of net neutrality, and Facebook, which could mobilize millions of supporters through its service, both declined to comment on Mr. Obama’s position.

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Cell Phone Web Browsing Logged and Tracked By Verizon and AT&T: Using 'Undetectable-Unerasable Super Cookies'

Even those who did opt out of the Verizon program still have a unique identifying code attached to all of their Web traffic.

Everyplace you go on the Internet with your cellphone - Verizon and AT&T keeps a record.

By Craig Timberg
Verizon and AT&T have been quietly tracking the Internet activity of more than 100 million cellular customers with what critics have dubbed “supercookies” — markers so powerful that it’s difficult for even savvy users to escape them.

The technology has allowed the companies to monitor which sites their customers visit, cataloging their tastes and interests. Consumers cannot erase these supercookies or evade them by using browser settings, such as the “private” or “incognito” modes that are popular among users wary of corporate or government surveillance.


Verizon and AT&T say they have taken steps to alert their customers to the tracking and to protect customer privacy as the companies develop programs intended to help advertisers hone their pitches based on individual Internet behavior. But as word has spread about the supercookies in recent days, privacy advocates have reacted with alarm, saying the tracking could expose user Internet behavior to a wide range of outsiders — including intelligence services — and may also violate federal telecommunications and wiretapping laws.


One civil liberties group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says it has raised its concerns with the Federal Communications Commission and is contemplating formal legal action to block Verizon. AT&T’s program is not as advanced and, according to the company, is still in testing.

The stakes are particularly high, privacy advocates say, because Verizon’s experimentation with supercookies is almost certain to spur copycats eager to compete for a larger share of the multibillion-dollar advertising profits won by Google, Facebook and others.

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Local Police Forces Have Morphed Into the Natioan Security Agency: Police Agencies In Virginia Quietly Stockpiling Private Phone Records

All over the U.S., local police agencies are collecting vast stockpiles of private information from people – some of it from people who have not been convicted of crimes but were merely stopped by police.

From Electronic Frontier Foundation.

By G.W. Schulz
While revelations from Edward Snowden about the National Security Agency’s massive database of phone records have sparked a national debate about its constitutionality, another secretive database has gone largely unnoticed and without scrutiny.

The database, which affects unknown numbers of people, contains phone records that at least five police agencies in southeast Virginia have been collecting since 2012 and sharing with one another with little oversight. Some of the data appears to have been obtained by police from telecoms using only a subpoena, rather than a court order or probable-cause warrant. Other information in the database comes from mobile phones seized from suspects during an arrest.

The five cities participating in the program, known as the Hampton Roads Telephone Analysis Sharing Network, are Hampton, Newport News, Norfolk, Chesapeake and Suffolk, according to the memorandum of understanding that established the database. The effort is being led in part by the Peninsula Narcotics Enforcement Task Force, which is responsible for a “telephone analysis room” in the city of Hampton, where the database is maintained.

The unusual and secretive database contains telecom customer subscriber information; records about individual phone calls, such as the numbers dialed, the time the calls were made and their duration; as well as the contents of seized mobile devices. The information is collected and shared among police agencies to enhance analysis and law enforcement intelligence.

The legality of the database is in question, however, and at least one law enforcement agency has declined to participate in the program due to such concerns.

“My initial reaction is that it's very disturbing and illegal under Virginia law,” said Rob Poggenklass, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, which was previously unaware of the database.

The system was set up with virtually no public debate or concern expressed by elected officials, who approved resolutions authorizing the database. Hardly anyone outside of the five participating police agencies knows about the sharing network, though its creation was not kept secret.

All over the U.S., local police agencies are collecting vast stockpiles of private information from people – some of it from people who have not been convicted of crimes but were merely stopped by police.

As an example of the amount of data being collected, in the first-ever transparency reports released by major telecoms earlier this year, AT&T revealed that between January and June, it received nearly 80,000 criminal subpoenas for customer records from federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, while Verizon disclosed that it had received over 72,000 subpoenas from law enforcement during the same period.

The Virginia system is yet another example of this creeping expansion of local law enforcement surveillance throughout the country.

Minimal public information about the sharing network exists, but it first made an appearance on the agendas of local government meetings, where it met no resistance. Elected city council members in Newport News and Chesapeake, for instance, passed resolutions approving the telephone data-sharing agreement without objection.

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The Internet is a Plantation, With Comcast, Verizon, AT&T Its Masters: Court Overturns Net Neutrality

Can we trust corporations that help the NSA spy on Americans?
(Slide released by NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden.)

Thanks to a ruling by the US Circuit Court of Appeals in DC, telecom companies are free to dictate every aspect of what you can and cannot see, hear or do over the internet. It's an emergency. It's time to demand immediate presidential intervention to head off the end of the internet as we know it.






By Bruce A. Dixon
“Network neutrality” on the internet is the idea that anyone can access it, with any device to view or contribute any content. Network neutrality is the foundation of the internet as we have known it. According to the federal court of appeals in DC, network neutrality on the internet is now over.

From this point on, the court has ruled, internet providers can levy extra tolls upon, slow down or, simply ban any content or any users they choose, for any reason whatsoever. Internet companies can now tell you which hardware and software devices, what kinds of computers, phones, programs and applications you may or may not use, and from which locations. The internet is now a plantation, with Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon its masters, and the rest of us serfs or worse.

This is one of those ground breaking, those earth shaking moments that reveal how capitalism works, how greedy corporations have captured the media, the courts and the other two bipartisan branches of government in these United States. This ruling is not a surprise, it's what the telecom companies have demanded for years, and what the administrations of President Bush and Obama alike seem to want to give them.

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Fake 'Think Tanks' Funded by $83M Right-Wing War Chest Have Vast Reach and Impact - REPORT

Stink Tanks: The State Policy Network (SPN) runs an $83 million dollar lobbying operation using fake "think tanks" backed and controlled by the Koch Brothers, Coors Family, ALEC, AT&T, Facebook, Time Warner, and others.

By Ronald Jackson
Twelve new reports from the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) and Progress Now show that fake "think tanks" are being funded by an $83 million dollar right-wing war chest closely associated with the Koch brothers and the secretive group of right-wing millionaires called ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council).

Koch Brothers: their tentacles reach everywhere (Illustration: DonkeyHotey)

Big time lobbyists "skirt the law" by operating as non-profits, according to the reports, often running the "think tanks" straight out of their own law or PR offices. These "think tanks" usually have no authentic scholarly staff to speak of but churn out fudged research and editorial opinion, targeted at media, politicians, and government officials.

The fake think tanks pretend to be independent, objective, and unaffiliated with any interest groups, but are in fact thoroughly controlled by a "right-wing network of funders."

The massive propaganda operation is being funded by a group of global corporations, including Reynolds American, Altria, the e-cigarette company NJOY, Microsoft, AT&T, Verizon, Facebook, the for-profit online education company K12 Inc., GlaxoSmithKline, Kraft Foods, Express Scripts, Comcast, Time Warner, and other individuals and organizations including the Koch brothers, the Waltons (owners of Walmart), the Bradley Foundation, the Roe Foundation, and the Coors family (owners of Coors Brewing Company).

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Excerpts From the Press Release:

Twelve new reports released today expose the State Policy Network (SPN), an $83 million web of right-wing "think tanks" in every state across the country. Although SPN's member organizations claim to be nonpartisan and independent, an in-depth investigation reveals that SPN and its state affiliates are major drivers of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)-backed corporate agenda in state houses nationwide, with deep ties to the Koch brothers and the national right-wing network of funders. The reports show how these groups masquerade as "think tanks," and describe how some of them may be skirting tax laws while really orchestrating extensive lobbying and political operations to peddle their legislative agenda to state legislators, all while reporting little or
 no lobbying activities.

_____________________________

The Coors family is one of the major funders of SPN. The family has a long history of sponsoring right-wing causes.
Bill Coors resisted the Civil Rights Act and once said blacks "lacked intellectual capacity." Joe Coors started the
right wing Heritage Foundation. The Coors family has been able to create a friendly image of itself through its beer commercials. Wonder if Ice Cube knows that? (Photo by Daniel Spiess)

 _____________________________

"The 'experts' of State Policy Network groups get quoted on TV, in the papers, or in the legislature as if they were nonpartisan, objective scholars on issues of public policy," said Lisa Graves, Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). "But in reality, SPN is a front for corporate interests with an extreme national policy agenda tied to some of the most retrograde special interests in the country, including the billionaire Koch brothers, the Waltons, the Bradley Foundation, the Roe Foundation, and the Coors family."

A NEW GENERATION GETS IN ON THE ACT: Mark Zuckerberg:
Chairman and CEO of Facebook, one of the funders of SPN.
(Photo: Kris Krüg)

Denise Cardinal, executive director of Progress Now, added, "The bottom line is these organizations of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich are representing themselves as groups that are looking out for the best interests of everyday, working class Americans and it's just a blatant lie. What we're doing is trying to bring some transparency to the damaging work they're doing on a daily basis. From policies that promote polluting the air and water to the destruction of our public education system and a tax system that benefits their rich donors, what these organizations are doing is shameful and it's time that someone brought this to light."

Key findings of the report include:

• Although SPN's affiliates are registered as educational nonprofits, several appear to orchestrate extensive lobbying and political operations to peddle their legislative agenda to state legislators, despite the IRS's regulations on nonprofit political and lobbying activities.
  
• SPN and its affiliates push an extreme right-wing agenda that aims to privatize education, block healthcare reform, restrict workers' rights, roll back environmental protections, and create a tax system that benefits most those at the very top level of income.
  
• SPN and many of its affiliates are some of the most active members and largest sponsors of the controversial ALEC, where special interest groups and state politicians vote behind closed doors on "model" legislation to change Americans' rights, through ALEC's task forces. SPN has close ties to, and works with, other national right-wing organizations like the Franklin Center and David Koch's Americans for Prosperity.
  

You can see the reports -- a nationally-focused report written by CMD and eleven state-focused reports written by Progress Now member groups and CMD -- at www.StinkTanks.org as well as detailed information documented at SourceWatch.org.

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For more information, contact:  Rebekah Wilce, (608) 260-9713, rebekah@prwatch.org

You can read and download the full report here.