Dissent Mag

by Tom Burghardt

July 21st, 2008

What do you get when you combine U.S. militarism, fantasies of domination and an administration that views the internet as a hot-bed of “evil-doers” and “subversives”? Cyber Command, of course! Only this scheme has the potential of inflicting massive suffering on civilian populations across the planet.

Currently situated at the secretive Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, Air Force Cyber Command, the newest Pentagon command since the 1990s, is dedicated to the notion that the “next war” will be fought in the electromagnetic spectrum, one that envisions computers as “network-centric” weapons.

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Canada Will Become Test Case

By Kevin Parkinson

21/07/08 “Global Research” — - In the last 15 years or so, as a society we have had access to more information than ever before in modern history because of the Internet. There are approximately 1 billion Internet users in the world B and any one of these users can theoretically communicate in real time with any other on the planet. The Internet has been the greatest technological achievement of the 20th century by far, and has been recognized as such by the global community.

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So Goes the Newsroom, the Empire and the World

Posted on Jul 21, 2008

By Chris Hedges

The decline of newspapers is not about the replacement of the antiquated technology of news print with the lightning speed of the Internet. It does not signal an inevitable and salutary change. It is not a form of progress. The decline of newspapers is about the rise of the corporate state, the loss of civic and public responsibility on the part of much of our entrepreneurial class and the intellectual poverty of our post-literate world, a world where information is conveyed primarily through rapidly moving images rather than print.

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Jul 14, 2008 04:30 AM

Michael Geist

For most of the past two years, the net neutrality issue, which focuses on equal treatment of Internet traffic, was limited to academics and consumer groups pointing to the dangers to the public of a two-tier Internet. That dynamic changed dramatically this year when Bell Canada began “deep-packet inspection” of its traffic and limited the bandwidth it allocates to certain applications at peak times (a practice known as “throttling”).

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By Antony Loewenstein

July 8, 2008

During the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2008–sponsored by Harvard University and Google in Budapest, Hungary, in late June, and attended by over 200 bloggers, human rights activists, writers, journalists, hackers and IT experts from every corner of the globe–one participant joked that it was worthwhile buying domain names for dissidents likely to be imprisoned. “Just get them with ‘Free (insert name here).com,’ ” he said.

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By JOHN SPIRI

Special to The Japan Times

20/06/08 “Japan Times” — – In a September 2003 article for The Guardian newspaper, Michael Meacher, who served as Tony Blair’s environment minister from May 1997 to June 2003, shocked the establishment by calling the global war on terrorism “bogus.” Even more controversially, he implied that the U.S. government either allowed 9/11 to happen, or played some role in the destruction wrought that day. Besides Meacher, few politicians have publicly questioned America’s official 9/11 narrative — until Diet member Yukihisa Fujita.

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by Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols
The Nation magazine, May 30, 2008

On a Thursday in mid-May, the Senate did something that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. Led by Democrat Byron Dorgan, the senators-Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives-gave Rupert Murdoch and his fellow media moguls the sort of slap that masters of the universe don’t expect from mere mortals on Capitol Hill. (more…)

By Scott Ritter, Truthdig. Posted June 17, 2008.

Even after a former Bush spokesman says the press caved in on Iraq, the media are in total denial about their role in the invasion.

“I think the questions were asked. I think we pushed. I think we prodded. I think we challenged the president. I think not only those of us in the White House press corps did that, but others in the rest of the landscape of the media did that. The right questions were asked. I think there’s a lot of critics — and I guess we can count Scott McClellan as one — who think that, if we did not debate the president, debate the policy in our role as journalists, if we did not stand up and say, ‘This is bogus,’ and ‘You’re a liar,’ and ‘Why are you doing this?’ that we didn’t do our job. And I respectfully disagree. It’s not our role.”

Note video - “BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU SAY” below the article
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