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US Gov't Orders 73,000 Private Websites Offline
joeszilagyi sends this excerpt from TorrentFreak:
"... according to the owner of a free WordPress platform which hosts more than 73,000 blogs, his network of sites has been completely shut down on the orders of the authorities. Blogetery.com has been with host BurstNet for 7 months, but on Friday July 9th the site disappeared. ... Due to the fact that the authorities aren't sharing information and BurstNet are sworn to secrecy, it is proving almost impossible to confirm the exact reason why Blogetery has been completely taken down. The owner does, however, admit to handling many copyright-related cease and desists in the past, albeit in a timely manner as the DMCA requires."
Just putting this out there, but helping prop up failing businesses is not, at least in my opinion, as bad as oppressing your population's "right" to have access to otherwise publicly available information.
I see where you are trying to equate the two, but they really are in two different leagues.
"A government source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, suggested that the websites in question may have had links to child porn, utility hacking guides, and terrorist activity. They could not say exactly due to the ongoing investigation."
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
This happened about a week ago. The owner of the single server (that's right, it was all on one single server, with no backups) posted to WebHostingTalk.com to complain because BurstNet wouldn't violate the government's order to keep quiet.
The authorities ordered BurstNet to take the server offline for what appeared to be very, very serious violations. Based on BurstNet's demeanor and seriousness when asked about the issue, it could be anything from national security to child porn. BurstNet also appears to have been hit with a gag order, as they've only made one (perhaps two) public comments on the situation, and absolutely refuse to make any more announcements.
Don't take my word for it - read up on the situation at the original WHT thread (which is now closed).
> Who said US doesn't pull stunts like China?
>> China is *bad*. The U.S. is *bad*. But to say that the U.S. is "just as bad" is ridiculous and obviously false
Hey look, data!
http://report.globalintegrity.org/China/2009
http://report.globalintegrity.org/United%20States/2009
Or does that ruin it?
In a sane society, the criteria for an obligating bond such as marriage would be "informed consent" and nothing else.
Some cultures, such as our own, also use marriage as an institution to shore up child rearing efforts. Ergo tax benefits for married couples and for merely having children. You're painting it with entirely too simple a brush, probably simply to support your position, but there it is.
Next, juxtapose:
Informed itself is limited by the capacity to be informed, and so creates natural age, intelligence and species limits
with
We live in a society guided by rank superstition and goat-age desert morality, a condition exacerbated by a legal system that tries to solve very grey problems with black and white lines in the sand such as "age."
So you reject the laws made by anyone that used to subsist off of goats outright. Strange, but okay. Next you assert 'natural limits' and yet deny the law the right to arbitrarily define them. Also very odd. Would you advocate a one-time assessment, or merely an ad-hock application of the law at the whim of the arbiter? I think the age 'line' works as sort of a compromise. You know once you've hit it, and everyone else does also. I think it sort of 'just works'. Why don't you?
On a more positive note, you can live together with any number of consenting adults you choose to and there are very few restrictions on that anywhere in the country
In the United States this is largely false. You cannot live together with more than a handful of people from different families in basically any area with zoning laws. Check your statutes for the exact details, but around my home town, the limit is five people and only two of which may be adults. Otherwise, people would be turning residential neighborhoods into frat houses, etc...
Based on some searching (wayback and webhostingtalk) this guy has been booted from two other hosting companies since 2008.
See the ongoing thread @ http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=964013
In China, if you say the wrong things, you can be arrested and then executed. That simply does not happen in the US. There IS a definite difference.
To play devil's advocate here, you have cases like Ruby Ridge & the Waco Branch Dividians Seige where you can argue that in the US they don't even bother arresting you before they execute you.
There's also been numerous cases of law enforcement breaking into the wrong house on a drug/guns/whatever bust and killing totally innocent people because of it. It's happened often enough that there's really no good way to excuse it. Yes mistakes happen, but when mistakes result in the government basically murdering innocent people, there's something seriously, seriously wrong. After it happens once there should have been changes made to make damn sure it never happened again. And yet it keeps on happening.
And of course you yourself brought up warrantless wiretaps & rendition. You also have the ultra-secret national security orders that the PATRIOT act gave us, and then this story we're posting comments on where someone's entire domain was taken down and the ISP's not allowed to tell him WHY. I'm willing to bet that whatever the reason turns out to be it won't be a national security issue, so the ultra-secret nature of the take-down will be totally unfounded.
So, execution of innocents, murder of people without even bothering to arrest them first, domestic spying, torture, refusing to even tell you what you're accused of (and not charging you for it)... it's starting to sound pretty bad isn't it? I wouldn't personally class the US up there at China levels, but there are certainly plenty of things they do wrong enough to make the comparison not totally unfounded. And to be perfectly frank, all the things the US does wrong worries me a lot.
Posted AC because I wasn't kidding about that worrying thing. I'm scared to criticize my government openly any more.