Slashdot Mirror
Anti-TPP Website Being Blacklisted
so.dan writes: The CTO of Fight for the Future — the non-profit activism group behind Battle for the Net, Blackout Congress, and Stop Fast Track — Jeff Lyon, is seeking advice regarding a problem with facing the website they created — stopfasttrack.com — to fight the secret Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal.
The site been blacklisted by Twitter, Facebook, and major email providers as malicious/spam. Over the last week, nobody has been able to post the website on social networks, or send any emails with their URL. Lyon has posted a summary of the relevant details on Reddit in the hope of obtaining useful feedback regarding what the cause might be. However, none of the answers there right now seem particularly useful, so I'm hoping the Slashdot community can help him out by posting here.
Lyon indicates that the blackout has occurred at a particularly crucial point in the campaign to kill the TPP, as most members of the House of Representatives would likely vote against it were it brought to a vote now, and as pro-TPP interests have started to escalate their lobbying efforts on the House to counteract what would otherwise be a no vote.
The site been blacklisted by Twitter, Facebook, and major email providers as malicious/spam. Over the last week, nobody has been able to post the website on social networks, or send any emails with their URL. Lyon has posted a summary of the relevant details on Reddit in the hope of obtaining useful feedback regarding what the cause might be. However, none of the answers there right now seem particularly useful, so I'm hoping the Slashdot community can help him out by posting here.
Lyon indicates that the blackout has occurred at a particularly crucial point in the campaign to kill the TPP, as most members of the House of Representatives would likely vote against it were it brought to a vote now, and as pro-TPP interests have started to escalate their lobbying efforts on the House to counteract what would otherwise be a no vote.
Censorship in the US doesn't have to be about the first amendment as long as you can get Facebook, Twitter and Google to agree.
If you run a messenger service, you aren't entitled to decide that select groups can't use your service. You can't decide that you will monitor the messages, and only deliver those messages that you approve of. You don't get to decide that you will deliver partisan messages that favor your position, and just lose messages that support the other side.
As an email provider/carrier/whatever, Google has a responsibility to pass the messages on, unless and until they actually violate some law.
How about if your phone company listens in to your conversations, and cuts you off when they disapprove of your conversation?
Now - you can twist a pair of panties into any kind of a wad you like, but you cannot twist morality and ethics enough to justify censorship of private communications. Nor can you justify political communications. Can't even justify censorship of business communications, until those communications violate a valid law.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Facebook is not the internet. Facebook is its own cryptic walled garden of bullshit that you've adopted as your medium of self expression. It's not public property.
The phone company isn't allowed to do that because it's legally defined as a "Common Carrier."
Facebook et al., on the other hand, aren't. I'm not sure, but I doubt most email services are either.
It may be arbitrary, unfair and anti-democratic, but that what happens when citizens can't be fucking bothered to pay attention and give the goddamn lobbyists free reign to write the laws!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
You may want to re-think your position.
The FCC redefined common Carrier to INCLUDE ISP's.
ISP's are defined as "an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet."
I am sure Google and Google mail qualify under that definition, as would Facebook and Twitter.
ISPs, not services. FCC made a clear distinction between Internet Access Providers and Services on the Internet.
Apart from the pretty colors, it's pretty badly designed. There's only the one video explaining why it's bad, no text, no in-depth analysis, no outside opinions, no nothing. There isn't even (that I could find) a link to the text of the TPP.
Even members of the US Congress only get extremely limited access to the text of the TPP:
Only members of the House and Senate are currently allowed to view the text of the deal, and even they are forbidden from discussing what it contains. As a new report from Politico published Monday details, "If you’re a member who wants to read the text, you’ve got to go to a room in the basement of the Capitol Visitor Center and be handed it one section at a time, watched over as you read, and forced to hand over any notes you make before leaving."
You basically have to be a negotiator or a representative of large business interests to get full access. Some chapters (5 out of 31) of the text have been made available via Wikileaks until now.
Anyone know and want to elaborate on what this TPP is?
The best, and definitely the most enjoyable, primer on the potential for abuse of the TPP (based on abuse of previously negotiated similar trade agreements) and the underhanded way it's being negotiated, is probably John Oliver's segment on it.
Donate free food here
First, we don't know everything about it because it is being kept secret to a large extent and debate is being officially suppressed.
Second, yeah there are a lot of problems we've gotten out of it via leaks.
1. There is some sort of committee being set up to settle a wide array of disputes that the US will have to submit itself to whether or not it wants to. The committee will be made up of unelected officials from many nations and their decisions will be binding on the US. That all by itself is unacceptable. Its like wishing for infinite wishes. You write into the agreement that some group can obligate you to abide by new regulations that some other committee comes up with whenever they want? No.
2. There is a lot of information security stuff in there. Basically they're exporting a lot of the NSA wire tap stuff to the rest of the world and they're forcing the US to continue to spy on its own people to comply in turn.
3. There are a lot of regulations on labor unions that shouldn't be involved in a trade agreement.
4. There are an almost endless list of ticky tacky regulations that they're requiring on everything including paying private hospitals money if you open a public hospital near them to compensate them for POTENTIAL losses to their profits. But really there are an almost endless list of these.
5. Basically no one in government has read the thing and yet they want to have a vote on it when no one has read it. They will let congressman go in there and read it. But they can't take it with them, they can't take notes out of the room with it in there, and they can't tell people what is in the thing.
6. THat it is secret is a bad sign in and of itself. If it isn't going against US interests then there is no reason to suppress knowledge of it or suppress debate. The argument is being made that if more people knew about it, then it would make negociations harder. However, that isn't rational because you can use the US congress as defacto bad cop in the negociations. Where in the administration could say "well, I'd like to do that but I'd never get that through congress". Suppressing information means our bargaining position is weakened and it is more likely that bad legislation or bad regulations will get through congress because no one will have read them before they were signed into law.
Congressman rarely read all these bills. They're too long. They use staffers and interest groups and the media to do the heavy lifting. And by denying congress the ability to use those features, they're basically forbidding congress from reading the law. Has Obama read the whole thing? Of course not. He's used his own staffers, interest groups, etc to read it for him and distill it to what he's going to care about.
Congressman do the same thing. You can't deny their staffers and interest groups and the media access to the legislation and expect them to know what was in the bill.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
...but that what happens when citizens can't be fucking bothered to pay attention and give the goddamn lobbyists free reign to write the laws!
Literally blaming the victim. Heh.
Look, it's not simply a case of "We just weren't prepared enough for this, didn't take any precautions, and did nothing to stop it." this is systematic rot that has been eating away at our rights for decades. We've fought it all over the place. Our method of rooting it out has itself been rotted away. We live in "democracies" where our votes are meaningless now.
There is no internal solution to this anymore. It's more than evident that our votes don't matter, and anyone voted into office will be bribed or worse. This is no longer a matter of voting the right person in. That doesn't mean 'give up'. It means 'start working outside the system'. You'll know it's effective when the government starts banning whatever method it is you've chosen for changing the system, the media starts demonizing you to destroy any popular/public support, and the intelligence agencies infiltrate your group to destroy it from within.
In fact, we have two prime examples already of this taking place: Occupy Wall Street, and the Tea Party movement. Anyone who thinks we haven't been fighting the blatant corruption in our government hasn't been paying attention. We've been fighting plenty; it's just that we've also been losing.
As I mentioned earlier - this is only going to get worse as time goes on. I'd honestly argue that many western nations are practical powderkegs right now. I don't think it's going to take much more for armed rebellion to start taking place. Another 2008 "recession", a sharp rise in the price of food, a couple more serious scandals like snowden, or CIA torture. People are getting fed up. People are noticing that their votes aren't changing anything.
Pretty soon people are going to start changing things in their own ways - and that isn't going to be pretty. It's going to leave many people wondering if we weren't better off just being the cattle we're being treated as.
Armed rebellion? You are a loon. American culture is nowhere near anything like that.
The reason your vote doesn't matter is very simple: you aren't casting it. I'm not talking about showing up and checking the box, plenty of people do that, and then feel smug about how they are being good Americans and making a difference. That isn't voting. That is the dog-and-pony show that we use to distract attention from actual voting.
How do you vote? It is easy as pie. Take your cold hard cash, and use it to lobby (either donate to a lobby, or start one of your own). Real money is real economic power, and you can use yours to effect positive political change.
American civilians resent this. This is because they don't care enough to make real sacrifices. Checking a box costs them a few hours out of their day once ever few years. That is nothing. They will happily do that, and blather on and on about how that is how the world should work. But they are wrong.
We attain power by being useful to others. That is what earns us the right to exercise that power over others. But exercising it is expending it. If that is too much for you to take, then keep on spouting nonsense about the revolution that will never come, while those of us who are in the know jump in the game as it is actually played.