Via Junkscience.com, comes this worrisome editorial from the Washington Times.
The new world order invades your computer
Imagine if everything you did online was subject to monitoring and control by the United Nations. Powerful authoritarian states, including China and Russia, are spearheading an effort to place the most potent information system in the world under centralized international control. They want the Internet to work with the same efficiency, speed and reliability as the U.N.
This week, Congress will consider legislation to amend the 1988 International Telecommunication Regulations to give the U.N. extraordinary powers over the Internet. In September, the authoritarian bloc submitted a proposal titled “The International Code of Conduct for Information Security.” In theory, it seeks to systematize and standardize the Internet and establish rules for maintaining cybersecurity. In fact, it will give the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) – a U.N. agency that oversees global telecommunications – vast new powers to regulate and control access to the Internet and information flow in cyberspace.
That Beijing and Moscow are backing the idea is enough to know it’s a bad one. The free flow of information has always been an enemy of thuggish regimes. To them, individual expression and the unlimited exchange of ideas – which the Internet has made possible for some oppressed people for the first time in history – must be stamped out. Such countries view the Internet as a vast intelligence operation, a means of collecting sensitive information on people and preventing freedom of expression through a sophisticated array of censorship tools.
More:
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/un-to-regulate-the-internet-house-set-to-examine-bill-next-week/
Here’s the FCC take on standing firm against it: http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2012/db0516/DOC-314117A1.pdf
WE SHOULD REMAIN UNIFIED IN OUR OPPOSITION TO UN/ITU REGULATION OF THE INTERNET.
Finally, all of us should be concerned with a well-organized international effort to secure intergovernmental control of Internet governance. Since being privatized in the early 1990’s, the Internet has historically flourished within a deregulatory regime not only within our country but internationally as well. In fact, the long-standing international consensus has been to keep governments from regulating core functions of
the Internet’s ecosystem.
Unfortunately, some nations, such as China, Russia, India, Iran and Saudi Arabia, have been pushing to reverse this consensus by giving the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) regulatory jurisdiction over Internet governance. The
ITU is a treaty-based organization under the auspices of the United Nations.32 As Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said last June, the goal of this effort is to establish “international control over the Internet using the monitoring and supervisory capabilities of the [ITU].”33
…
Today, however, several countries within the 193 member states of the ITU35 want to renegotiate the 1988 treaty to expand its reach into previously unregulated areas. A few specifics are as follows:
– Subject cyber security and data privacy to international control;
– Allow foreign phone companies to charge fees for “international” Internet traffic, perhaps even on a “per-click” basis for certain Web destinations, with the goal of generating revenue for state-owned phone companies and government treasuries;
– Impose unprecedented economic regulations such as mandates for rates, terms and conditions for currently unregulated traffic-swapping agreements known as “peering;”
– Establish for the first time ITU dominion over important functions of multi-stakeholder Internet governance entities such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the nonprofit entity that coordinates the .com and .org Web addresses of the world;
– Subsume under intergovernmental control many functions of the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Society and other multi-stakeholder groups that establish the engineering and technical standards that allow the Internet to work; and
– Regulate international mobile roaming rates and practices. These efforts could ultimately partition the Internet between countries that on the one hand opt out of today’s highly successful, non-governmental, multi-stakeholder model to live under an intergovernmental regulatory regime, and on the other hand, those member states that decide to keep the current system. Such a legal structure would be devastating to global free trade, rising living standards and the spread of political freedom. It would also create an engineering morass.
Once control is handed over, how long do you think it will be before they move to shut down climate skeptic blogs critical of the UN’s IPCC?
Write/call your representative in Congress now.
h/t to Mike Lorrey
Related articles
- House to examine plan for United Nations to regulate the Internet – the ITU (independentsentinel.com)
- Keep The U.N. Away From The Internet (webnerhouse.com)
- TheThe U.N. Wants to Run the Internet (tarpon.wordpress.com)
- Russia calls for internet revolution (rt.com)
- House reviews U.N. plan to regulate Internet (blacklistednews.com)
Folks, just a smidge OT.
If you haven’t heard or Brett Kimberlin, it’s closely related thematically to this UN story.
It’s a story about a conservative, completely innocent blogger be clapped in jail TODAY, by a lib-funded terrorist.
It’s not an uncomplicated tale, but it’s ethics and morals are plain as day. One of us is in jail. And Stacy McCain and his family had to flee his home-state. Because of this terrorist.
http://theothermccain.com/
Again OT.
The (not short) story of our guy now in jail:
allergic2bull.blogspot.com
Mark T says:
May 29, 2012 at 7:46 pm
………………………..in spite of the screaming from the left, treaties do not trump the Constitution (or any other US law for that matter)” rather than “there’s no way the left can really screw us.” We’re fortunate that, for the most part, our current SCOTUS representation does relatively good by the people of our fair country.
——————-
Bear in mind the next POTUS will most likely pick one or two new SCJs. I believe our youngest is somewhere over 75 years old.
Where will that leave the left?
Can you cite a specific example?
Can you cite an RFC that gives port numbers or explains this interface?
A long time ago now (the 1st Clinton era) CALEA for instance specified how voice telecommunications gear was to provide access to LE agencies … it is a simple matter otherwise to route desired traffic to/from one port to another for inspection/observation shall we say … CALEA, too, has since been ‘upgraded’ to encompass internet-based technologies as it relates to LE access, but the question for something specific still stands.
CALEA – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_Law_Enforcement_Act
.
Mike Busby says: (May 29, 2012 at 3:56 pm) “Meh, I give it 25 minutes after the announcement for some kid in China/Tawian/Hong Kong/Russia/Tasmania to create a bypass. …”
Would very much like to believe that, Mike… but a bypass on what? The internet?
Chuck,
Not sure where your info is from but only 4 are even in their 70s: Scalia, Kennedy, Ginsburg, and Breyer. Two liberals, one swing, and one conservative.
Mark
richardscourtney says:
May 29, 2012 at 3:17 pm
“The question at issue is how to arrive at the agreed standards…”
The same way we got HTTP and HTML. Someone invents some neat stuff and when it turns out to be useful, it becomes a standard.
The ITU had its idea of how global networking should work: it’s called ATM. It basically tried to push telephony technology onto a global network so you had to ‘set up a call’ to each server you wanted to talk to in a similar manner to how you’d set up a telephone call. You’ve probably never heard of it because it was a disaster; it’s now primarily used to provide DSL connections from your home to your ISP, where the concept does work because you’re not connecting to six different servers to request a single file via HTTP in order to display a web page.
We don’t want the ITU anywhere near fundamental Internet protocols or management; when all you know is telephony, every protocol looks like a telephone call.
I have thought for some time now that the UN has outlived its usefulness, turning from an organization that was simply meant to help keep the peace into a vast international bureaucracy run by a handful of power-hungry tyrants who seek to establish some kind of world government. Time for us to pull out of this useless organization and send it to Brussels, where they seem to like bureaucracy more.
DirkH says:
May 29, 2012 at 9:03 pm
Here is an example of mass human ingenuity to beat the system – BitTorrents. Would the internet police shut that down if they could?
It never ceases to amaze me how many Americans read “UN” and their brains switch off. The ITU is an example of an very early “public-private-partnership” and basically all the big telcos call the shots there – the same telcos that want to get rid of net neutrality. So the threat is real, but it comes from private corporations, not some self-aware international body bent on destroying the USA.
Nick in Vancouver: an old joke on the lines of your post.
Heaven: The chefs are French, mechanics are German, lovers are Italian, and the policemen are English.
Hell: The chefs are German, mechanics are Italian, lovers are English, and the police are French.
Yep, George Orwell was very prophetic. I live in the country to keep away from those cameras of which we have more than any other country per head of population, the UK.
Stupid, stupid idea. The UN should be disbanded not made more powerful.
Mike Edwards:
Re. your dispute of my comment that you provide at May 29, 2012 at 10:45.
Please see the reply by MarkG at May 29, 2012 at 11:11 pm .
He explains what I was trying to say.
Richard
Politeia – No. Old Greek Polis-City State, and a written constitution. The existing one that controls the United States says no no no. There is due process for change. The yes yes that this constitution proclaims are very limited. Is it anachronism of the Constitution?
A City State-UN perhaps, now at Turdle Bay, New York, New York.
Tony Mach, individual countries are leading the charge on this. Are you saying that big companies rule these countries? Pretty big assumption there with no evidence. Either that, or you are talking about something different then the article above. Stay on topic. We are talking about giving “MORE control ” and how several countries are leading the charge.
Why are these countries leading the charge? There is some argument on this, but its rather simple. If a country likes central control and often uses censorship, they would love anything that would make this easier for them to control the internet. If the ITU can be used to make it simpler and to adopt standards that require all information to be parsed easier….well that means that central control does not mean that these individual countries give up power over their own internets, far from it. I also highly doubt that China (or others) would push for something that would allow more information through.
I guess in the end it comes down to two choices:
Do we want an organization of the UN having the power to decide things for us in the neighborhood of standards and such?
Or does the internet work fine like it is.
I really don’t see the point in controlling things centrally since history teaches us that everytime that is tried it works worse then the alternative.
This is a horrific idea. At least they need a 2/3 vote in the Senate to ratify any treaties and the Dems only hold a one vote majority. I have a hard time thinking they will get enough Reps on board to do this even in a lame duck session if they all get bounced after the Nov. elections. There’s no logical basis to think the Reps would because the Reps would be looking at a new, incoming majority to go with a majority in the other house and an incoming president. They wouldn’t want to risk public goodwill on something like this, and any one of these treaties would be enormously unpopular, any one of them, but particularly this one. Now, if things go horrendously wrong, and the Dems get re-elected with strong majorities, all bets are off.
“I really don’t see the point in controlling things centrally since history teaches us that everytime that is tried it works worse then the alternative.”
All the big problems of the Internet; DNS, number allocation, SSL certificates, etc, are due to centralisation. With IPV6, for example, every telco on the planet could just pick a random 64-bit prefix with almost no chance of a collision… and then still give 4 billion IP addresses to each of their customers with no chance of running out any time soon.
The great thing about the IP standard is that you can do so much with it yet it does so little. All it provides is a means of requesting that your network try to send some data from one machine to another, and from that you can build just about anything you want, other than the kind of protocols the ITU love.
“What? You want to send data to another machine but don’t care whether it gets there? You don’t have quality of service guarantees? You can’t bill it? You can’t tell the network which route to take? A protocol that doesn’t work like a telephone call? Are you insane?”
If the ITU had built the Internet, not only would you have to specify the precise bandwidth for every connection even if you didn’t then use it, but most of the protocol spec would cover billing, so they could bill you by the byte, by the second and by the mile. Multi-billion dollar Internet companies would not exist, because the technology would make them unaffordable… most of the money would be going to the telcos.
I’m guessing the ITU are struggling to find something to justify their existence because no-one cares about telephony any more; just yesterday I was talking to one of our customers who wants to stop using the PSTN links to our systems and start using VOIP instead. Pretty soon all ‘telephone’ calls will be going over the Internet and the old PSTN system will only remain in a few backward countries where the telco is preventing widespread Internet access.
Can we just stop funding these idiots, the UN. It would not exist but for our money. I remember 40+ years ago, coming across a billboard , “Get the US Out of the UN!”. It seemed a strange concept then, I had not yet heard of the sponsors, the John Birch Society. Their motto, IIRC, was/is, “Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.”
Chuck Nolan says:
May 29, 2012 at 10:03 pm
Mark T says:
May 29, 2012 at 7:46 pm
………………………..in spite of the screaming from the left, treaties do not trump the Constitution (or any other US law for that matter)” rather than “there’s no way the left can really screw us.” We’re fortunate that, for the most part, our current SCOTUS representation does relatively good by the people of our fair country.
——————-
Bear in mind the next POTUS will most likely pick one or two new SCJs. I believe our youngest is somewhere over 75 years old.
Where will that leave the left?
__________________________________
People keep saying “the Left” and “the Right” Dr Evans at Jo Nova’s had it nailed there is no “Left and Right” there is the Regulating Class and the rest of us who are to be controlled so we pay and pay and pay.
Have you ever known a Republican Admin. to reframe from passing laws and instead devote it’s self to repealing a bunch of useless laws passed by the previous Democrats??? HMMmmm?
I rest my case.
Tony Mach says:
May 30, 2012 at 1:08 am
It never ceases to amaze me how many Americans read “UN” and their brains switch off…..So the threat is real, but it comes from private corporations, not some self-aware international body bent on destroying the USA.
__________________________________
There is a difference? The World TRADE Organization works hand in glove with the UN to promote international harmonization of law and global governance.
I suggest you see what the Director-General of the World Trade Organization, Pascal Lamy is talking about these days:
Of What Use is Global Governance? http://theglobaljournal.net/article/view/56/
Pascal Lamy: Local governments, global governance: http://www.friendsofeurope.org/Contentnavigation/Library/Libraryoverview/tabid/1186/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/3067/Pascal-Lamy-Local-governments-global-governance.aspx
The G20 in the Coherence Triangle: Global Governance according to Pascal Lamy: http://www.economicsummits.info/2010/04/the-g20-in-the-coherence-triangle-global-governance-according-to-pascal-lamy/
Of course private corporations such as the privately owned Cargill, who’s VP Dan Amstutz wrote the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture, want to see Global Governance. Harmonization of laws is much much better for trade and making money.
Engage your brain and read between the lines in this two documents one from the US FDA, one from WTO and one from the UN both addressing harmonization of national laws.
FROM THE FDA
FROM THE WTO.org WEBSITE
FROM THE UNITED NATIONS
The Shadow Net will have some dissenting input on any effort to centralize control of the Internet.
Oops! I wasn’t supposed to say anything about that.
Sorry. Forget I said anything.
Mike Busby says:
May 29, 2012 at 3:56 pm
Oh and would that would mean that the UN would be ultimately responisble for all porn/gambling/Nigerian Scams/Dating agencies/Facebook/Twitter/betting/forums/illegal file sharing and phoney medicine pushers on the Interwebs?. Good, finally we can track them down and sue the pants off them.
Oh no, The UN is very careful to add disclaimers to absolutely everything they do to completely remove their liability for any of their mistakes. There’s no way you could EVER sue them, for ANYTHING. They are quite literally above the law. Have you heard about their New York employees ripping up any parking tickets they get? They cannot be prosecuted, they all have complete immunity. It is quite disturbing really.
IGF 2012 (Internet Governance Forum)
The Seventh Annual IGF Meeting will be held in Baku, Azerbaijan from 6-9 November 2012. The proposed main theme for the meeting is: ‘Internet Governance for Sustainable Human, Economic and Social Development’.
Read all about it:
http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/2011/book/IGF_2010_Book.pdf
Message by Sha Zukang
“United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs
The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) was established by the World Summit of the
Information Society in 2006. Since then, it has become the leading global multistakeholder
forum on public policy issues related to Internet governance. The value and importance of the IGF has been increasingly recognized in recent years. In 2010, the United Nations General Assembly extended the IGF’s mandate for another five years, as recommended by the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Mr. Ban Ki-Moon.”
A Special Advisor to Ban KI-Moon on Internet governance and chair of the Advisory Group that organises the annual UN Internet Governance Forum, is Mr. Nitin Desai. He is an Honorary Fellow of the London School of Economics from whence comes Lord Nicholas Stern and a former Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations from 1997 to 2003.
In India, he is a colleague of IPCC chairman Dr Pachauri, as a “Distinguished Visiting Fellow” at The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) and advises the Indian Government on its national climate change action plan.
Much more background on what the UN is doing behind our backs with the connivance of our politicians can be found at these links:
The United (Nations) States Environmental Protection Agency
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/the_un_states_epa.html
UN Agenda 21 Will Rule The US Waves
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/un_agenda_21_will_rule_us_waves.html
United Socialist Nations
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/un_progress_governance_via_climate_change.html
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/lisa_p_jackson_epa_administrator_fulfilling_the_un_mission.html