No Honor Among Thieves: Obama, Occupy $location, UMG, Megaupload, and the money behind government.
(This post will have a Wiki-note-style bibliography at the end. I want you to read it without clicking away from what I have to say. Therefore, if you see Superscript, refer to the link list at the bottom of the post. I have the impression from the lack of comments on most of my posts, most of you wan't read this anyway. It's been knocking around in my head for a while, I just need to get codify it somewhere.)
I'm dissatisfied with the leadership of this country.
Stay tuned, because I codify this into a coherent conclusion at the end.
Obama: I don't really have any complaints about Obama.. He's not the Magic Black Man1 I imagine some people might have thought he was. Most info I have of him indicate he's just doing his best with the system. He rallied on a "I'll change things" platform, and some people are shortsighted enough to say.. "oh well he had his chance, but he's only been in there 4 years" The american system of government is BUILT to be able to nullify any one term of a president. I think she should get 4 more years. I want to see if he'll deliver.
Obama.. well I'm sure has his dirt. If you don't play ball with the nasty people you don't get into the club's higher levels. Reminds me of a quote from Mayor Weldon last week's Castle2 put it:
"I can’t run for governor in two years, I can’t run for president in six. That dream is done... [I'm] A little too innocent. There are people out there. I realize it now, people who control what goes on in this city and beyond. I wouldn’t play ball, so they took me out of the game. It’s been decided: this is as far as I get."
How much ball did Obama play to get to be President of one of the most corrupt governments on earth? I.. just don't know. He has such a good PR team.
The Occupy Movement: I've already posted my thoughts on this.3 Essentially, 1-2% of the people in this country control the money. The outrage started when the Census info was publicly published.4 And continued till riots and protests happened. The amount of money boggles the mind when you look at it objectively. 5 These protests were organized online, they got nationwide support, and the terrible police actions that happened then were all posted as memes to the net. I'm stil not sure if we got ANY legislation changes as a result of it. If any of you know, please tell me.
Which leads me to...
Law proposals that will SCREW US UP: I bet you can think of the biggest protest in internet history on 1/17/12 for SOPA and PIPA right off the bat, but did you know about other ones that come so close on the heels of the protests, that it seems prompted by them. They're taking our rights away bit by bit. "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Ben Franklin
A list will probably make this easier:
- They can track you without official cause or a warrant 6 : A court just supported police's right to put a magnetic GPS device on your car.
- They can detain US citizens as war criminals like the ones they do in Guantanamo 7 : This crap actually passed.
- SOPA and Protect IP 8 : Oh yeah, such a great idea. Break DNS for the entire internet in order to make it a little less convenient to pirate.. More than a handful of SOPA's supporters actually said that they didn't understand how the internet worked. Ridiculous
- You can be legally forced to give the password to encrypted files in court 9 : a precedent is now set.. You can't be forced under the 5th amendment to give up your safe's combination, but encryption passphrases aren't protected.
Are you outraged yet? These keep me up at night. I don't want to live in a country that is THAT locked down. Do we blindly trust any government? Because any right we give away, we give away for good.
The chief research officer at F-Secure Corporation in Finland, Mikko Hypponen has an amazing TED talk about the 3 kinds of online attack 10 . Only 2 are illegal.. the 3rd is perpetrated by governments, and occurs without reprocussion.
They're ALREADY ABUSING the powers they already have, and it was pointed out by...
Megaupload: (referred later as MU) It was a website that would allow you to upload a file to them, and then let anyone else download it if they had the direct download link. There were limited free accounts, and Premium accounts that allowed you to download or upload as much as you wanted to their service. They branched out to MegaVideo, MegaKey, and other sites.
People uploaded pirated content to this service and bought premium accounts to do more pirating.. Universal Music Group (referred later as UMG) discovers this pirated content, and then requested up to 5k files a day to be removed under their rights as a copyright holder. This is something that was insisted on by laws, and MU was complying within reason.
MU decided to hire a bunch of famous artists and people to do testamonials and sing a commerical for the MU service and posts it on the internet. 11 UMG has youtube take it down for copyright, MU insists all the artists did it of their own free will, were paid for the time, and give permission for it to be aired. The video comes back up, then gets removed again for the same reason. 12 It becomes public that UMG can remove content without proving that the content violates copywrite at all. MU files a lawsuit and files a restraining order to stop UMG from taking down their video.
Around the same time, MU announces that they're going to start a new music service called MegaBox. 13 It will allow artists to upload songs for MU to sell to people for them, and the artists get to keep 90% of the money earned.. 90! That's unheard of in the industry. NO MUSIC PUBLICITY COMPANY EVER DID IT BEFORE... and it would have killed UMG.
People in the fight against SOPA use MU's lawsuit as an example of how the government is already abusing the powers they have, and it causes a LOT of waves. Enough that Google, Wikipedia, and hundreds of other sites decide to stage an online protest by blacking out. 13
In 24 hours SOPA goes from 80 House of Representative supporters to under 60. In 48 hours from the black out, MU's offices are raided for "racketeering". Why? Because of the flimsiest indictment statement I've ever seen. 14 All the servers for MU are blocked off, and the employees arrested.
The CEO of MU is given no bail because of flight risk 16 , and the Department of Justice tells everyone who had content on MU to screw. 17 MU's main lawyer is forced off of defending MU because of "outside" causes. 18 MU is forced to drop their lawsuit. 19
Are you seeing where i'm leading you?
Conclusion:
The rich people are manipulating Media, Government, and more to take away our liberties.
Timeline:
-People get knowledge and protest
-New laws come in immediately after to lock protesters' communication and liberties down
-Megaupload points out how much they abuse their power and get shut down
-SOPA is only delayed.. not stopped. 20
Notes:
1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_Negro
2) http://scriptline.livejournal.com/55031.html
3) http://tryss.livejournal.com/360759.html
4) http://2010.census.gov/2010census/
5) http://xkcd.com/980/huge/
6) http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/01/warrantless-gps-monitoring/
7) http://rt.com/usa/news/senate-mccain-battlefield-graham-429/
8) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act
9) http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57364330-281/judge-americans-can-be-forced-to-decrypt-their-laptops/
10) http://www.ted.com/talks/mikko_hypponen_three_types_of_online_attack.html
11) http://youtu.be/o0Wvn-9BXVc
12) https://torrentfreak.com/universal-censors-megaupload-song-gets-branded-a-rogue-label-111210/
13) http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2011/111221airvinyl
14) http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/English_Wikipedia_anti-SOPA_blackout
15) http://www.scribd.com/doc/78786408/Mega-Indictment
16) http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2399353,00.asp
17) http://www.digitaltrends.com/web/doj-to-megaupload-users-who-lost-files-you-should-have-known-better/
18) http://torrentfreak.com/megauploads-top-lawyer-outside-pressure-120123/
19) http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/blogs/gear-up/megaupload-drops-lawsuit-against-universal-music-group-20120123
20) http://marshfieldmail.com/news/sopa-loses-support-gets-delayed/article_ba1e8242-477e-11e1-bb9c-001871e3ce6c.html