[Paleopsych] Undernews: Censorship Growing On Internet: Suppressing Anti-Bush Material

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Censorship Growing On Internet: Suppressing Anti-Bush Material Undernews

WAYNE MADSEN REPORT - Internet censorship. It did not happen overnight but 
slowly came to America's shores from testing grounds in China and the Middle 
East.  Progressive and investigative journalist web site administrators are 
beginning to talk to each other about it, e-mail users are beginning to 
understand why their e-mail is being disrupted by it, major search engines 
appear to be complying with it, and the low to equal signal-to-noise ratio of 
legitimate e-mail and spam appears to be perpetuated by it. . .

Take for example of what recently occurred when two journalists were taking on 
the phone about a story that appeared on Google News. The story was about a 
Christian fundamentalist move in Congress to use U.S. military force in Sudan 
to end genocide in Darfur. The story appeared on the English Google News site 
in Qatar. But the very same Google News site when accessed simultaneously in 
Washington, DC failed to show the article. This censorship is accomplished by 
geo-location filtering: the restriction or modifying of web content based on 
the geographical region of the user. In addition to countries, such filtering 
can now be implemented for states, cities, and even individual IP addresses. . 
.

News reports on CIA prisoner flights and secret prisons are disappearing from 
Google and other search engines like Alltheweb as fast as they appear. Here 
now, gone tomorrow is the name of the game.

Google is systematically failing to list and link to articles that contain 
explosive information about the Bush administration, the war in Iraq, Al Qaeda, 
and U.S. political scandals. But Google is not alone in working closely to 
stifle Internet discourse. America On Line, Microsoft, Yahoo and others are 
slowly turning the Internet into an information superhighway dominated by 
barricades, toll booths, off-ramps that lead to dead ends, choke points, and 
security checks.

America On Line is the most egregious is stifling Internet freedom. A former 
AOL employee noted how AOL and other Internet Service Providers cooperate with 
the Bush administration in censoring email. The Patriot Act gave federal 
agencies the power to review information to the packet level and AOL was 
directed by agencies like the FBI to do more than sniff the subject line. The 
AOL term of service has gradually been expanded to grant AOL virtually 
universal power regarding information.  Many AOL users are likely unaware of 
the elastic clause, which says they will be bound by the current TOS and any 
TOS revisions which AOL may elect at any time in the future. Essentially, AOL 
users once agreed to allow the censorship and non-delivery of their email.

Microsoft has similar requirements for Hotmail as do Yahoo and Google for their 
respective e-mail services.

There are also many cases of Google's search engine failing to list and link to 
certain information.  According to a number of web site administrators who 
carry anti-Bush political content, this situation has become more pronounced in 
the last month. In addition, many web site administrators are reporting a 
dramatic drop-off in hits to their sites, according to their web statistic 
analyzers.

http://waynemadsenreport.com/