EU on web-terror: Something must be done EU ambassadors have agreed on a draft statement regarding "cooperation to combat terrorist use of the internet". Justice and Interior ministers are expected to endorse the document in June. The EU draft text (which can be downloaded here [pdf]), lays out conclusions regarding the so-called "Check the Web", initiative launched …
I wonder what a win looks like for these 'terrorists' they always talk of?
Bush claims they're all part of a big secret organisation out to destroy American freedom, but that's just comic book stuff. Same as Pat Robinsons claim they want to wipe out Christianity.
Al Qaeda's big demand was US troops out of Saudi Arabia, and that was done back in 2003 when Bush pulled them out of Saudi Arabia.
Iraqi insurgents want US out of Iraq and their faction to be dominant. But we don't care either way, it's not our business, it makes no difference whether we pay a fortune to Exxon or Sunnis or Shiia for our oil. Or do you think Exxon will sell it to us cheaply? I don't.
Palestinian armed gunmen want a homeland.
Israeli armed gunmen want Palestinian land.
Iran wants USA not to invade.
Chechen rebels want Russian out of Chechnya.
Basque separatists want a land to themselves that speaks their language.
I don't see how the Internet is to blame for any of these. About the only thing it's to blame for, is the last US election that kicked the Republicans out of Congress and Senate, and Tony Blair out of office.
Remember 'terrorists use Youtube'?
I don't see why we have a problem, we could pull the troops out of Iraq, stop pandering to the loons in Washington, give the Basques language protections like we did the Welsh separatists before them, be more critical of Israels bombing campaigns, not go invading a bunch of other countries based on documents from convicted Lebanese fraudsters.
Or are these radical terrorist ideas that must never be discussed?
Perhaps a win is when people like Bush Cheney and Blair are safe to tell lies without getting caught out?
A win is if the Internet doesn't embolden the voters?
So now we come to the internet. The same PR bullshit that lead to things like the invasion of Iraq, wiretaps without warrants, enforced ISP data retention, biometric ID cards, RFID passports and many other things (whose benefits to any but a few crony CEOs is highly questionable), has brought us to this attempt to use the internet as a scapegoat for policies based on greed and political partisanship - rather than a coherent use of law enforcement to nab terrorists.
Unfortunately these people have no idea how the internet works or what it really is. Therefore the only thing they'll do effectively is monitor totally innocent people, gather gigabytes of useless data and maybe alienate some others, helping to recruit a few more extremists. And besides enriching a few more cronies with plum over-reaching government contracts what they'll actually end up doing is cause even more of these wacko sites to spring up all over the world. Then again maybe they do understand, and hope to use these sites as a means to enrich themselves and their cronies for years to come.
As you can see from the excellent US website http://trac.syr.edu/tracdhs/index.html , the US WarOnTerror(c)(tm) fronted by the Department of Homeland Security...
quote "Despite repeated claims by high officials of the Bush Administration that fighting terrorism has been the central mission of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) since it began operating, the data show that in the last three years a claim of terrorism was made against only 12 (0.0015%) out of 814,073 individuals against whom the DHS has filed charges in the immigration courts."
so that's a US WarOnImmigrants (to 99.9985% accuracy) then....
what will the EU "Web terror initiative" (I've heard it described as something like a safe , tame, version of the internet thats to be held in a google style mega-cache, an internet abstraction layer that is (state) firewalled from the real data) be *actually* targeting.......?
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