Scenario: Your government is displeased with the communication going on in your location and pulls the plug on your internet access, most likely by telling the major ISPs to turn off service.
This is what happened in Egypt Jan. 25 prompted by citizen protests, with sources estimating that the Egyptian government cut off approximately 88 percent of the country's internet access. What do you do without internet? Step 1: Stop crying in the corner. Then start taking steps to reconnect with your network. Here’s a list of things you can do to keep the communication flowing.
Phi Beta Iota: If Trump runs on a pledge of Electoral Reform, announces a Coalition Cabinet prior to 1 September, challenges all other candidates to do the same, and then holds a balanced budget bake-off, he wins as an Independent. This is the one person we have seen who is credible and not a piss-ant wrapped up in No Labels and other similarly fraudulent schemes.
Phi Beta Iota: It is actually much worse than that. Our estimate of the cost of US being best pals with 42 of 44 dictators is closer to 500 billion, and that is a very conservative estimate. The cost is roughly divided between US taxpayer money being given away for the wrong reasons, and the “true cost” to the world–and ultimately to the USA–of an unethical, uninformed, unstrategic foreign policy that is in no way, shape, or form focused on creating a prosperous world at peace. Not to be naive, we realize that we have a government Of, By, and For the Banks and their Corporations. That is what needs to change, non-violently, on the basis of Internet Freedom and Freedom through the Internet. In passing, we are not amused when people steal our ideas and offer to help the US Government do for $3 million what we are doing for free. Three Internet Freedom URLs with links below the line.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton vowed on Tuesday to invest $25 million for developers to build tools that will let online dissidents get around “thugs, hackers and censors.” It’s her attempt at giving teeth to the so-called “Internet Freedom Agenda” that she unveiled last year.
Very heavy interview with Turkey's Foreign minister : Beginning at 9:40, the issue of Israeli intransigence on negotiations. No “mainstream” pick-up anywhere I can find.
Turkey's line in the sand. Cannot be walked back. I believe this to be a notice to US in the face of the wikileaks palestinian docs which revealed the US duplicity, in which EVERY nation under the influence of the US vis-a-vis negotiations was made to look like stooges. None, more so than Turkey. I believe that this interview ends that subordination.
As the Middle East undergoes historic transformation and upheaval one country is quietly enjoying levels of prosperity and stability that can only be envied by its neighbours – Turkey. And, in its ninth year of rule by the AK Party, the country is perceived as having successfully combined democracy and Islam.
But under the AKP Turkey has done more than improve its system of governance. It has also reached out to the Middle East in a way that no previous Turkish government has.
But as Western governments can tell you, getting involved in the Middle East is not always easy. One man more than any other is responsible for Turkey's drive to engage: Ahmet Davutoglu, the Turkish foreign minister.
He talks to Al Jazeera's Anita McNaught about the recent developments in the Middle East and explains why he is hopeful that change and stability will work together in Egypt and serve as a positive example for other countries in the region.
This episode of Talk to Jazeera aired from Monday, February 14, 2011.
Phi Beta Iota: Turkey and Iran are both inevitable leaders in their region and across their considerable diasphoras. There is NOTHING the US can do about it because the US is financially, morally, and practically bankrupt. It is going to take a quarter century to recover from the craven criminality that has chracterized the two-party tyranny and their Wall Street and corporate masters. The world is not stupid–they understand the inherent goodness of the American people and of America the Beautiful, but they also wonder why a public once famed for its independent intelligence can now be confused with a herd of sheep.
This is a specialization of our general Technology section, focusing more explicitely on the ‘true internet' or distributed P2P infrastructures. It is being updated over the next week or so.
On the overall perspective of the P2P Foundation: What Digital Commoners Need To Do, a meditation on the strategic phases in the construction of a peer to peer world
Programmatic Statement for the creation of a world-wide user-controlled network based on a distributed architecture, by Raffael Kéménczy
Projects we find worthty of support:
We Rebuild is a cluster of net activists who have joined forces to collaborate on issues concerning access to a free internet without intrusive surveillance
High Priority Free Software Projects: “The FSF high-priority projects list serves to foster the development of projects that are important for increasing the adoption and use of free software and free software operating systems.”
David Brooks’ article “Social Animal,” in the New Yorker, piled on more insights about human essence and consciousness: “Our perceptions…are fantasies we construct that correlate with reality.”
“I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past we call genetics. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago we call family, and the information offered months ago we call education. But it is all information that flows through us. The brain is adapted to the river of knowledge and exists only as a creature in that river. Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in isolation from it.
So much for our COIN strategy. I knew it wouldn't work because it is a
hollow approach. You cannot get to the population living in reinforced
garrisons while the rank and file walk the streets. When you are all
armored up and travel through a town in vehicles whose drivers pay no
attention what is going on you will loose the support of the public….and
that is a daily occurrence in AF….
For the U.S. government, and for the 100,000 American troops fighting in
Afghanistan, the messages delivered last Friday could hardly have been
worse.
Under the weathered blue dome of Kabul's largest mosque, a distinguished
preacher, Enayatullah Balegh, pledged support for “any plan that can
defeat” foreign military forces in Afghanistan, denouncing what he called “the political power of these children of Jews.”
Across town, a firebrand imam named Habibullah was even more blunt.
“Let these jackals leave this country,” the preacher, who uses only one name, declared of foreign troops. “Let these brothers of monkeys, gorillas and pigs leave this country. The people of Afghanistan should determine their own fate.”
HOW TO COMMUNICATE IF THE U.S. GOVERNMENT SHUTS DOWN THE INTERNET
