How could I blackout a site that hasn’t been updated in years? Instead, to protest the pending Internet regulation legislation in the US Congress right now, commonly known as SOPA (House bill) and PIPA (Senate bill), I will spare my social network followers the incessant snippets, and finally, blog definitively about it.

There is plenty of explanatory commentary on this bill widely circulating right now. I offer a unique treatment of this situation, public reaction and possible resolution.

Citation of bills

H.R.3261 – Stop Online Piracy Act

AKA SOPA
http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h3261/text
http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h3261/show

S.968 – PROTECT IP Act of 2011

AKA Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011
AKA PIPA
http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-s968/text
http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-s968/show

Commentary

Simply put, this legislation is an embarrassing blunder of epic proportions by both the Copyright Cartel (MPAA, RIAA, Chamber of Commerce, The 5 Major Media Corps) and their proxy lawmakers, which as of this writing, include my own (Chuck Schumer [D,NY], Kirsten Gillibrand [D-NY], co-sponsors; Nydia Velasquez [D, NY-12], a cagey SOPA Supporter).

It criminalizes the design, structure and usage of the Internet and Social Web.

Imagine the PIPA law is signed by the President. As early as March…

Uploading a Michael Jackson song could land you 5 years in jail. This could happen by accident, as it plays in the background of a home video you make and upload to YouTube to share with friends and family. Not only will YouTube be forced to close down its business because of you, but you will also likely serve jail-time, as the Attorney General has new tools to prosecute you. A copyright owner would only need to accuse you of infringement to shut down the site. There’s only a 5 day window to remove the content before shutdown.

As written, these acts would cut off the digital media technology startup industry. The uncertainty of the regulatory conditions and expense of retaining counsel for constant consultation would eliminate entrepreneurialism. All risk-taking would essentially cease when it comes to Internet-based business development.

As written, these acts would criminalize most forms of media remixing, which scholars believe is a critical literacy for the twenty-first century. Public libraries are currently being outfitted as afterschool media labs so that teens can learn the skills that will … lead to their arrest … as they get caught uploading and linking to copyright material? Yes, that is the bizarre reality if SOPA and/or PIPA are enacted into law.

As written, these laws demonstrate Congress’s appalling inability to show us that they are not bought out by special interests. Their rubber stamping of dangerous language in these laws, probably written by Lobbyists, reveals to us that they do not understand the concept of the Internet or the verdant, world-changing cultures that inhabit it, building value the world has never seen.

As written, these bills reveal that the American Entertainment Complex, acting through its industry associations, MPAA and RIAA, with support from the Chamber of Commerce (CoC) brazenly “purchases” democracy and attempts to regulate the Internet-as-we-know-it out of existence. They cite evidence of their profit losses in amounts that even the FBI cannot corroborate. Most empirical studies point to a link between media sales as a result of bootleg media distribution channels. Consumers demand total media access. Producers refuse to sell it to them, at any price.

Congress and the White House should consider how they could redirect this effort towards a transparent collaboration between the Content Cartel and the immense design and technology capital offered by the free market, (See Silicon Valley, Silicon Alley) to solve copyright infringements through innovation, not totalitarian legislation. The Internet, the Social Web and the Technology Industry is rightly furious that it was not consulted by Congress to craft this legislation. It offends to ponder Congress’s corrupt contempt for the burgeoning bright spot of the American economy.

Congress must acknowledge that the Entertainment Industry fosters piracy by means of their own business model of keeping complete content libraries fragmented across platforms, restricted by arcane rights limitations, and throttled by restrictive rights management. This is a deliberate attempt on the part of IP Lawyers, working for Big Media, to create scarcity where there is none. They only know how to profit from economies based on scarcity. If the combination of the digital Internet, the Social Web, and mobile computing obliterates the scarcity maintained by physical media, then the Cartel must create scarcity by limiting rights, so you cannot download any movie or tv show, anywhere, anytime.

Why can’t consumers download any movie or any song on any device for any price? There is no technological limitation for this not to be standard. The protocols, tools and systems are in place, right now. It is due to an artificial constraint imposed by Copyright implementations, by choice.

If the Content Cartel would license its complete library, open access, all platforms, for any price it would like to charge, piracy would essentially end.

This will be an issue in the November elections. I anticipate a significant number of voters will struggle to cast votes re-electing any member of Congress who fails to take this momentous opportunity to step away from this folly. Let’s dump these evil twin sisters, SOPA and PIPA, for good.

Dear @sengillibrand, This is me protesting your co-sponsorship of #PIPA at today’s rally outside your office. #SOPA twitter.com/aquarious/stat…

— Dave Carroll (@aquarious) January 18, 2012

Authors Note: Citations and hyperlinks and hypermedia to be added as I publicly revise this essay, true to form.

Could we fix systemic flaws simply by printing a new denomination with a picture of a mag-lev train riding through a wind farm on the back of the bill?

The Preamble

I’m not an economist or an expert on currency markets. But I am a designer. When designers are presented with problems, they instinctively imagine design solutions. This is my proposal to work towards solving the current financial crisis and restore the greatness of the United States of America. It is inspired by the three previous attempts of Presidents Lincoln, Jackson and Kennedy to re-nationalize our currency. Most people don’t realize that our currency is based on the Treasury Department selling debt to an international banking cartel that funds the Federal Reserve Bank. When you really try to figure out what the Fed is, you realize that it’s not really Federal (beyond the appointment of leadership positions by government) and it’s not really a Reserve either. And it’s certainly not the purest form of a United States currency. We’ve tried issuing a non-fiat currency of US Notes in the past, often nicknamed the greenback. According to economist, S.G. Fisher, ‘the Greenbacks were the best currency that ever a Nation had.’¹ Naturally, banks hate this kind of currency as it diminishes the role of debt in a financial system, which is how they get to make money out of thin air.

The Problem

The Federal Reserve is far too powerful; above the authority of Congress² and probably above the President.³

Our Lender of Last Resort is now so mired in debt and inflationary triggers that it’s hard to imagine its capacity to finance a green economy revolution. The Fed is stuck with financing the bailouts and an exponential debt that now equals the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and has doubled the amount of money in circulation. In other words, the international financiers that actually supply the Fed with loans to issue Federal Reserve Note dollars have not only doubled their investment, but also crafted the conditions to cause devastating inflation down the road, which will invariably benefit them with more and more indentured servitude to their unquenchable money making.

The forces of globalism naturally seek a more stable currency, one that is more protected from the boom-bust cycles that work out great for the international banking cartel. Just consider how unbelievably profitable the housing-bubble collapse and ensuing bailouts have been to JP Morgan and Goldman-Sachs.

In addition, a Central Bank system thwarts pure capitalism and fuels crony capitalism by centering monetary policy in the hands of a winner-take-all few. The Chairman of the Federal Reserve is widely regarded as the most powerful man in the world economy. And this is good? The US campaign finance and lobby system only worsens the situation, nurturing a corrupt partnership between the corporate person and legislators.

Whether your political perspective is leftist or rightist, it’s pretty easy to accept that the Federal Reserve just might be the source of all economic evil. Libertarians hate it. Liberals should hate it for epitomizing the secret subversion of government and a blatant conspiracy to enrich private interests at the expense of the state and the public common good. The only people who really support the idea of the Federal Reserve are Centrists, who by nature, don’t want to rock the boat. And dissolving the Fed is a truly radical idea, Titanic Big, maybe bigger.

The Solution

Launch a parallel, alternate US NOTE greenback dollar in the spirit of a national project, such as financing a war or major sci-tech project. Like JFK’s proposal, Treasury could issue $30 and $200 US “green” notes. The New Greenback’s value would be directly coupled to Green bonds to fund new eco-economy projects (renewables, mag-lev trains, smart electric vehicles). The value derived from the presumed economic strength of a “free” energy grid that fuels a “clean” transportation network promises a staggering profit potential once initial outlay is capitalized. The Greenback 2.0 captures our national economic potential as an alternative to the petroleum economy. Big Oil is completely tethered to Fed notes and the entrenched oligarchy.

New Greenbacks would likely have restrictions like the original US fiat currencies: maybe you couldn’t pay your income tax with them, or buy gasoline. Instead, they would be used to buy green energy and transportation, as well as acceptable goods and services. We would use New Greenbacks to buy clean energy from wind/solar/tidal farms, pay fares on mag-lev trains, purchase leases on electric smart vehicles and debit tolls on smart highways (with EZPass 2.0 powered by Greenbacks). Commercial business would be free to accept Greenbacks for everyday transactions based on a market-derived exchange rate against Fed Note dollars. Banks and other financial institutions would probably disparage this currency since they’re in on the Federal Reserve cartel.

The Result

Greenbacks (US Notes) would compete in the marketplace with Federal Reserve Notes to diminish the international banking cartel’s grip on our government, economy and monetary policy.

Greenbacks would buffer against inevitable Federal Reserve Note inflation while providing a means to exchange value based on the assets of environmentally sound, renewable, basically unlimited energy sources and the subsequent transportation capabilities that would drive a new 21st century marketplace towards a future without debt.

Instead of making money out of thin air through the Fractional Reserve System, an alternate US Note currency would make money out of an ambitious, game-changing clean-and-green energy and transportation system.

Footnotes

1. This is an awesome quote and S.G. Fisher is an awesome name, but I’m having trouble fact-checking this person and attribution beyond the Wikipedia entry where I found it.
2. According to the Accounting and Auditing Act of 1950, section, 31 USC 714(b), congressional audits of the Federal Reserve may not include “deliberations, decisions and actions on monetary policy matters.” According to the law, in other words, the Fed simply cannot be audited by Congress. Or by anyone else, for that matter.
3. Conspiracy Theory: In 1963, President Kennedy had tried to circumvent the private Federal Reserve banking cartel by issuing legal tender notes in $2 United States Notes denominations. Many speculate that this cost him his life as all the notes were recalled days after his assassination. Andrew Jackson killed the Federal Reserve, but we don’t really know the whole story. Some say it was just a shallow personal vendetta against the bankers that ran it. Others say Jackson was sincere. Abraham Lincoln used US Notes to help finance the Civil War, also assassinated. Call it coincidence or assume the banking cartel operates above the law as it has every reason to and has gotten away with it for more than a hundred years.

Strategist Smackdown

A Democrat mouthpiece annihilates his Republican counterpart. Truly humiliating.

via YouTube

O’Reilly Hung Out To Dry by Donahue

Although a pathetic shout-match between partisan extremists, O’Reilly lost this bout.

via YouTube

McCain Utterly Destroyed by a Maine ABC Affiliate Anchor

If this reporter anchored a major news network, our country would be a better place.

via YouTube

Decision 2008 Convention Chatterbox

The party conventions have magnetized the polarities of choice for our next president. Indeed, historic moments on both sides of the aisle.

“Identity politics” aside, instead, let’s just stick to the real issues. Presidential Election 2008 will come down to this decision for the American people, in three talking points:

Talking Points

If you:

1. don’t mind oil, no matter the price¹
2. don’t mind the government legislating reproductive rights in the bedroom and religion in the classroom²
3. don’t mind trickle-down economics³

…then you should support McCain/Palin.

If you:

1. want to start getting off oil, no matter the price⁴
2. don’t want the government legislating any reproductive rights or injecting religion in science classes and libraries⁵
3. reject trickle-down economics⁶

…then you should support Obama/Biden.

Divide and Conquer

They’ve gone ahead and done it, in act of bleak desperation, and made the election about 3 stupid things
(oil/abortion/the-economy-stupid).

The selection of Gov. Palin as Vice President without a truly acceptable vetting process is a blatant act of sexist pandering by McCain and reflects his poor judgment, especially considering there are so many other qualified and tested party rank-and-file women to select from (Sec. Rice, Sen. Snowe, Gov. Whitman). If you have to be sexist and choose a woman, for tactical purposes only, at least be smart about it. Atrocious!

It’s an evil-genius move, that smells like Karl Rove took a dump all over it. Play the VP choice like a talent-pageant.

“America’s Next Vice President: So You Think You Can Run The Free World!” – Tonight on FOX

The American thirst for playing out the pretty girl story on TV is unquenchable. It’s a contagious addiction to “narrative” rather than any real substance. This reality-show amusement reflects our fractured sense of true reality in a national quest for impossible authenticities. The guilty pleasure of liking and disliking people for superficial reasons bleeds into the real voting process. In dystopian horror, our democracy seems to be punishing qualified candidates for being too elite through accusations of elites of the highest order. This tactic envelopes discourse into pure us vs. them categories where the mutual contempt between intellectual haves and have-nots collide. Is this an Idiocracy in the making? Why wouldn’t we want a deeply intelligent individual in the land’s highest office. The most elite candidate, please. The Founding Fathers were the most “cosmopolitan” men of their day. If it wasn’t for them, we’d have the monarchy that the GOP is intent on coronating.

A Czechoslovakia Problem

I’ve seen the propaganda reels of McCain’s senile gaffes and it ain’t pretty, even when you discount it all “being taken out of context.” He’s just not sharp these days. I want a sharp commander-in-chief.⁷

And then there’s the most spine-chilling propaganda reel about McCain that you will ever see, with the guy from Book TV, the last place you’d expect to find a kind of whistleblower…

“There’s gonna be other wars. I’m sorry to tell you. There’s gonna be other wars.”

Footnotes

1. McCain/Palin and GOP machine is all about more drilling, denying inconvenient truths, and stalling to be conservative.
2. McCain or Palin would likely appoint anti-abortion and possibly pro-creationist justices to the Supreme Court during their term(s). Palin gutted funding in a surplus state for Teen mom support services.
3. You’ll see no relief to the middle class, no penalties for big business to foot the bills of the nation’s financial crisis, and social security will be gutted and privatized.
4. Obama will dedicate towards truly solving the problem of oil.
5. Obama or Biden would never appoint an anti-abortion justice to the Supreme Court. Palin tried to have books banned in the library.
6. The middle-class would likely see some economic relief, the greed and corruption of unfettered big business would likely be assessed, and social security would be preserved and nurtured.
7. Especially one who has traveled the world. Palin’s travel history is atrocious. Executives need international travel experience. It’s a basic qualification.

Is this any way to celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s Birthday?

We are appalled with Congress. In a huge victory for the Bush Administration, the Senate passed the revised FISA bill to grant sweeping government spying powers and shield the telecoms, especially AT&T and Verizon, from the legal action they deserve for breaking laws to build a universal Internet and telephone “wiretap” for government agencies with impunity.

These Democratic Representatives are still on the fence with the House version. If you’re also outraged, check the list and see if you know anyone from these states, and ideally, these districts and have them make their voices heard.

There are several moments in very recent history that we will later reflect upon in total disgust. These laws of fear will come to emblematize our national degradation towards fascism. This will be one of them. In the meantime, we can elect as many change-agent presidents as we want. Until we dump all the Senators and Representatives who voted for this criminal bill, having a brave new president is just the start of any effort to prevent us from moving towards the fear-driven desecration of our national values.

We warned about the dangers of the AT&T secret server rooms earlier. Today, we take a step closer towards the police state of China with its Great Firewall that censors and monitors telecommunications traffic. A big win for corporate power, a big loss for the 1st Amendment and the principle of privacy.

Just imagine how this post has been cataloged, indexed and red-flagged for being critical of the government its favorite corporations. Is this really what we want?

The site modmyiphone.com changed its name and domain services to modmyifone.com per the legal request of Apple counsel. This is significant only in that we’re surprised it took Apple this long to drop the hammer on the trademark infringers, especially after its fiasco with Cisco over the name iPhone in the first place.

This episode echoes what happened to a popular MINI Cooper enthusiast forum site when BMW sicked its legal on minicooperonline.com which forced it to change its name to northamericanmotoring.com in a bitter surrender.

The moral of the story is that it’s not a good idea to ever develop a web property using an obvious trademark. Legal precedent is now deeply in the favor of trademark holders. Gabriel Bridger got it right the first time when he named his famed MINI blog motoringfile.com in light of the “minicooperonline” controversy.

We look to China as a totalitarian police-state undergoing hyper-capitalism.

We know that China’s internet is filtered by the Great Firewall of China, an intricate, secretive and semi-effective internet censorship system.

As a guest-professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, I was offered VIP overseas access on the campus network, which offered, maybe, 80% of the web — everything but Wikipedia, BBC, and who knows what else. Without this extremely special login, however, the web was a stark list of accessible domain names: google.com.cn, microsoft.com.cn, yahoo.com.cn, the university intranet, and a set of Chinese web properties that require Mandarin literacy to discuss here.

I was advised that every site, email and instant message that I exchanged while on the campus network was being logged, databased, and perhaps, even monitored by a human resource, in real-time. In China, as a visitor, you are always impressed by a society the size of ours, quadrupled. A workforce of unimaginable quantity is assigned to each and every micro-task that occupies the Middle Kingdom, Earth’s most ancient society.¹ It is not unimaginable that a team of internet surveillance specialists could have been assigned to monitor my activities, especially since I was an American professor invited to teach design for the web on state turf. Certainly, I would be in a position to discuss controversial topics in front of impressionable minds, movements of web-based democracy. In jargon, we call it Web 2.0, user-generated content, crowd-sourcing, social networks. These tendencies may reflect American group dynamics, the result of open, free expressions. In other ways, web communities resonate with China’s state-centric qualities, group over individual, country over citizen, a bastion of anonymous, de-humanized, technocratic interactions. Really, it’s the hyper-individualism of web democracy that characterizes what’s new and exciting about the net, today. Possessive pronouns and terms of individuality exclaim the brands of blazing net properties. MySpace. YouTube. Facebook.

Not only do Tsinghua students experience a Great Firewall internet, they don’t even benefit from networked classroom computers. Viruses are blamed as the reason, but you won’t even find Ethernet cables connecting PCs in campus classrooms and laboratories. Naturally, it was a challenge to check my email, let alone teach a course in web design. I’ve already written more generally about this teaching exchange on these pages. My point here is that I can confirm from personal experience, the Great Firewall of China is omnipresent, a truth, not an an exaggeration.

We would never imagine that our own internet at home, in the US, was limited² or monitored by our central government. We readily accept that it is monitored and data-mined for profit by the corporations that run these services. But we cherish a different sort of firewall, a Great Firewall of America, a constitutional separation between commerce and government when it comes to surveillance of citizens. In the US, it’s a national ambition to profit from consumer surveillance,³ but it’s a crime for the government to perform unauthorized surveillance of citizens.⁴ Or is it?

Total Information Awareness is the supposed internal name for the Bush Administration’s NSA data-mining operation on the American open internet. We learn today of Attorneys General, past and present, and their secretive exchanges over hospital beds, ordered by the highest powers, to quash concerns of its legality and active use. Surprisingly, Congress scrambles to rewrite laws to make these crimes legal. According to the PBS Frontline “Spying on the Homefront” special reports, we are only beginning to discover how the Great Firewall of America, that sacred separation between Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue is secretly breached. In a confusing twist of metaphor, if you believe Mark Klein’s account of the NSA ‘splitter rooms’ at AT&T backbone facilities where the aortas of the internet in major cities are essentially tapped with NSA equipment, Big Brother channels our collective electronic thoughts.

We can only assume that data-mining endeavors of unimaginable scale are taking place on these servers and switches, all paid for by fellow citizens. We can only assume that AT&T and other telecom executives crumbled or gladly accepted the NSA’s requests to install these electronic surveillance centers and install the Great Firewall of America 2.0, the core tool of TIA. Indeed, we can only assume that since installation, every web site, visitor history, email, IM, and file transferred has been logged and data-mined by the NSA. We can only assume that algorithms beyond the scope and scale of Google’s crawlers are trawling and flagging content and IP addresses. The exact identities of each consumer/citizen is obtainable through a court-order to the appropriate ISP. Real-time dossiers are being compiled by software agents, associating net, consumer and governmental identities.

We are told that this is for fighting terrorism, it is patriotic to believe that the government could never erroneously apply justice, that data mining software connects the dots perfectly, and that it is our civic duty to forsake civil rights in the name of security.

We may be able to visit any site we want, post any language or image we desire, and communicate in any manner we see fit, as Americans. Our Chinese counterparts, however, may need to circumvent serious oppressions in order to enjoy similarly unfettered electronic freedoms. Indeed, incarceration and execution remain ever-present risks of destabilization and disruption to social order through expressions of taboo topics.⁵ But we both share in the inevitable shame in knowing that our governments employ the highest of technologies to apply Panoptic surveillance on its citizens. At least in China, you’re easily reminded that this is true. In the US, we are fooled into thinking this is false. The US was a nation designed to be great through its checks and balances. Do we need regimes like China’s to remind us of what we will become if we recklessly abandon our core national values?

So in stating all of this, why would I “feed the dragon” and offer my criticisms here, where the AT&T NSA TIA servers might spider, filter, identify, sort, tag, cross-reference, and save for later, just in case any red flags come up? Red Flags. Imagine that.⁶

Footnotes

1. A direct translation of 中国 (zhong guo), the name for China, in Chinese, is “middle kingdom.” Indeed, the language and consistent culture of China has lasted longer than any other civilization, thousands of recorded years.
2. Although, see Net Neutrality
3. See Google, ChoicePoint, the credit companies, bureaus and banks, retailers, market researchers, and so forth. Even this website uses Google agent technologies to analyze the content of this page to serve advertising and provide the owner with in-depth, but anonymous, site usage and tracking information.
4. See FISA.
5. The Three Ts: Taiwan, Tian’anmen, and Tibet are well known taboo topics. In addition, Democracy, Falun Gong and the resilient cult of Mao remain profoundly censored topics in China.
6. If you’re a federal employee reading this, I just wanted to say “Hi.” Otherwise, you’re a computer program and you’ve probably already red-flagged this data.