Welcome to a corporate, cable TV-style world wide web
Image: Wikipedia Commons
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Despite the corporate-driven hubbub surrounding the inevitability of “the cloud” replacing personal hard drives as the pre-eminent storage center for all web content, this system represents another dangerous trojan horse for the establishment to complete their agenda to regulate and shut down the free Internet.
Apple, Google and Amazon amongst other tech giants have all jumped on board with “the cloud,” a remote server network that allows users to store their data without using hard drives.
“It’s all part of a generational trend away from owning physical media content and towards renting media content from the computing universal cloud,” reports Investmentu.com.
However, despite the convenience of having all your files easily accessible in one place wherever you go, the drawbacks are ominous.
The Cloud is basically a You Tube for everything, and the problem with this is that You Tube routinely blocks, censors and deletes content when ordered to by governments. As we reported back in May, You Tube is now following orders from governments to remove videos that show protests, demonstrations and other sensitive information the state doesn’t want others to see.
Indeed, Amazon’s Cloud network notoriously deleted the entire Wikileaks website from its servers following a phone call made by Senator Joe Lieberman’s Senate Homeland Security Committee demanding the website be axed.
Lieberman has been at the forefront of a push to purge the Internet of all dissent by empowering Obama with a figurative Internet kill switch that he would use to shut down parts of the Internet or terminate websites under the guise of national security. Lieberman spilled the beans on the true reason for the move during a CNN interview when he stated “Right now China, the government, can disconnect parts of its Internet in case of war and we need to have that here too.”
The cloud is therefore the perfect compliment to cybersecurity. The goal is to force everyone to use one of the cloud networks run by a major corporation, first by taxing, regulating, and making the normal Internet prohibitively expensive, and eventually by shutting it down all together. Once the vast majority of data is confined to the cloud network, harsher copyright, free speech and defamation laws will slowly be tightened, which will force the alternative media out of business.
When you agree to have your content hosted on the cloud, you are virtually handing it over to a large corporation which then through “terms of use” has the power to access or delete your information.
For example, Amazon’s Cloud Locker’s “binding agreement” with users mandates that Amazon can exercise, “the right to access, retain, use and disclose your account information and Your Files”.
Handing your data over to the cloud also makes it that bit easier for the government to obtain your private information.
“It’s not like putting your data in a desk drawer,” Chris Calabrese of the American Civil Liberties Union told the Washington Post. “Although the government needs a judge’s order to seize a hard drive, a subpoena is often enough authority to obtain cloud data.”Security is also virtually non-existent on Amazon’s cloud. Amazon writes that “We do not guarantee that Your Files will not be subject to misappropriation, loss or damage and we will not be liable if they are. You’re responsible for maintaining appropriate security, protection and backup of Your Files.”
So if a hacker or Amazon itself deletes your files – tough luck – there’s no recourse.
Technology buffs have also predicted problems for people who later decide to switch between clouds, say moving from Apple to Google.
“Providers of cloud services like Apple, Google and Facebook will have strong profit incentives to hold on to their users to maximize revenue,” writes Tony D’Altorio. “They’ll do their best to limit consumers’ freedom to roam freely from cloud to cloud.”
“So consumers may get stuck in Apple’s iCloud and not be able to get out without a hassle. Mark Little, an analyst at Ovum, remarked, “Switching costs [from cloud to cloud] is likely to be one of the biggest parts of the cloud story.”
The cloud is nothing more than a trojan horse to eviscerate the free Internet. It’s an effort to assimilate the alternative media into a borg hive before destroying it from within. It’s one component of Internet 2 and the move towards a world wide web that resembles something more like cable TV than what we know as the Internet today, a system where a small number of giant corporations will work with governments to decide what can and cannot be published.
The cloud will kill the free Internet unless we get the message out that it is a tool perfectly honed for shutting down free speech on the world wide web.
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show.
