Corporate Fascism is ruling America?

A couple years ago when I started this site, I was thinking to myself "what do these different political labels mean", one of which is the term "Fascism". You hear it thrown around, so-and-so gets called a Fascist, and of course you have Hitler's and Mussolini's regimes as the primo examples of Fascism. Since Fascism equates to death camps, we can't have Fascism exist anywhere, can we?

That's kind of the idea, but there's little concrete definition available of what this term means. Hence my earlier article What is Fascism, and where is it now? took information from a very informative book review to try to derive a meaning to this word. In that article I concluded it's a political style emphasizing domination by the goverment of the people, seeking simply to control everything. In other words, its an exercise in overbearing power.

Another example of "Fascism" in action is demonstrated in The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols is a book full of faked up charges against Judaism first written in Russia during the Czarist days. It is the source of peoples claims for a great Jewish conspiracy to control everything. It was later used to great effect by Hitlers regime to sell the German population on the dangers the Jews presented to the world. The Plot exposes the propoganda and the conspiracy to distribute this book, and how its been widely distributed to many countries around the world even though it's been exposed numerous times as a complete travesty.

But, we think, that's not what is happening in America. We don't have goon squads patrolling the streets beating up anybody that walks funny, do we?

I think the answer gets back to the question of the definition "Fascism".

For example: Harper's Magazine: We Now Live in a Fascist State (Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2005 13:34:38 -0700) This is a speech given by Lewis H. Lapham, editor of Harpers Magazine, in which he says that America is already, and has been for a long time, a Fascist state. It's just that the Fascism isn't by the government, but by the corporations.

First he points out how the word has been stolen from its original meaning, and instead redirected to mean "evil acts" such as genocide.

The bulk of the article talks of how the corporations strive to control everything. Employees of corporations are expected to walk and talk the corporate line. If what you say, do, believe, etc falls outside some bound of corporate acceptableness, then you'll get fired. What keeps people in line is the way that so many things are tied to having a job. Ones identity, livelihood, reason for being, health insurance, retirement, etc, is all tied up with whether one has a job or not. The corporation cannot stand the free thinker.

Hmmmmm?

Er... What's this about threatening Syria?

I've covered this before. The Neocon Cabal planned as least as far back at 1997 to reshape the Middle East, starting with toppling Iraq, and then moving on to either Iran or Syria.

There's been an ongoing nuclear standoff between the U.S., Europe and Iran for over a year. Iran is supposedly working to build breeder nuclear reactors, one of the side effects of this being weapons-grade plutonium. Europe has been acting to reach a negotiated settlement, but the Bush Administration is playing hardball and repeatedly threatening Iran. So it's been clear Iran was the chosen target of the next domino to fall.

But...

Bush's tipping point with Syria (Christian Science Monitor, October 24, 2005)

This details moves that can only be interpreted as putting heat on Syria. Okay, so which of the two is it? Because clearly the Neocon's have remained in power, and they're about to con us into another war.

The US wants the UN Security Council to hold Syria "accountable" for its role in killing a top Lebanese leader.

Okay, a couple months ago a Lebanese leader was assassinated, and Syria has been fingered as the culprit. And, as the article goes on to say, some of the forces fighting the U.S. occupation of Iraq are based in Syria.

A UN report last week implicated high-level Syrian officials in the bombing of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri on Feb. 14. The report found the assassination "could not have ... [occurred] without the approval of top-ranked security officials and could not have been further organized without the collusion of their counterparts in the Lebanese security services."

The Security Council meets Tuesday to discuss what action to take. For the Bush administration, the options are difficult.

The US is militarily exhausted by Iraq and Afghanistan, and can hardly pick a fight with Syria's president, Bashar Assad. Nor can it politically afford right now to further erode America's international reputation by operating outside the UN Security Council.

The assassination closely followed Syria's withrawal from Lebanon after occupying the country for 20 years. Clearly Syria might have wanted to attempt to regain/maintain some control over the country, even as they are not actively occupying the country.

And, yes, the options are difficult. Despite the Iraq war being highly illegal, it has drained the country's will to fight, and totally drained away Bush's approval rating.

The FBI is tracking those dangerous color laser printers

A couple years ago I had a brilliant money-making thought. Literally. What if I were to scan a dollar bill, and then print it on my color printer? Would a change machine accept it? Fortunately the thought of spending 20 years in the pokey for attempting such an experiment kept me from following through.

Around the same time I saw some news articles discussing the same problem. Seems that some people had been doing exactly what I outlined above. Though, they must have found some higher throughput way of making money this way. Another thing that kept me from actually trying this was the low earnings rate ... see, the place you'd want to go is a laundromat, and the biggest bill you could foist upon those change machines is $20. At $20 per visit to the laundromat you're not making money at a very high rate. So the risk/reward ratio is low.

In any case at around that time there was a couple related news items. One is that the Feds reached an agreement with the makers of Photoshop and other graphics software to detect images of money, and just show up blackness. Presumably this was meant to foil counterfeiters playing with printers and scanners, but it would also foil legitimate artists making works that include monetary images. Sigh.

The other item was that the slashdot crowd noticed the Feds were also working with printer makers to have the printer makers insert codings in printed output that would let the Feds track the printers.

That is, if a printer were to output some data encoded in the dots being printed ... well ... you could identify the printer used to print the document. This is like the old adage of police detectives trying hundreds of typewriters to identify which one was used to type a kidnapping ransom note. But it's obviously fast-forwarded into the modern age.

Secret Code in Color Printers Lets Government Track You (Electronic Frontier Foundation)

The EFF has researched this and broken the coding. Details are at the page listed above.

Iraq voting on its constitution

I haven't been writing about the Middle East and the Iraq War for awhile. I've been too busy with other things, but the news I see from there is still telling me there's a horrendous situation.

This weekend Iraq is voting on the Constitution that is hoped to establish the moderate democracy the neocons wanted to install there. Leading up to the vote has been a lot of bloodshed, violence, rancor, etc.

Iraq's constitution seems headed for passage (Associated Press, in the International Herald Tribune, October 16, 2005)

Rice optimistic about Iraq referendum Five U.S. soldiers killed in roadside bombing (Sunday, October 16, 2005; CNN.COM)

This is difficult to defend

The context is this - we're in the middle of a war in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is the never-ending-war the conspiracy theorists warned us was coming. The legality, legitimacy or sensibility of this war is not the issue though. Instead the issue is a man who operated a web site offering porno pictures for free in exchange for pictures of dead or mutilated or tortured Iraqi or Afghani people. He was exchanging these pictures with the troops in the field.

Porn and gore man arrested GI Jane man collared for 'obscenity' (By John Oates, Published Monday 10th October 2005, The Register)

GI Janes in Iraq DIY smutfest Warzone porn and gore online (By Thomas C Greene in Washington, Published Monday 26th September 2005, The Register)

US Army probes nude GI Janes Porn is one thing, but corpses... (By Lester Haines, Published Wednesday 28th September 2005, The Register)

And he has now been arrested on obscenity charges. The web site used for the above exchange now carries this message:

America isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship. You've gotta want it bad, cause it's gonna put up a fight. It's gonna say, "You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who's standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours." You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Now show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.

Along with contact URL's for a legal defense fund.

The writer of that statement is right, I'm appalled by someone wanting to collect such things. At the same time I recognize the right to free speech. However, there is more going on here than the exchange of speech and ideas. By offering something desirable in exchange for brutal photographs, isn't he encouraging the troops to commit atrocities?

Perhaps it's fitting he's offering porn images in exchange for atrocity images. Porn is, after all, an atrocity performed upon the beauty of sexual union.

The deeper principle here I see is ... it's not a crime to think about such atrocities. What is a crime is to encourage others to commit them.

A possible push for e-voting audit trails

In the push for simpler to use voting systems, that use current technology, we've (the U.S.) have embraced touch screen voting in a big way. Sure, it's a big advance over using paper cards, a technology developed and perfected in the 1930's.

E-voting report could push audit trails (Published: October 4, 2005, By Declan McCullagh, Staff Writer, CNET News.com)

Last month a study headed by President Carter and former Secretary of State Baker was unveiled. In their recommendations was one to give national identification cards to everybody, presumably to give higher faith in the accuracy of one-vote-per-person.

However this current article goes into one of the lesser publicized recommendations. To insert "voter-verified audit trails" into the system.

The article doesn't go into what those audit trails might be. Of course it's a political, not a technical, recommendation.

My technical recommendation is for the touch screen machine to print a paper ballot. The touch screen machine would have zero long term storage, and not be connected to any tallying computer. Instead the paper ballot is what's counted. The printed ballot could be easy to scan with a computer, all one has to do is use a known font and locations on the page. This would make the system just as convenient as a purely electronic and computerized voting system, but with the added assurance to the voter that their vote is what they meant, plus its easily recountable in case of questions.

However, one concern remains even with such a scannable paper ballot. What of security holes in the computers used to tally the votes?

This was demonstrated during the 2004 elections. One hole is that the Deibold machines have modems in them, and the modems might well be unsecured allowing "anybody" to log into the computer remotely. Barring physical access is the first barrier to creating a secure system, but the Deibold tallying machines don't provide that barrier because of the modem. The next level of the problem is that the Windows-based software Diebold implemented itself is not secure. For example there would be known passwords used to log into the computer. Secondly, once someone is logged in they can easily modify the underlying data files without using the vote tallying software at all. Hence, even if Diebold did a good job of making their application software secure, it doesn't matter because someone with access to the computer (e.g. by calling the modem) can fiddle with the data file directly.

This points to another political requirement that's needed. That a thorough security audit be done by computer security professionals.

I'll note that security audits are easier when the voting system uses open source software. With a closed source system like Diebolds, the proprietary nature of the software business prevents outside experts from doing an adequate review. The details would be hidden in unrevealed software, and if you can't see the details then how can you adequately review them?

Who controls the net?

There's been an ongoing hue and cry over the control of the domain name system (DNS). The DNS is what turns a name like 7gen.com or cnn.com into the underlying addressing your computer uses to reach the computer. Humans are better at remembering names than numbers (aside: why do we still use telephone numbers after all this time?) so the DNS increases the user friendliness of the Internet.

The hue and cry seems to hover around who "controls" the Internet. I guess the idea is that if someone controls the names by which computers (hence web sites) are known by, then they have some control over the network. And a case in point is the ".xxx" top-level domain name, which was approved by the Internet governance body, but the Bush administration has been blocking because they don't want to be seen as approving a red-light district. Hurm.

Here's a case in point: Power grab could split the Net (By Declan McCullagh, CNET News, Published: October 3, 2005, Will the U.N. run the Internet? By Declan McCullagh, CNET News, Published: July 11, 2005, U.S. to retain control of Internet domain names By Declan McCullagh, Staff Writer, CNET News.com, Published: June 30, 2005)

In my opinion he's doing journalistic grandstanding, overplaying the issue.

The article concerns

At a meeting in Geneva last week, the Bush administration objected to the idea of the United Nations running the top-level servers that direct traffic to the master databases of all domain names.

Apparently the ITU and United Nations are offering to take over governance of the domain name system. But the U.S. is balking, for some reason. (??Why??) As the article points out later, what would happen is to transfer control of the "root" servers from their current governance to the United Nations.

This deserves a little explanation. The "root" domain name servers are the ones which define the top-level domain names. In the top level domain names you have ".gov", ".com", ".org", ".edu" as several of the three-letter top level domain names, and there are newer top level domain names such as ".name" and ".info" plus all the two-letter country-specific domain names such as ".ws", ".tv", ".uk" or ".yu". Yes, ".tv" means Tuvalu not Television.

It is through the U.S. control of the root domain servers that the U.S. is unilaterally blocking the creation of the ".xxx" top level domain name. You can thank our prudish leaders for this moment of brilliance. (Bush administration objects to .xxx domains By Declan McCullagh, Staff Writer, CNET News.com, Published: August 15, 2005)

The work in question has been controlled by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN http://www.icann.org/general/)

What is ICANN?

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is an internationally organized, non-profit corporation that has responsibility for Internet Protocol (IP) address space allocation, protocol identifier assignment, generic (gTLD) and country code (ccTLD) Top-Level Domain name system management, and root server system management functions. These services were originally performed under U.S. Government contract by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and other entities. ICANN now performs the IANA function.

As a private-public partnership, ICANN is dedicated to preserving the operational stability of the Internet; to promoting competition; to achieving broad representation of global Internet communities; and to developing policy appropriate to its mission through bottom-up, consensus-based processes.

Earlier in this posting I described Declan McCullagh's article as grandstanding. He's trying to say this will "split" the Internet. The picture he's painting is one of the U.S. retaining control over the domain name system root servers via keeping ICANN in its position (but I note in one of his articles, the U.S. administration wants to keep ICANN on a "short leash"). At the same time it's clear the U.N. will move ahead with creating its own root servers. Which, in the picture being painted, means the fracturing of the Internet.

Hmm... not quite.

First, it would be foolish of the U.N. to ignore the existing root servers. Hence, the U.N. root servers would contain the content of the existing ICANN root servers, plus extra entries as the U.N. agency decides to create new top level domain names. Not a problem. There are several existing unofficial top level domain names that are privately run between cooperating server administrators, so technically there's little trouble with this. What would happen is outside the U.S. certain top-level domain names would be known which at the same time would go unrecognized by the U.S. and other countries that follow the U.S. lead.

Second, the ICANN does more than control the top level domain names. They also control assignment of the IP address space. The IP addresses are the underlying numeric addressing I referred to earlier. If a second body, e.g. the U.N., were to try and assign IP addresses then there would be clear possibilities of conflict as the U.N. body might well assign some IP addresses that the ICANN also assigns.

The chance of chaos depends on what the U.N. decides to do. But does having control over the domain name system constitute control over the Internet? As in this article title: "Will the U.N. run the Internet?"? Depends on what you mean by "control". There's so many aspects to the Internet. For example, the actual system is telecommunications wiring systems controlled by telecom companies around the world. Several Internet backbone providers exist who run the network on a daily basis. They will retain control over their businesses and the telecommunication channels they control, and the transfer of ICANN functions from U.S. to U.N. control would not change that fact.

Another aspect is the communication protocols through which Internet traffic is sent. Those protocols operate over the physical Internet wiring. They are defined through International committees meeting under control of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in a process that has operated perfectly well for over 30 years. Control of the IETF process is not discussed in the articles, and I don't think this is being proposed for transfer to the U.N. The IETF process defines the protocols, and then equipment makers from around the world build gadgets that implement those protocols.

Between the physical wiring and the telecommunications protocols and equipment, there's a lot of "control of the Internet" that is outside the purview of the ICANN and IANA activities under discussion.

I wonder if the potential transfer is a good idea. I have often wondered whether it's a good idea for the U.S. to have such a dominant role in the operation of the Internet. Why, for example, are the three-letter toplevel domain names primarily for U.S. use? For example, the ".gov" or ".edu" domain names are largely used for U.S. government or educational institutions. Why is that? And, for that matter, why are U.S. federal, state or city governments using ".gov" rather than a country-specific domain name?

I remember in the 1980's when all this was new, the concept floating among the designers of the domain name system is the coolness factor of having the domain name disconnected from physical location. For example you could have "joesbar.com" refer to any computer in the world, and to the geeks designing the system that seemed like a great idea. Heck, I thought it was a great idea at the time.

But thinking back on this I wonder just how good an idea it is in practice. A city government for example controls a specific piece of land, and is very location dependant. Why would a city government need a location-independant domain name? Most Universities have the same issue, in that they are governed by state or city governments and generally don't have operations outside their geographic areas. Hence, why should ".gov" or ".edu" exist? Why shouldn't they all be under their country specific domain names?

Another objection discussed in the "Will the U.N. run the Internet?" article is the SPAM issue. Some of the country representatives are quoted complaining how the current "control" of the Internet is doing little to control SPAM, like this statement from Syria: "There's more and more spam every day. Who are the victims? Developing and least-developed countries, too. There is no serious intention to stop this spam by those who are the transporters of the spam, because they benefit...The only solution is for us to buy equipment from the countries which send this spam in order to deal with spam. However, this, we believe, is not acceptable."

The research I've seen about the source countries for sending SPAM is that it's largely coming from China. Yet the equipment is usually designed by U.S. companies.

The vague logic aside, SPAM is allowed free reign because of problems with the protocols. It's got little to do with the control over the top level domain names. Well, unless there's something I don't know about in the decision making over the domain name system (this is not an issue I've followed closely).