A Senate committee unanimously approved major cybersecurity legislation which would allow Brother O to shut down Internet networks, block incoming Internet traffic from certain countries, and force private websites to comply with broad cybersecurity measures.

Last Thursday the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee agreed to send the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010 to the Senate floor for a vote. The Act will create a White House Office of Cyberspace Policy and a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) center to adopt cybersecurity policies related to federal and private sector networks.

The legislation, crafted by Senators Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Tom Carper (D-DE) is aimed at bringing the Internet under the regulatory power of the federal government. Lieberman’s “Kill switch” bill parallels last year’s legislation by Senators Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME) granting the government power to disconnect certain websites.

“We need this capacity in a time of war…. for the president to say, ‘Internet service provider, we’ve got to disconnect the American Internet from all traffic coming in from another foreign country, or we have to put a patch on this part of it’.” –Joe (Droopy Dog) Lieberman on CNN’s State of the Union with Candy Crowley

Droopy Dog’s “Kill switch” bill would hand Brother O absolute power to shut down the Internet for at least four months without Congressional oversight. His loosely worded bill also gives DHS’ new National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications (NCCC) “significant authority” to monitor the “security status” of private websites, ISPs and other U.S. net-related business, and critical internet components in other countries.

“Companies would be required to take part in ‘information sharing’ with the government and certify to the NCCC that they have implemented approved security measures. Furthermore, any company that ‘relies on’ the internet, telephone system or any other part of the U.S. ‘information infrastructure’ would also be ‘subject to command’ by the NCCC under the proposed new law.” — Andy Chalk

Privacy and civil liberties groups fear that Droopy Dog’s “Kill switch” bill would grant Brother O the power to declare a “national cyber-emergency” at his discretion, which could force private Internet service providers and search engines to limit or cut off a whistle-blowing or political site’s connection to the Web for blaming or criticizing the Bread and Circuses administration.

“We have seen through recent history that in an emergency, the Executive Branch will interpret grants of power very broadly.” –Gregory Nojeim, from the Center for Democracy and Technology, a group that promotes Internet freedom

“The way it seems to be worded, the bill could easily represent a threat to free speech.” –Wayne Crews, vice president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute

Droopy Dog is pushing his “Kill switch” bill “at lightning speed” because he says the country’s “economic security, national security and public safety are now all at risk from … cyber-warriors, cyber-spies, cyber-terrorists and cyber-criminals.”

“The need for this legislation is obvious and urgent.” –Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT)

“We cannot afford to wait for a cyber 9/11 before our government realizes the importance of protecting our cyber resources.” –Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME)

Ginning up fears to rush legislation helps to mask the “Kill switch” bill’s real purpose, which is to keep the alternative Internet media from exposing the mainstream media propagandists in their whitewashing of government favoritisms, cover-ups, and atrocities. After all, the fear card worked to rush through and hide the real agenda behind the Wallstreet/Automotive industry bailouts, the Porkulus package, and the ObamaCare bill.

Interestingly, the communist Chinese also claim the need to police and censor the Web to maintain security and combat cyber warfare, but the totalitarian government’s real agenda is to silence those who criticize it. It would appear that Droopy Dog, whom Glenn Beck heralds as a man of honor, wants to add a technological iron curtain to quell America’s ambiance.

“Right now China, the government, can disconnect parts of its Internet in case of war and we need to have that here too.” –Lieberman told Crowley

First Iran shuts down the Internet to quash a revolution, then Pakistan shuts down Facebook and Google to blackout “Everybody Draw Mohammad Day,” and now members of the U.S. Senate are mimicking communist China’s censorship and coercion policies to stifle Internet media outlets and bloggers who are quickly displacing the statists’ mainstream press organs.

Lieberman, whom Sean Hannity embraces as a friend and a “good guy,” declares his bill is “not a big deal,” and that his critics are over reacting and “intentionally peddling misinformation.” According to the conscience of the Senate, the President already has the authority under the Communications Act to close any facility or station for wire communication, “So I say to my friends on the Internet, relax.”

In the wake of the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC’s) floating of the Drudge tax as a way to fund mainstream newspapers and to tax out of existence their competitors in the alternative media, George Orwell’s discernment might be better suited for Lieberman than either Hannity’s or Beck’s.

“Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Lieberman: China Can Shut Down The Internet, Why Can’t We (2:04 Video)

Competitive Enterprise Institute — Lieberman-Collins-Carper Bill Threatens Nation’s Cybersecurity

Obama is plunging the United States deeper into debt with China through reckless spending. He is preventing us from ending our dependence on foreign oil by opposing offshore drilling, ostensibly on environmental grounds.

Now he is using $2 billion of your taxpayer dollars to support Brazil’s state-owned oil company Petrobras in drilling for oil off the shores of Rio De Janeiro. The funding will take the form of loan guarantees from the US Export-Import Bank.

FOXNews notes the discrepancy:

Some see a contradiction in an executive branch agency … facilitating abroad the very kind of energy exploration Obama opposes domestically.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Thursday he wasn’t prepared to address the issue.

“I have not seen the story,” he said. “I’d have to take a look.”

But former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a vocal proponent of offshore drilling, had plenty to say.

“So why is it that during these tough times, when we have great needs at home, the Obama White House is prepared to send more than $2 billion of your hard-earned tax dollars to Brazil so that the nation’s state-owned oil company, Petrobas, can drill off shore and create jobs developing its own resources?” she asked….

And here’s the kicker. Where do you think all this newly developed oil will be going? To China. Plans were finalized last May, according to this article in China Daily:

Petrobras to increase oil exports to China
2009-05-20

A long-term export agreement was also signed Tuesday between Petrobras and UNIPEC ASIA, a wholly-owned subsidiary of China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation (Sinopec), Asia’s largest refiner by output.

It provides that Petrobras export 150,000 barrels of oil per day to China starting from 2009 and 200,000 barrels of oil per day from 2010 to 2019….

Apart from the agreement, Petrobras and Sinopec signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) under which the two sides would cooperate in several areas such as exploration, refining, petrochemicals and the supply of related goods and services, said Petrobras.

Sinopec announced in February that it has signed a contract with Petrobras to import 3 million to 5 million tons of crude oil from the latter from February 2009 to January 2010 at market price.

Also in February, Sinopec and CDB signed an MOU with Petrobras regarding cooperation in the fields of oil and finance.

According to the memorandum, the annual trade volume between Sinopec and Petrobras will be raised from 3 million tons in 2008 to between 10 million to 12.5 million tons before the end of 2010. Their future oil trading volume will reach 30 million tons.

It gets even worse, as far as the Obama “smell test” goes. According to Bloomberg, Obama puppet-master George Soros bought a hefty stake in Petrobras before the announcement:

Billionaire investor George Soros bought an $811 million stake in Petroleo Brasileiro SA in the second quarter, making the Brazilian state-controlled oil company his investment fund’s largest holding.

As of June 30, the stake in Petrobras, as the Rio de Janeiro-based oil producer is known, made up 22 percent of the $3.68 billion of stocks and American depositary receipts held by Soros Fund Management LLC, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

It is becoming abundantly clear that Obama is focused on a (likely Marxist) new world order, and does not have the best interests of the United States at heart. His gaze is fixed firmly into the future post-American world:

(October 18th, 2008) Although the mainstream media have been careful to mask Obama’s real agenda, it is clear that the Zakaria model is the way that he sees the world. If elected president, we could expect him to disarm the citizens, move our sovereign nation increasingly under the control of the United Nations, and “spread the wealth around” by diluting our hard-earned way of life to help bring up the third world.

The media coverage of two journalists captured by North Korea who were released today does not pass the sniff test. The basic facts are not in dispute:

• Laura Ling and Euna Lee work for former Democratic vice-president Al Gore’s Current TV media venture.
• They went to China to interview defectors living along the Chinese border with North Korea about trafficking of women.
• They were detained for illegal entry into North Korea on March 17 by border guards.
• They were tried, convicted, and sentenced to serve 12 years of “reform through labor” in a North Korean prison.
• The U.S. public was emotionally engaged in this heart-rending story through breathless media coverage, a media-facilitated postcard campaign, advocacy websites, and candlelight vigils.
• This afternoon, former Democratic U.S. president Bill Clinton secured their release from North Korea’s “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il and the two ladies left for the U.S. with Clinton on his private plane.

There are, however, some suspicious factors in this syrupy story.

• Laura Ling is Chinese-American. Euna Lee is a South Korean-born U.S. citizen. They should both be familiar with the region both geographically and politically. It is hard to imagine that they made a blunder unaware of the consequences.
• A South Korean activist who helps North Korean refugees seek asylum, the Rev. Chun Ki-won of the Seoul-based Durihana Mission, helped the two journalists plan their trip. If they weren’t aware of the dangers, he certainly was, and he was their advisor. There is also the question of his motivation and involvement, given his professional bias.
• With full tear-jerking media coverage, their families said, “If they wandered across the border without permission, we apologize on their behalf.” Wandered across the border? It’s a RIVER. At the time, it was frozen, and they were walking on the ice (a tidbit from the Asian media, which the American MSM conveniently omitted from its reports).



• The U.S. media coverage consistently described the two as “girls.” They are NOT. Both are married, middle-aged women, one with a daughter. Ling is 32, and Lee is 36. Both were portrayed prior to this event as seasoned journalists, with Ling routinely reporting from political hot spots. I’m not alone in this observation — check out this article by Heather Michon at Open Salon.
• Then there is the extreme coincidence of precisely timing the guards’ location along the 521 kilometer-long Tumen River. Heather Michon notes:
  

  The real mystery is how the North Koreans happened to serendipitously be at the exact right place at the right moment.

• There is the sponsorship of Al “the hypocrite” Gore. Here is a man who foisted the myth of global warming on the world, while scientific data indicated the climate is cooling, and then became wealthy selling carbon offsets to the industries he victimized. If he really believed in global warming, would he be living in a mansion with a heated poolhouse and flying around in a gas-guzzling private jet? I’m suspicious of anything he is managing — there is most likely a hidden agenda. What are the random chances of this happening to obscure web journalists, and not, say, to someone from a major news outlet?
• Finally, there’s just the mere fact of the “coincidental” involvement of high-profile Democrats like Gore and Clinton.

So here’s the picture the fawning mainstream media painted for us with their disingenuous choice of wording and strategic omissions of fact. A couple of wide-eyed innocent MTV-type media ingénues — girls — inadvertently wandered across a poorly defined border, were captured by ruthless evil North Korean soldiers, and sentenced to hard labor in a wretched prison. Their worried families prayed for their safety.

The truth is that a couple of women, seasoned journalists accustomed to world hot spots, climbed from the border road in China down the steep bank to the boundary river and walked out onto the ice. They were detained by border guards, sentenced to reform through labor, and detained in a government guest house.

Remember these dear Obama friends?

Here’s my theory. Obama, who has openly demonstrated his affection for the likes of socialists Raila Odinga and Hugo Chávez, wanted more open relations with North Korea. Although he has made many bold moves toward totalitarian control in a few short months, nationalizing major banks and auto manufacturers and co-opting the census, he was concerned about awakening the American public with a quick rapprochement with North Korea.

So he and a few close confidants, Gore and the two Clintons, set up this journalistic expedition to China to create a cover for an initial softening. Who could criticize the “humanitarian” effort of Bill Clinton on behalf of two innocent young “girls” for whom a whole nation was lighting candles and praying? It all ended with this touching photo-op, showing the triumphant and successful diplomat Bill Clinton but only the black pony tails of the two “girls,” whose faces might reveal their age.

There is the pervasive smog. There is the threat of newly fomented Islamic terror. And then there is the cultural divide…

The Chinese government has assembled a large cadre of Public Security employees to monitor internet activity. For most Chinese, access to information is restricted to what their government allows.

This group of computer experts is also a potential threat. As they studied the ways in which the Chinese “Golden Shield” could be breached, they gained the skills to penetrate other countries:

The Chinese Three-Headed Monster

Ten years ago, the Chinese Defense Ministry established the “NET Force.” This was initially a research organization, which was to measure China’s vulnerability to attacks via the Internet. Soon this led to examining the vulnerability of other countries, especially the United States….

In addition to reading this article, you may want to bookmark the website, which is full of interesting material — Strategy Page.

The following is a wake-up article I want to share with our readers — the emphasis is mine. It was originally posted at Information Clearing House.

Uncle Sam, Your Banker Will See You Now
By Paul Craig Roberts

Early this morning China let the idiots in Washington, and on Wall Street, know that it has them by the short hairs. Two senior spokesmen for the Chinese government observed that China’s considerable holdings of US dollars and Treasury bonds “contributes a great deal to maintaining the position of the dollar as a reserve currency.”

Should the US proceed with sanctions intended to cause the Chinese currency to appreciate, “the Chinese central bank will be forced to sell dollars, which might lead to a mass depreciation of the dollar.”

If Western financial markets are sufficiently intelligent to comprehend the message, US interest rates will rise regardless of any further action by China. At this point, China does not need to sell a single bond. In an instant, China has made it clear that US interest rates depend on China, not on the Federal Reserve.

The precarious position of the US dollar as reserve currency has been thoroughly ignored and denied. The delusion that the US is “the world’s sole superpower,” whose currency is desirable regardless of its excess supply, reflects American hubris, not reality. This hubris is so extreme that only 6 weeks ago McKinsey Global Institute published a study that concluded that even a doubling of the US current account deficit to $1.6 trillion would pose no problem.

Strategic thinkers, if any remain who have not been purged by neocons, will quickly conclude that China’s power over the value of the dollar and US interest rates also gives China power over US foreign policy. The US was able to attack Afghanistan and Iraq only because China provided the largest part of the financing for Bush’s wars.

If China ceased to buy US Treasuries, Bush’s wars would end. The savings rate of US consumers is essentially zero, and several million are afflicted with mortgages that they cannot afford. With Bush’s budget in deficit and with no room in the US consumer’s budget for a tax increase, Bush’s wars can only be financed by foreigners.

No country on earth, except for Israel, supports the Bush regimes’ desire to attack Iran. It is China’s decision whether it calls in the US ambassador, and delivers the message that there will be no attack on Iran or further war unless the US is prepared to buy back $900 billion in US Treasury bonds and other dollar assets.

The US, of course, has no foreign reserves with which to make the purchase. The impact of such a large sale on US interest rates would wreck the US economy and effectively end Bush’s war-making capability. Moreover, other governments would likely follow the Chinese lead, as the main support for the US dollar has been China’s willingness to accumulate them. If the largest holder dumped the dollar, other countries would dump dollars, too.

The value and purchasing power of the US dollar would fall. When hard-pressed Americans went to Wal-Mart to make their purchases, the new prices would make them think they had wandered into Nieman Marcus. Americans would not be able to maintain their current living standard.

Simultaneously, Americans would be hit either with tax increases in order to close a budget deficit that foreigners will no longer finance or with large cuts in income security programs. The only other source of budgetary finance would be for the government to print money to pay its bills. In this event, Americans would experience inflation in addition to higher prices from dollar devaluation.

This is a grim outlook. We got in this position because our leaders are ignorant fools. So are our economists, many of whom are paid shills for some interest group. So are our corporate leaders whose greed gave China power over the US by offshoring the US production of goods and services to China. It was the corporate fat cats who turned US Gross Domestic Product into Chinese imports, and it was the “free trade, free market economists” who egged it on.

How did a people as stupid as Americans get so full of hubris?

This is not an article written by some fringe nutcase. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.

I have been aware of the writer below for a while. He says, probably with more authority, what I have been saying since 1989. This article should be read by any American interested in our nation’s survival. Hint: that excludes most Democrat politicians. Following are a few paragraphs and a link to the rest of the article:

ONE CLENCHED FIST
by J. R. Nyquist

Two recent items reveal Moscow’s intentions. First, President Vladimir Putin has announced that he is suspending Russia’s commitment to follow the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty (CFE). This means that Russia can move tank and motorized infantry divisions to NATO’s doorstep. Second, Russian radio news broadcasters have been ordered to make 50 percent of their reporting on Russia “positive,” and that the United States is – from now on – to be described as Russia’s enemy.

President Putin’s intentions are clear. The Cold War is to be renewed. America is the “main enemy” once again. It has been my contention, for many years, that this was the KGB’s intention from the outset. The collapse of Communism was a staged event. It was a repeat of Lenin’s New Economic Policy of the 1920s, in which Russia pretended to liberalize and move toward capitalism, drawing investment and technology from the West. I believe that the political process in Russia, from 1989 to the present, was guided to this end. In 1989 America’s leaders could not see the Kremlin’s intentions because intentions are invisible to the naked eye. And so America’s leaders were fooled. Now Russia and China will emerge together as “one clenched fist,” and their intention is to smash America….

Read the rest of this article by J. R. Nyquist here.

Most politicians seem to welcome China’s involvement in the effort to reign in North Korea’s nuclear program. After all, they are the big presence in that part of the world, diplomats reason. But that is just why we should be cautious. Here’s a very interesting article from the Orange County Register, written yesterday by California Assemblyman Chuck DeVore. (Assemblyman DeVore, R-Irvine, served as a Special Assistant for Foreign Affairs in the Reagan-era Pentagon. He is also a lieutenant colonel in the Army National Guard with training in North Korean organization, tactics and equipment.)

China’s reasons to take out Kim Jong Il
A reunified Korea could easily come under Beijing’s influence
By CHUCK DEVORE | Wednesday, October 18, 2006

The discussion over what to do about North Korea’s nuclear test detonation needs to be expanded to place Kim Jong Il’s Democratic People’s Republic of Korea into the context of the region and of history. Whether or not America, Japan and South Korea ought to embargo or blockade North Korea for its hostile actions pales in significance relative to what China believes its interests in the region happen to be.

China will determine North Korea’s fate – and it may act sooner and in a more forceful fashion than anyone outside Beijing would even remotely consider as being possible today.

While the former Soviet Union ultimately acquiesced to the reunification of Germany, China may force the reunification of Korea because it is in its best interests to do so. There are five compelling reasons for China to act decisively on the Korean question….

We urge you to read the rest of this important and compelling article. It predicts a reunified Korea under the influence of China, with the U.S. troops stationed in South Korea forced out, and Taiwan as the next domino in line to fall. It will take a very clever U.S. foreign policy to navigate these treacherous waters.