State secrets
It’s common knowledge that companies that provide access to the internet cooperate with law enforcement. The telephone companies have always been closely tied to emergency responders and the police — in times of need, people reach for telephones, and this close cooperation has allowed many rescuers to reach panicked callers. But the cooperative relationship springing from law enforcement’s surveillance needs is just as close.
In the NSA spying scandal, the administration has frequently claimed that to reveal the nature of network providers’ involvement with the apparently unlawful wiretapping would reveal secrets - and therefore this relationship can’t even be discussed in court. Now the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, is admitting that “the private sector” (the network operators) did indeed help out:
Now the second part of the issue was under the
president’s program, the terrorist surveillance program, the private
sector had assisted us. Because if you’re going to get access you’ve
got to have a partner and they were being sued. Now if you play out the
suits at the value they’re claimed, it would bankrupt these companies.
So my position was we have to provide liability protection to these
private sector entities.
And McConnell also says that people will die because we’ve been so public about our discomfort with this illegal wiretapping program.
It’s all pretty rich.
Q. So you’re saying that the reporting and the debate in Congress means that some Americans are going to die?
A. That’s what I mean. Because we have made it so public. We used to do these things very differently. . .
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State secrets…?
As a so-called ICANN Director (non-elected and planted by Esther Dyson and others) here are some cyberspace topics/questions you may want to spend more time on. [It appears that 99.9% of your topics are meat-space related and almost 100% of ICANN processes are meat-space oriented. Why is that ?]
1. It is common knowledge that Netizens connect to the 32-bit legacy transport using 32-bit Address Spectrum.
2. Address Spectrum is very similar to other spectrums commonly managed (in the US) by the FCC.
3. People motivated by selling new protocols, technology, and religious agendas are currently running around cyberspace claiming that they will soon no longer have any more “virgin” Spectrum to lease. [They make sure people do not notice the 10s of millions of dollars they have banked, which now allows them to retire for the next 20 years.]
4. A quick review of the 32-bit Spectrum shows that 50 of the 250 major allocations remain RESERVED. That is about 20%. Has the ICANN Board reviewed how well the other 80% is used ?
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Q1. What are those 50 Spectrum blocks RESERVED for ?
Q2. What is the defined FAIR and OPEN process to obtain one or more of those Spectrum blocks ?
Q3. What do companies pay ICANN per year for such Spectrum blocks ?
Q4. How many, so-called, ICANN Directors know anything about Spectrum, the value of Spectrum, or about US FCC Spectrum Auctions ?
Q5. Is the intention to make all of the Spectrum blocks below, Public Spectrum?
Q6. Is it possible that so-called ICANN Directors “distract” people to meat-space topics to avoid dealing with cyberspace topics ?
Q7. Is it true that the New ICANN Spin, for 2008, is that ICANN only does names, not addresses ?
Q8. Is it also true that the New ICANN Spin is that all of the inter-locking of the same people profiting from names and addresses is “Pure Coincidence”, and was not some small clique's intended result ?
Q9. Is it true that the recent secret meetings in Aspen resulted in agreement that the US FCC will handle Spectrum Allocations ?
Q10. Is it true that the US FCC plans to immediately out-source that Spectrum Management to one of the Northern Virginia spook companies that was home-grown by ICANN to handle such matters ?
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