We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Monday, March 27, 2017

Five Ways Cybersecurity Will Suffer If Congress Repeals the FCC Privacy Rules

Click here to access article by Peter Eckersley and Jeremy Gillula from Electronic Frontier Foundation.
...last Thursday, Republicans in the Senate voted to repeal those rules. If the House of Representatives votes the same way and the rules are repealed, it’s pretty obvious that the results for American’s privacy will be disastrous.

But what many people don’t realize is that Americans’ cybersecurity is also at risk. That’s because privacy and security are two sides of the same coin: privacy is about controlling who has access to information about you, and security is how you maintain that control. You usually can’t break one without breaking the other, and that’s especially true in this context. To show how, here are five ways repealing the FCC’s privacy rules will weaken Americans’ cybersecurity.
The authors writing for this foundation are likely internet geeks who are bit challenged in their understanding of political reality. The last time I tried appealing to Congress to urge any action was when the Boland Amendment was being considered for passage in 1982. Our government during the Reagan administration was actively organizing and supporting a terrorist army known as the Contras that were based in nearby Honduras to sow chaos in Nicaragua (does this sound familiar?). About this time I had returned from a trip to Nicaragua where I saw schools and clinics funded by the Sandinista government that were attacked and destroyed by the Contras. I and many activists engaged in a massive campaign to inform Americans of this and succeeded in gaining overwhelming public opposition to our government's support of the Contras, and support for the Boland Amendment which prohibited such support.

Yes, this resolution passed, but ruling class operatives (mostly in the CIA) soon engineered other ways around Congressional authority to fund their terrorist army. They used the Contras to supply a burgeoning drug operation that saw massive amounts of cocaine imported into the US, primarily into the African-American ghettos of the large cities in the US. And they sold weapons to Iran.

This experience proved to be the last straw in my hope that working through the official, supposedly democratic, institutions could change anything. I had already lived through the Vietnam War and saw corporate media engage in massive disinformation campaign to hide the realities of that war. I had already lived through the assassinations of any public figure who tried to argue against our official policies. I became convinced that the only way to bring about significant change was through revolution and the overthrow of the real controllers of our society--the capitalist class.