The Big Story

While our fellow internet users were busy chasing wikileaks, I believe the big story happened in front of our eyes, and most were not even aware of it, and failed to appreciate the true significance of it. Instead we chased after the what the media told us was vital, what the media told us was useful, blingy and of value. You tend to be smart people in many cases, but seem to fall for the usual false God's continually. I am just as fallible in many ways, but I guess living in a conspiracy, it's easier to see when something has value or is real, vs fake.

The story that the media in my opinion overhyped to death, but who's reveal in my opinion made very little difference to the course of humanity, yet in typical fashion, most of the people fell for it, and totally missed a developing story that I think is far more significant in scope and what I means for our future not only on the internet, but in others institutions not yet disclosed.

Here is the story of how the Starfish shutdown several sites on the internet right before our eyes and what the true significance was, which in my opinion was only grasped by a few, but is significant to most of society.

The Starfish

The story begins with 72 websites being shut down. Naturally the websites are copyright websites, sites that link to download sites, or sites selling possibly counterfeit material.
Interestingly enough, many of the sites targeted also had high Alexia rankings, but that is a trifle in comparison to other more important factors. Naturally a sad event, and it reminds many how vulnerable the internet is and the freedoms that we hold dear, but the real story seems to be behind the year and a half maneuverings that happened, to get someone into place who would agree to these use ICANN for such shutdowns. ICANN is now helping to police the internet vs just creating domain names.

A comment posted on another site pointed to the new CEO of ICANN and some interesting information.

[quote]
1 day ago in reply to Khalid Noufal

What everyone should have noticed was when the cyber chief of the US Department of Homeland Security, Rod A. Beckstrom, resigned last year and was immediately appointed the president of ICANN.

[/quote]

The former cyber chief of the Department of Homeland Security was now running ICANN? That seemed that depending on his views and mentality it could be a hugh conflict of interest to me. Even if he is no longer with the Department Of Homeland Security, it seemed important to find out some information about this new CEO.


http://www.icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-26jun09-en.htm

[quote]

Beckstrom is the former Director of the U.S. National Cybersecurity Center (NCSC), where he formed an effective working group of leaders from the nation's top six cybersecurity centers spanning the civilian, military and intelligence communities.

The announcement of Beckstrom's selection as CEO occurred at the conclusion of ICANN's 35th international meeting in Sydney, Australia.

"The importance of the Internet as a free flowing source of information is being underscored right now by the events in Iran," said Beckstrom. "It shows the power of human expression through a free and open Net."

[/quote]

He worked as cyber chief for about a year and a half for the department, but when the NSA were stepping on their toes and he felt that his leash was being pulled too tight, and they were not being given free reign to do what he wanted to do he wrote an interesting resignation letter and quit the job.


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123638468860758145.html

http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/BeckstromResignation.pdf

Just three months after this oh so dramatic revelation, he landed on his feet and was now president of ICANN, and amazing chance of circumstance, that a man who did not feel he was able to go far enough in his role as cyber chief was now in control of ICANN and a large part of how decisions get made about most of the domains on the internet. For those who don't know, ICANN is the main centralized domain registrar in charge of many top level domains such as .com, .net, .org, etc.

When he received the job, an internet poster was savvy enough to make this comment.

by karl.auerbach (157250) writes: on Friday June 26 2009,

[quote]

I hope he recognizes that ICANN is supposed to make sure that the domain system works and that ICANN is not to be a policeman doing trademark enforcement for the intellectual property protection industry or enforcing various governments' views about what is acceptable use of the net.

[/quote]

Looking ahead this comment would almost become prophetic in the days ahead and with the role that ICANN helped play in these current shutdowns of these websites. Remember the websites were shutdown without notice, without warning, and they were redirected at the ICANN level, not at the domain registry level.

The story in and of itself could end there, and well be worthy of some popcorn, but it does not end there. Mr. Beckstrom has written a really interesting book, which I would not mind reading in future, but for the moment I was only able to read the jacket, and this is what his philosophy is, about starfish organizations. The book is called the starfish and the spider.

He talks about how these companies that share a philosophy are able to come together and be stronger faster and do better than there counterparts that share a leader down structure. The starfish organization is a leaderless organization, people that share the same philosophy and social networks, but without any obvious leader, so you never truly know who is who. Organizations that you can cut down, but then another part of it springs up almost over night.

Here is what it says.


http://www.starfishandspider.com/index.php?title=About_the_Authors

[quote]

IT'S A STARFISH WORLD AND MOST PEOPLE DON'T EVEN REALIZE IT

One thing that business, institutions, governments and key individuals will have to realize is spiders and starfish may look alike, but starfish have a miraculous quality to them. Cut off the leg of a spider, and you have a seven-legged creature on your hands; cut off its head and you have a dead spider. But cut off the arm of a starfish and it will grow a new one. Not only that, but the severed arm can grow an entirely new body. Starfish can achieve this feat because, unlike spiders, they are decentralized; every major organ is replicated across each arm.

But starfish don't just exist in the animal kingdom. Starfish organizations are taking society and the business world by storm, and are changing the rules of strategy and competition. Like starfish in the sea, starfish organizations are organized on very different principles than we are used to seeing in traditional organizations. Spider organizations are centralized and have clear organs and structure. You know who is in charge. You see them coming.

Starfish organizations, on the other hand, are based on completely different principles. They tend to organize around a shared ideology or a simple platform for communication- around ideologies like al Qaeda or Alcoholics Anonymous. They arise rapidly around the simplest ideas or platforms. Ideas or platforms that can be easily duplicated. Once they arrive they can be massively disruptive and are here to stay, for good or bad. And the Internet can help them flourish.

So in today's world starfish are starting to gain the upper hand.

How can Toyota leverage starfish principles to crush their spider-like rivals, GM and Ford? How did tiny Napster cripple the global music industry? Why is free, community based Wikipedia crushing Encyclopedia Britannica overnight? Why is tiny Craigslist crippling the global newspaper industry? Why is Al Qaeda flourishing and even growing stronger? In today's world to answer this it is essential to understand the potential strength of a starfish organization.

The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, explores the phenomenal and unstoppable new power of the starfish organizations and will change the way you look at the world.

[/quote]

I found this to be one of the most significant thing that I have come across in a long time, as I am often advocating leaderless resistance, so that our organizations can not be easily infiltrated, integrated and destroyed, and here is someone interestingly harvesting a similar philosophy, who felt limited in his cyber security role, who quit and was clearly able to use some type of social network to finesse his eventual leadership of the head of ICANN and organization that plays a huge role in the internet.


http://www.starfishandspider.com/index.php?title=About_the_Book

[quote]

Book Jacket Summary

If you cut off a spider's head, it dies; if you cut off a starfish's leg it grows a new one, and that leg can grow into an entirely new starfish. Traditional top-down organizations are like spiders, but now starfish organizations are changing the face of business and the world.

What's the hidden power behind the success of Wikipedia, craigslist, and Skype? What do eBay and General Electric have in common with the abolitionist and women's rights movements? What fundamental choice put General Motors and Toyota on vastly different paths? After five years of ground-breaking research Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom have discovered some unexpected answers, gripping stories, and a tapestry of unlikely connections. The Starfish and the Spider argues that organizations fall into two categories: traditional 'spiders,' which have a rigid hierarchy and top-down leadership, and revolutionary 'starfish,' which rely on the power of peer relationships.

The Starfish and the Spider explores what happens when starfish take on spiders (such as the music industry vs. Napster, Kazaa, and the P2P services that followed). It reveals how established companies and institutions, from IBM to Intuit to the US government, are also learning how to incorporate starfish principles to achieve success. And it will teach you:

* How the Apaches evaded the powerful Spanish army for 200 years
* The power of a simple circle
* The importance of catalysts who have an uncanny ability to bring people together.
* How the Internet has become a breeding ground for leaderless organizations
* How Alcoholics Anonymous has reached TK million members with only a shared ideology and without a leader

The Starfish and the Spider is the rare book that will change how you understand the world around you. You'll never see things the same way again.

[/quote]

It makes you wonder how many other chess pieces are getting put into play. How many others who share a same philosophy, but have no clear ties, or affiliations are now getting into similar positions across the globe, and how many other similar plays are being set up that most do not see, and can not even imagine? Because we are dealing with a leaderless entity, with no clear associations we may never know until the plays unfold.

Think about how a society can be taken over, there are two ways, it can be done by force, or it can be done by putting your people into key positions of power, people who share ideals, philosophies, principles. No clear affiliations have to be present, you would just set up a social network, that promotes those with your ideals, and get them into significant or key roles and no one would be the wiser.


http://www.thehiddenevil.com/plot.asp

[quote]

In 1934 General Smedley D. Butler went public after he was approached by Wall Street and offered up to 300 million dollars to lead an army of 500,00 veterans equipped with munitions from Remington Arms Company to Washington D.C., in order to overthrow the U.S. Government by force. The plot was investigated by the McCormack-Dickstein committee, which found General Butler to be telling the truth.(*)

[/quote]

[quote]

According to this information, the CFR/Wall Street made an overt attempt to install a dictatorship by force. This plot was investigated by congress and found to be authentic. It is strikingly similar to the Communist Revolution which Wall Street is known to have funded, where an entire country was communized after a few major cities were seized.

"The Communists came to power by seizing a mere handful of key cities," wrote Allen. "In fact, practically the whole Bolshevik Revolution took place in one city--Petrograd. It was as if the whole United States became Communist because a communist-led mob seized Washington D.C."

[/quote]

When you know what you are doing, it does not take much for a take over to happen. It can happen seemingly in the blink of an eye, but you find that in the background, there has been strategy building, culminating over years, key players getting moved into critical positions of power, and networks set up. Most people are likely to not understand the inner workings until the whole thing is unveiled and by then ofcouse it's too late.

I don't think we are necessarily a stupid society, sometimes I think that we are just lazy. We want others to do the thinking for us, to connect the dots. We have begun to think that we are not smart enough or cleaver enough to think for ourselves, and have started to trust others to do the thinking for us. Thus voting.

If you ever want to take the power and control back you have to start to think for yourself, believe that you are capable. Connect the dots for yourself and you must stop chasing after the shiny shallow things that the world tells you are the important things. The things that they want you to buy, to swallow, to believe is the truth when it's only the ministry of truth, the lies that they want you to accept and to believe disguised as the truth. No one can hold you hand and get you to do that, you have to do that for yourself.

Anyways this was a story that I thought was slightly more important and significant than some of the pablum that you might have been feed.

Woman placed on Violent Offenders Registry

I am really happy about this story. I did not know there was a potentially "violent person registry." I don't know what the names would be in Canada, U.S. or Europe, but it should not be hard to find out.

Think of this scenario in the workplace, at school, etc. You make a comment, or perform an action that might upset someone with the capacity to get you on such a list, and then an notice is sent out to several dozen places that you are a potentially violent person who should not be alone with others, and then your life changes.

Here is some really neat info from this article.


I was turned into a Parriah for complaining about a yob

[quote]Jane Clift saw it as her public duty to report a drunk she saw trampling flowers in a park.

But her efforts led to a surreal nightmare in which she was branded potentially violent and put on a council blacklist with thugs and sex attackers.

Her details were circulated to an extraordinary range of public and private bodies, including doctors, dentists, opticians, libraries, contraceptive clinics, schools and nurseries. Their staff were advised not to see her alone.

The 43-year-old former care worker was forced to withdraw an application to become a foster parent and, eventually, to leave the town where she had lived for ten years.

Now, after a bitter four-year legal battle with Slough Council, the stain on her character has finally been removed.[/quote]

A list that put her up there with sex attackers if you can imagine that.

She was a care worker, and got denied fostering a child because of this.


Woman sues council for libel after being labelled
'potentially violent' for complaining about a vandalised flowerbed

[quote]Ms Clift told the court that she had to leave Slough, where she had lived for 10 years, and had initially moved to Southampton.

'I'd like to move back some time in the near future but without this hanging over my head and my family's head.

'I have many connections in Slough, I like Slough, but it was impossible for me to function normally in Slough with this on my head for 18 months, and the stain will always be there.'

She said that after the council acted, she sensed that everywhere she went, there was 'whispering, collaboration, people scurrying about'.

'One time I went to the contraceptive clinic and I felt that there were way too many people hovering about for me than should have been there, making me feel very insecure.

'It did serve as a reminder that everywhere I went - hospitals, GPs, libraries - anywhere at all, even if I phoned the fire service, as soon as my name went on to that system, it flagged up 'violent person marker, only to be seen in twos, medium risk'.'

'I'm nothing special, no qualifications, don't have a fancy job but I don't go getting into trouble. It cuts across class, race, everything.

'These people have this ability to do this and they can abuse it.
Not many people know, I didn't even know, that such a register existed.[/quote]



She sensed that everywhere she went there was a whispering and collaboration campaign, with people scurrying about. She also goes on to say more people were hovering about than should have been there, making her feel insecure. I am sure that I have another word for what they were doing, but to continue.


Woman Placed on Violent persons registry
Woman labelled violent by Slough borough council wins damages

[quote]A woman who was labelled potentially violent by a council has won £12,000 in libel damages.

Jane Clift sued Slough borough council and Patrick Kelleher, its head of public protection, over their reaction to her complaint about a three-year-old boy who vandalised a flower bed in a town park.

The authority argued that a 2005 entry about her in its violent persons register was accurate, and that Clift was obsessed with getting Slough's antisocial behaviour co-ordinator sacked.

Mr Justice Tugendhat found in favour of Clift at the high court, but rejected her claim that Kelleher had been malicious.[/quote]

She had to move and it took four years to get her name removed from this list.

I was just pointing that out, because I am sure that the policy on these lists is not to give our information to the person being placed on the lists.



http://www.doncaster.gov.uk/about/chamber/default.asp?Nav=Report&ReportID=8873

[quote]
Staff Safety (Potentially Violent Persons) Database
employees and others arising from their work activities.

3. Purpose

The purpose of this document is to alert Directorates to their statutory duties and of the corporate information system designed to enable managers to identify potential risks to employees from individuals, animals and premises. The purpose of the recording is to seek to avoid further incidents through the controlled sharing of information that will be used to undertake a better-informed risk assessment of proposed visits by employees.


5. Definitions

The Staff safety register is a secure electronic based database recording incidents involving an employee of DMBC (or partner agency) that have caused actual or potential harm.

6. Policy

It is Doncaster Council policy to ensure the health, safety and welfare of its employees and therefore managers must utilise the staff safety database to achieve this objective.

7. Responsibilities

Managers

All managers in day-to-day control of people, places etc must ensure that risk assessments are completed and are suitable and sufficient for their purpose. Managers must ensure that the significant findings arising from risk assessments are communicated to employees affected by those work activities. For the purposes of this section the work activity relates to visits by Council employees away from Council premises. See Instruction section for detailed Risk assessment.

Senior managers who, after notification of an incident to one of their employees, believe that person(s) and/ or an address now need to be included onto the staff safety register then they must notify the system manager of that decision at the earliest opportunity.

To comply with Data Protection Act 1988 if the manager decides to include a person onto the register then that person must be informed in writing of the intention to do so, the reason for their inclusion and the arrangements for review and removal. The right of appealing against that decision must also be provided.

Employees

Employees who undertake visits to non-Council premises must utilise the Staff safety register to ascertain if the location of the proposed visit is included in the register as a potential to cause harm.

Principal Safety Officer

The Principal Safety Officer as system manager has the ability to create, amend and delete data and to ensure appropriate an advisory/ training service is available to all employees with responsibilities under these instructions. The PSO must ensure that the system is managed and staffed appropriately.

8. Instructions

System Access – Three levels of access are available and a clear level of authorisation will control the granting of each. All levels of direct access to data will be password controlled and the staff safety register itself will record details of every access, including the data viewed and the reason for access.

8.1. Level 1 Access- Basic Interrogation

An email (external email facility) based enquiry function, which tests whether a name or address is registered. Appropriate staff will be specifically authorised to use this function.

8.2. Level 2 Access- View Only

The ability to view data on the software system (software installed on individual pc’s). Only a limited number of managers will be given this access. Where a level 1 user identifies a match from the email system a Level 2 user will obtain the relevant information from the software system and carry out a risk assessment for a visit to the premises and advise accordingly.
[/quote]


Interesting, I bet every single little Human Resources officer knows about this list. It goes hand in hand with make a stink go see a shrink policy they have in their handbook.

http://www.harassment101.com/Article5.html

[quote]
The next day, the plant director of human resources invoked a Ford program for combating workplace violence to bar Crosty from the factory and ordered him to see a company-paid psychiatrist or lose his job.

A little more than fourteen months later, and 725 miles away, officials at Emory University cited a similar concern about violence to justify using armed guards to escort Dr. James Murtagh off university property when Dr. R. Wayne Alexander, chairman of the department of medicine at Emory, ordered him to see a company-selected psychiatrist or lose his job. Six weeks earlier, Murtagh, a professor of pulmonology at Emory, had filed a false claims suit against the university, alleging that it had misspent millions of dollars in federal grant money. He claimed the university diverted money from research grants in order to pay for salaries and trips for administrators and some staff. The specific allegations were sealed by order of the federal judge.

Crosty and Murtagh don't know each other. It is unlikely their worlds would ever intersect, but they have at least one thing in common. They both are victims of an increasingly popular employer weapon against whistleblowers: the psychiatric reprisal.

Across the United States, companies have seized upon concerns about workplace violence to quash dissent. Hundreds of large corporations have hired psychiatrists and psychologists as consultants to advise them on how to weed out "threatening" employees. They say they are only responding to a 1970 directive from the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration that they maintain a "safe and secure work environment." But by drawing the definition of "threatening" as broadly as possible, they are giving themselves a new club to bang over the heads of workers.
[/quote]


So in the workplace I am guessing this could be applied for a number of reasons, and then you end up on these little connected lists.


[quote]
132 – Violent Persons Register

Referring to Minute No. 125 – Violent Persons Register, John Irving from the COPS Team had attended the meeting and gave the following advice:

To hold a register of violent or potentially violent people on computer, the information could be de-personalised by using a classification system i.e.: 1 = Potentially violent, 2 = Threatened people before, 3 = Been violent in the past, 4 = Two-man visit, 5 = Don’t Visit.

ITEM

132 – Continued…

The Legal Services Administrator would compile a Violent Persons Database, which would be put on the Council’s Intranet system, and would be password protected. John Irving suggested that as a long-term goal, once the database had been established it would be useful to share the information with Liberata, District Nurses etc.

The Legal Services Administrator also needed to write a procedure to ensure that the Council didn’t fall foul of the Data Protection Act. It was agreed that addresses couldn’t be put onto the Violent Persons Register without proper clarification. It was suggested that a sub-group to this Group be set up to endorse these requests.
[/quote]

Minutes of the meeting from a local booby. How to really mess up someones life. I mean how to share information of violent persons.

Well just some fun food for thought. Tell me what you think, leave comments if you feel like it.