I received a message asking me to send a message to Google to protest that URUKNET has been deleted from the News service of Google News, which means that no articles will show up when you search for them using the url: URUKNET
Not having heard of this site before I ‘Googled’ it and up it came. There was an article dated from that day, (yesterday) so I was a bit puzzled. There were other entries and I looked at another and there was the letter from Google news stating the reason they had removed URUKNET from the site because it was largely an ‘aggregator’ of other people’s new items, with little original stuff.
I wrote back to the person who sent me the email with this and they promised to get back to me, (she is a busy person running another site).
This got me thinking particularly about Google. We have perhaps heard of the compromise Google and Yahoo have reached with the ‘totalitarian’ regime of China and others restricting what people may see in those countries, and also you may have heard of the soldiers in Iraq not able to use You Tube because the stuff on there might corrupt their delicate minds.
Another thought that led to the title of this piece was that what restrictions do we NOT know about for every one of us? I quite often find a link that when clicked on says it doesn’t exist or that the URL you requested might be spelled wrong or the ‘timed out’ message is displayed. And further; the people who frequent the sites where you can comment are fully aware of the ‘trolls’ who try to sow dissent and argumentation amongst commentators and sometimes they are very clever, often accused of being paid by the GOP and the like.
So why haven’t the Pentagon, or whoever maintains the Internet, not shut it down? After all it is full of anti war, anti AIPAC, anti Israel, anti this and anti that people, and they are gathering momentum by sharing information that could lead to upsetting the applecart of the Military/Industrial/Complex, or do they feel secure with their monolithic self perpetuating gung-ho ideology and that we few will never have the power to unseat them?
Some would immediately jump to the conclusion that the Homeland Security Establishment, The FBI and the other 15 intelligence agencies, (count ‘em) with all their minions are busily monitoring all of us and putting our names on various ‘no-fly’ lists, for when the Halliburton/KBR detention centers need a few thousand dissenters/radicals/inmates. That may be true to some degree, after all Bush’s illegal wire tapping, reading all those emails, poking about in our bank accounts for suspicious payments to Islamic charities/call girls have been going on for some time.
So it seems to me that shutting it down would deprive them of all that lovely data, for mining with their computer ‘wizz kids’ programmes and keeps lots of ‘government beurocrats’ burning the midnight oil, (not from the Middle East) trying to put two and two together to make nine.
They are past masters at ‘national security’, state secrets, foreign policy think tanks and ‘gagging orders’. They already have the lame stream propaganda machine in their pockets and even if they look askance at the Internet and all that potential ‘subversion’ they find it more useful to let it be, albeit with some control through ‘Google’ and monitor the hell out of us all, for future reference and possible ‘actionable intelligence’, ala Obama with Pakistan.