Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

President Obama Calls for a Free and Open Internet

whitehouse.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 449 posts

Re: President Obama Calls for a Free and Open Internet

#211

Post by cryoshon »

shitehawk wrote: post #96
cryoshon wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compare the Bush-era level of surveillance intrusiveness with the Obama-era level. You'll find that what Bush started, Obama has drastically developed, distributed, and expanded. Under Bush we had increasing levels of surveillance which were undesirable, but the veneer that it was still all about terrorism could at least be believed. Now, we know it's targeted specifically at us for the purposes of exploitation and d…

>the veneer that it was still all about terrorism could at least be believed. Now, we know it's targeted specifically at us for the purposes of exploitation and domination of us. The great thing about hyperbole is that it rebuts itself.

Is it really hyperbole when we know via Snowden that one of the projects of the NSA is to infiltrate, discredit, and disrupt any/all dissenting groups?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Threat_Research_Intellige...

What about parallel construction, putatively started to help with terrorists but now usually used in drug investigations in order to sidestep civil rights safeguards?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

Re: President Obama Calls for a Free and Open Internet

#212

Post by mbrubeck »

This is very similar to Mozilla's proposal to the FCC last spring: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/mozilla-offers-fc...

Mozilla: "The petition calls on the FCC to designate last-mile delivery of edge provider communications as “remote delivery” services, and as telecommunications services under Title II of the Communications Act."

Obama: "I believe the FCC should reclassify consumer broadband service under Title II of the Telecommunications Act."

Re: President Obama Calls for a Free and Open Internet

#213

Post by cpleppert »

owenmarshall wrote: post #176
300bps wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had 58 votes in 2009 which was darned close and they only needed one Republican to switch sides to stop a filibuster. Other than that, I guess you don't follow the news much. Harry Reid changed the Senate Rules in 2013 to disallow filibusters of appointments. http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/senate-poised-to-limi...

> Other than that, I guess you don't follow the news much. Harry Reid changed the Senate Rules in 2013 to disallow filibusters of appointments. Which lead to Republican senators using another procedural technique (refusing unanimous consent) to slow down appointments.[1] This means appointments were delayed for days, and even weeks, after which time the same obstructing senators often voted for the appointee anyways.…

There is no difference between refusing unanimous consent and a filibuster. Reid just changed the cloture requirement to 51 from 60.

Re: President Obama Calls for a Free and Open Internet

#214

Post by guelo »

wahsd wrote: post #191
AndrewHampton wrote: post #9

Here's the thing that bothers me the most about a lot of the talk about net neutrality by government officials: > If a consumer requests access to a website or service, and the content is legal, your ISP should not be permitted to block it. Specifically "and the content is legal" is what raises a flag for me. I've seen similar phrases in nearly everything I've read coming from any government official regarding net ne…

The problem is that society has been sitting on its laurels and even though the default should have been that the inherent spirit of the Constitution be extended into the digital world, instead, we have allowed and been complicit in allowing government to not only become authoritarian on the internet, but even to subvert and pervert the very fundamental concepts that set parameters on our whole existence. People, the…

The government created the internet. For a while in the early 90s corporations tried to create it, and what they came up with were walled gardens, the open internet blew them away, look up Compuserve, AOL and Prodigy.

The internet works because of the underlying open, bidirectional, equally privileged connections. If the corps are starting to change that it must be stopped. The internet is one of humanities greatest achievements and we can't let greedy monopoly beuraucrats kill it.

Re: President Obama Calls for a Free and Open Internet

#215

Post by enraged_camel »

dragontamer wrote: post #202
tracker1 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obama already has a legacy that we can talk about... Expanding a police surveillance state, and raining hell-fire down upon our "enemies" like no other president before him.

Someone needs to learn American History... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Censorship http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_an... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton When the FBI start assassinating American Citizens in their sleep after an agent drugs their food to silence African American Political movements... THEN we can start talking about…

>>When the FBI start assassinating American Citizens in their sleep after an agent drugs their food to silence African American Political movements... THEN we can start talking about a "police state".

You do realize that the USA committed extrajudicial murder of an American citizen during the current president's term, right? Or are you just ignoring it because it's inconvenient to your narrative?

>>Today's laws make such surveillance and wiretapping illegal.

And yet we have the entire population under surveillance. Compared to that, spying on a handful of civil leaders is nothing.

Re: President Obama Calls for a Free and Open Internet

#216

Post by cryoshon »

dragonwriter wrote: post #174
cryoshon wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compare the Bush-era level of surveillance intrusiveness with the Obama-era level. You'll find that what Bush started, Obama has drastically developed, distributed, and expanded. Under Bush we had increasing levels of surveillance which were undesirable, but the veneer that it was still all about terrorism could at least be believed. Now, we know it's targeted specifically at us for the purposes of exploitation and d…

> Under Bush we had increasing levels of surveillance which were undesirable, but the veneer that it was still all about terrorism could at least be believed. Not if you were paying attention to any of the players involved before 9/11. Or even after for that matter. That 9/11 was used as a pretext for things the people involved wanted for other reasons and had been seeking for years (in some cases decades) without an…

In the eyes of the public, I think that it was very much believably about terrorism-- people have internalized the false maxims that security must be sought, and that liberty must be traded to get security. This wasn't really a popular trope before the anti-terrorist propaganda came along.

I agree with you when you say that it was never about terrorism but rather increasing executive power, though. There certainly was a trend toward increased surveillance for many years before, but the entrance of surveillance into the new world-dominating media of the internet is a story in and of itself, I think.

Re: President Obama Calls for a Free and Open Internet

#217

Post by fragsworth »

adevine wrote: post #187
padobson wrote: post #56

I hope no one is getting excited about this. President Obama is a lame duck. His party just got tossed out of the Senate, relegating his political capital to basically 0. In the wake of this, he's decided to take maybe the most important economic issue of the next 20 years and politicize it. Neither the red team nor the blue team could say they owned this issue, but one of the most divisive voices in politics just st…

Agreed. Given the knee-jerk reaction of "Anything that Obama supports is bad", Ted Cruz is now tarring this as "Net Neutrality is the Obamacare of the Internet". I like how "Obamacare" has become the new Communism. A lot of people know hardly anything about it or what it's policies actually are, but it's baaaaad. I like the Digg headline about this: Ted Cruz is the Uber for stupid metaphors.

> Ted Cruz is now tarring this as "Net Neutrality is the Obamacare of the Internet".

That is disastrous. If the Republicans unite against Net Neutrality just because Obama supports it, we could easily get a Republican president in the next election, and then the Internet in the U.S. will be doomed for a very long time.

Re: President Obama Calls for a Free and Open Internet

#218

Post by guelo »

DigitalSea wrote: post #154

As per usual with all politicians, these are just words. Nice words, but until a bill is passed and there is movement in the senate to make something like this closer to a reality, words are meaningless. My question to Obama is: why now? This whole net neutrality debate has been going on long before Obama started his first term of presidency, why wait until you are almost out of the White House to act upon something…

I don't think it's ever a bad time to point out that Republicans are generally anti-consumer and pro large corporations.

Re: President Obama Calls for a Free and Open Internet

#219

Post by KobaQ »

yc1010 wrote: post #48
nkozyra wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's entirely possible that the notions of surveillance (and the egregious examples of that which have come from the top-down in this country) and net neutrality can be evaluated independently of each other, particularly because they are dissonant concepts.

He calls for "Free and Open Internet" An internet where all traffic is closely monitored, recorded and data-mined is not free and open in my books.

Actually it is free and open. It's not private, however.

The internet was never a private place and it will never be.

Edit: It's important that we don't loose the freedom and openness. That's what the discussion is all about. Not about the lack of privacy.

Post reply on HN