The Classified Information Highway

Expect more walls, barriers and checkpoints along the information highway, where everything you type or download is considered a potential unexploded roadside device requiring a three million spook ordnance disposal team to pre-emptively detonate your thought bombs. The internet is being transformed into a military-occupied space, warns Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, commenting on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations that the US government had every one of its internet connected citizens under surveillance with the cooperation of the telecom and tech giants who store and organize your data. Iraq and Afghani civilians have known for decades what it’s like to be considered an “enemy combatant” on their own turf – guilty until proven dead. Every man, woman and child in Palestine could also tell you what it’s like to live under a military occupation on your own land, forced to navigate a maze of heavily armed checkpoints, making a 15 minute trip to your olive grove a seven hour ordeal involving interrogations and strip searches.

If internet giants have their way, netizens will have to confront prepaid toll booths along a classified information highway to gain access to selected sites able to afford the increased bandwidth fees that will be imposed upon them, while low-paying users will be diverted to a potholed cattle path to reach a slow loading site whose accessibility will be determined by how much you pay in fees to your internet carrier. In this world, cyber ‘haves’ are waved through fiber optic checkpoints, while the ‘have nots’ endlessly navigate obstacles and barricades put in place by the gatekeepers of information. This may explain Microsoft, Verizon, Google, et al’s willingness to hand over your data to the government. It’s cheaper than paying lobbyists to make the case for dismantling existing regulatory frameworks that provide equal access to all users. Even under existing laws, broadband has been almost completely deregulated in the USA, resulting in sub-par, extremely expensive internet access compared to any other industrialized country. Companies on the list of firms revealed to have complied with government demands for customers’ data (Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner, etc.) have done so willingly in exchange for favorable treatment from the FCC. The government can easily get what it wants from these companies already unencumbered by federal oversight, merely by muttering “FCC” under its breath at high level meetings in boardroom bunkers where attendees slip in and out of non-existent (really!) ‘back doors’.

Repeated attempts to ‘gentrify’, so to speak, cyberspace and transform it into a wholly commercial real estate zone have now given way to a full-blown military occupation implemented in part by the tech firms working in tandem with the government as private contractors, helping to root out “insurgents”.

We shouldn’t be surprised that our Imperial overlords have finally trained their sights on us and quietly declared us enemies of the state. Predator drones, like chickens, have a boomerang-like tendency to come home to roost. So you’re not bothered by a lack of privacy – good little lickspittle grunt that you are in the Brave New World Order of liberal cruise missiles raining down on evil-doers overseas who have crossed “red lines”. Perhaps you still believe that President Sparkle Pony is helpless against the predations of his own government, which he “inherited from Bush”. Perhaps you consider his unmanned flying machines vague and distant abstractions – a “better, less messy option” than more “boots on the ground”, while erasing the term “kill list” and the name ‘Bradley Manning’ (who?) from your mental hard drive, coz nothing harshes the mellow of a capital ‘O’ believer than the possibility their hero actually has authority. But maybe you should be concerned that the internet has been declared a military zone, because even good little lickspittle grunts could find themselves in a Homeland Security dragnet when they become expendable as surplus labor in the global sweatshop. Don’t believe me? Just ask a Mexican.