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Comment by truth on February 4, 2010 at 8:39pm

Establishment mouthpiece calls for web ID system that would outstrip Communist Chinese style net censorship

Paul Joseph Watson
Propaganda Matrix
Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Time Magazine has enthusiastically jumped on the bandwagon to back Microsoft executive Craig Mundie's call for Internet licensing, as authorities push for a system even more stifling than in Communist China, where only people with government permission would be allowed to express free speech.

As we reported earlier this week, during a recent conference at the Davos Economic Forum, Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft, told fellow globalists at the summit that the Internet needed to be policed by means of introducing licenses similar to drivers licenses - in other words government permission to use the web

His proposal was almost instantly advocated by Time Magazine, who published an article by Barbara Kiviat - one of Mundie's fellow attendees at the elitist confab. It's sadistically ironic that Kiviat's columns run under the moniker "The Curious Capitalist," since the ideas expressed in her piece go further than even the free-speech hating Communist Chinese have dared venture in terms of Internet censorship.

"Now, there are, of course, a number of obstacles to making such a scheme be reality," writes Kiviat. "Even here in the mountains of Switzerland I can hear the worldwide scream go up: "But we're entitled to anonymity on the Internet!" Really? Are you? Why do you think that?"

Kiviat ludicrously compares the necessity to show identification when entering a bank vault to the apparent need for authorities to know who you are when you set up a website to take credit card payments.

"The truth of the matter is, the Internet is still in its Wild West phase. To a large extent, the law hasn't yet shown up. Yet as more and more people move to town, that lawlessness is becoming a bigger and bigger problem. As human societies grow over time they develop more rigid standards for themselves in order to handle their increased size. There is no reason to think the Internet shouldn't follow the same pattern," she writes.

"The people in charge—as much as anyone can be in charge when it comes to the Internet—are thinking about it," Kiviat barks in her conclusion, seemingly comfortable with the notion that shadowy individuals and not the Constitution itself are "in charge" of deciding who is allowed free speech.

Despite Kiviat's mealy-mouthed authoritarianism and feigned reasonableness in advocating such a system, Mundie's proposal is little different to a similar system already considered by officials in Communist China to force bloggers to register their identities before they could post. At the time the idea was attacked by human rights advocates as an obvious ploy "by which the government could control information" and crack down on dissent.