Posted on 09/29/2016 10:50:13 AM PDT by VitacoreVision
October 1 is D-Day for the start of the international takeover of the Internet, a scheme the Obama administration and the United Nations have been advancing for years. Why are GOP leaders AWOL as President Obama and the United Nations move to transfer critically important jurisdiction over the Internet to an unaccountable UN-aligned monopoly? Why are Ryan and McConnell doing nothing?
On October 1 — which is only hours away — U.S. oversight of the Internet’s domain name system is scheduled to be stripped from the U.S. and transferred to the new Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) designed by global “multistakeholder” activists. Members of Congress, national security experts, military professionals, constitutional authorities, privacy advocates, and human rights activists are warning that this pending transition to “independent” oversight by “the international community” is fraught with danger.
However, as on so many other crucial issues, the Republican-controlled Congress is acting as a rubber stamp for Obama. Although few Americans are aware of the serious threat posed by this impending transition, the UN’s Internet takeover scheme is not something that has sprung upon us recently or ex nihilo; we have been reporting on this growing peril for the past several years (see here and the articles linked below, following this story).
Rick Manning, president of Americans for Limited Government (ALG), yesterday blasted House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) for failing even to attempt to block the Internet giveaway, while at the same time caving in to threats of a government shutdown by President Obama and the Democrats if the Republicans didn’t give them all the funding they demanded. One of the key issues was a deal to provide the city of Flint, Michigan, a liberal Democrat stronghold, with $170 million in federal funds for their municipal water supply.
“So, Democrats block the continuing resolution, demand money for the Flint, Mich. water supply,” noted Manning. “House Republicans led by House Speaker Paul Ryan relent and agree to add it to the House water bill after that proposal was defeated in the House Rules Committee, and got nothing in return.”
“Republicans have majorities in both houses of Congress, Democrats were actively demanding extra add-ons for these bills, and they couldn’t even get a rider stopping the irreversible transition of U.S. oversight of the Internet’s domain name system," ALG’s Manning charged. “That, even though the Department of Justice has repeatedly failed to respond to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees on a number of outstanding legal concerns with the Internet transition of U.S. oversight of the domain name system,” he said, referring to the most recent letter from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.).
In their September 21 letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, the chairmen raised serious national security concerns and important constitutional matters that the Department of Justice has failed to address, despite repeated requests. The DOJ has failed to address, the chairmen pointed out, “how the transfer will effect free speech and the openness of the Internet, if U.S. control of the .mil and .gov domains will be compromised, if the transfer will open the Internet to undue influence from foreign nations, if the transfer will lead to the improper conveyance of United States government property, or if the transfer affects any existing antitrust immunity and increases the likelihood of significant antitrust litigation.”
ALG’s Rick Manning charges that “these issues risk either creating an unaccountable global Internet monopoly or a potentially fractured domain name system if antitrust does come into play. The transition proposal contemplates neither scenario, and these issues cannot be addressed once the transition occurs on October 1.” (See here for a detailed legal analysis by ALG’s senior editor Robert Romano of the anti-trust issues involved in the transfer.)
The letter by chairmen Grassley and Goodlatte asked Attorney General Lynch to answer “whether or not the administration has the constitutional authority to conduct the IANA transition without the authorization of Congress because of the United States property interests in the root zone file — or other similar components of the Internet that were created and financed by the United States.” The chairmen pointed out that under Article IV, Section 3 of the Constitution, Congress has the exclusive power “to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory or other property belonging to the United States.”
On September 26, a stellar coalition of 77 generals, admirals, intelligence experts, cybersecurity professionals, and industry leaders sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Joseph Dunford, calling on them to intervene in opposition to President Obama’s radical plan to jeopardize the security of the Internet, which is vital to national (and global) security.
“As individuals with extensive, first-hand experience with protecting our national security, we write to urge you to intervene in opposition to an imminent action that would, in our judgment, cause profound and irreversible damage to the United States’ vital interests,” the letter states. Of immediate concern, say these national security professionals, “is the prospect that the United States might be transferring to future adversaries a capability that could facilitate, particularly in time of conflict, cyberwarfare against us.” The letter continued, “In the absence of NTIA’s stewardship, we would be unable to be certain about the legitimacy of all IP addresses or whether they have been, in some form or fashion, manipulated, or compromised. Given the reliance of the U.S. military and critical infrastructure on the Internet, we must not allow it to be put needlessly at risk.”
Among the signers of the letter are Adm. James A. “Ace” Lyons, USN (Ret.), former commander-in-chief U.S. Pacific Fleet; Lt. General William “Jerry” Boykin, USA (Ret.), former deputy under secretary of defense for intelligence; Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, USAF (Ret.), former deputy chief of staff, United States Air Force; Hon. Charles E. Allen, former under secretary of the Department of Homeland Security for intelligence and analysis; Lt. Gen. C. E. McKnight, Jr., USA (Ret.), former director, Command and Control Systems for Nuclear Forces, Joint Chiefs of Staff; Dr. Lani Kass, former firector, Air Force Chief of Staff’s Cyber Task Force; Rear Adm. Philip S. Anselmo, USN (Ret.), former director of Command Control Communications Computers and Intelligence (C4I); Rep. Brian Babin (R-Tex.), Chairman, House of Representatives’ Committee on Science Space and Technology Subcommittee; Jody R. Westby, CEO, Global Cyber Risk LLC and former chief administrative officer & counsel, In-Q-Tel.
Considering the Obama administration’s contempt for the Constitution’s system of checks and balances, its record for ignoring Congressional requests and concerns, and President Obama’s penchant for “legislating” by executive order, it is not surprising that the administration has completely ignored these appeals by Congress, as well as military and cybersecurity experts. Nor is it a surprise that the Republican leaders have failed, once again, to fight for America’s vital interests. As ALG’s Manning notes, their failure even to engage Obama on this issue is inexcusable.
“Did they even try?” Manning asks. “Ryan and McConnell have not issued any public statements on the matter, so we must assume they actively agree with surrendering U.S. oversight of the Internet. They didn’t even put up a fight. House and Senate Republicans are not what they say, they are what they do. And what they are doing is allowing President Obama to give away the Internet to the international community, threatening the American people’s vital Internet freedoms. And don’t let any Republican tell you different.”
The clock is ticking; October 1 is only hours away. Opponents of the Internet giveaway are urging voters to deluge their U.S. senators, representatives, House Speaker Paul Ryan, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell with phone calls and e-mails urging them to take action to stop the transfer before the October 1 deadline.
Related articles:
The United Nations Grabs for Internet Control (Video)
U.S. Lawmakers Aim to Block Obama's Internet Giveaway
Internet “Governance” Summit in Brazil Advances UN Control
Chinese Communist to Lead UN Agency Seeking to Control Internet
UN, Islamists & Communists Push Global Internet Regime
Secret UN Document Lays Out Plan to Seize Control of Internet
Side streets and easements are cicso machinery that come off the backbone. There are major internet traffic highways, last I heard like 17 major hubs, then thousands of pieces of Cisco hardware off of that.
The surface streets would be things like LANS and WANS.
You have to know how the internet was designed. It was designed to be a communication network that could survive a nuclear strike. If a major internet highway or hub was down (or vaporized) the routing would still be possible through lower levels of routers.
Internet Exchange Points. The communications traffic on the Internet backbone is exchanged at large Internet Exchange Points (IXP), sometimes called Network Access Points (NAP) or Metropolitan Area Exchanges (MAE), constituting the top level of the Internet network topology. The first five large NAP's in North America were established in the 1990's in Chicago, New Jersey, San Francisco, San Jose, and Washington, D.C. The following sites maintain current indexes of IXPs, many of which provide statistics and graphs of the performance of their major nodes:
Great info-thanks
So if I want to start up a web site called Islam is the problem .com then no problem right? wrong.
I like your analogy. And there’s so much redundancy in the telecom network that any one bottleneck is solved by automatic routing of traffic around it.
And we’re not forced to go down low bandwidth “side streets”. Huge capacity is available for high speed communications under the sea, by satellite, and fiber.
The danger of relinquishing control of the Internet is that incrementalism you suggested. In fact, the globalists will probably try to bypass the U.S. as much as they can as punishment for being a sovereign nation, not part of the New World Order and Commission run by bureaucrats and supported by Soros, Buffet, and that ilk.
ICANN is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. While I disagree with ceding control, it’s much ado about nothing. They literally manage the assignment of internet addresses and DNS. The worst that will happen with this is that it’s likely we’ll see a substantial uptick in spam since foreign entities will likely buy up tracts of American IP addresses to spam from the comfort of their own borders.
If it is “nothing” why are companies like Google and Facebook spending money to get this done? Do you think Google and Facebook have our interests at heart? Fact is you can’t predict the future. While ICANN may be benign now that might not be the case in the future.
This is Obamacare all over again, IMO. This is all about breaking the current system for leftists. The proggies are playing the long game here. Don’t give them a free pass.
20+ years in IT and several industry certifications disagree with your assessment, but if you have something to rebut my claims, please feel free to opine.
Rebut your claims? We’ll that’s easy: If you like you doctor, you can keep your doctor. Take nothing the Obama admin says at face value.
Yeah amazing how they trust Obama and the UN since they’ve been working on this takeover for many years
Thank you for your explanation. I’m no IT person and this is your area of expertise. Now, let me ask since this is your field. You’ve discussed the main structure, which in itself is huge. However, I suppose my concern is in data collecting and suspending of service. How would this new ‘take over’ use their central power to cause disruptions?
TPP
The disruptions possible would be minor at best.
Example: If the powers-that-be decided to remove Free Republic from the name servers, we would be reduced to using number-based urls.
No more www.freerepublic.com, but something numeric instead.
At worst, an inconvenience.
Interesting. Thank you.
How would we get the word out if suddenly the urls were gone?
Better question is why did they get re-elected? Answer that and you will know why.
Strange that you would not remember the difficulty we had logging into FreeRepublic unless we knew the physical address a while back. Those little problems could become standard and you know it.
Free Republic’s facebook site.
But it’s very unlikely to go down like that.
Sure everyone has a ham radio and they are so easy to use much easier than point and click on a phone.
Actually, if I am not mistaken, we could use alternative DNS servers, and I guarentee you that those would spring up.
Uh the Republicans control both houses.
A lot of Doctors and insurance companies agreed we could keep our doctor too.
I hope you’re right.
I hope we don’t have to find out if you’re right.
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