statism watch

Flashback: Small Farmers Pushed to Plant GM Seed

Linn Cohen-Cole, GlobalResearch.ca
February 14, 2009

People say if farmers don’t want problems from Monsanto, just don’t buy their GMO seeds.

Not so simple. Where are farmers supposed to get normal seed these days? How are they supposed to avoid contamination of their fields from GM-crops? How are they supposed to stop Monsanto detectives from trespassing or Monsanto from using helicopters to fly over spying on them?

Monsanto contaminates the fields, trespasses onto the land taking samples and if they find any GMO plants growing there (or say they have), they then sue, saying they own the crop. It’s a way to make money since farmers can’t fight back and court and they settle because they have no choice.

And they have done and are doing a bucket load of things to keep farmers and everyone else from having any access at all to buying, collecting, and saving of NORMAL seeds.

(more…)

Flashback: Law Professor tells tech conference: plans to shut down Internet already on deck

John Markoff, New York Times
February 14, 2009

Two decades ago a 23-year-old Cornell University graduate student brought the Internet to its knees with a simple software program that skipped from computer to computer at blinding speed, thoroughly clogging the then-tiny network in the space of a few hours.

The program was intended to be a digital “Kilroy Was Here.” Just a bit of cybernetic fungus that would unobtrusively wander the net. However, a programming error turned it into a harbinger heralding the arrival of a darker cyberspace, more of a mirror for all of the chaos and conflict of the physical world than a utopian refuge from it.

Since then things have gotten much, much worse.

Bad enough that there is a growing belief among engineers and security experts that Internet security and privacy have become so maddeningly elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over.

What a new Internet might look like is still widely debated, but one alternative would, in effect, create a “gated community” where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety. Today that is already the case for many corporate and government Internet users. As a new and more secure network becomes widely adopted, the current Internet might end up as the bad neighborhood of cyberspace. You would enter at your own risk and keep an eye over your shoulder while you were there.

(more…)

Flashback: Hats banned from Yorkshire pubs over CCTV fears

Matthew Taylor, The Guardian
February 14, 2009

A prospective pub landlord says the police insistence on him installing CCTV cameras to film everyone entering his pub threatens his customers’ civil liberties.

Nick Gibson says he has been in a “silent rage” since the police outlined conditions to his licence application, which also requires him to hand over any film of drinkers on request.

“I have been spitting teeth … since I first heard of this request, but at every turn I am alternately advised to keep my head down or laughed at for my naivety,” said Gibson, who plans to reopen the Drapers Arms in Islington, north London, in April.

(more…)