Google Censorship: A Manufactured Affair?

In an article entitled, "How the Courts Are Curbing YouTube," the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation explains to us that judicial pressure is being applied to YouTube to continually expand self-censorship. YouTube is owned by huge search engine provider, Google.

We are supposed to be concerned that Google's "guidelines are running afoul of local laws in different parts of the world" and generating these reactions. But if we look beneath the surface, we find a different scenario altogether.

We begin to see this is an elite dominant social theme, a promotion designed to bring about a certain result, one apparently designed to reduce certain kinds of information available on the Web. What we find, in fact, is a kind of orchestrated dance whereby the very forces that are supposedly anti-censorship are helping manufacture episodes that further promote it.

If we understand what is at work here, it helps us comprehend the larger matrix of control that has been woven around our lives and times.

What we call the Internet Reformation – 'Net-based debunkery of "accepted wisdom" – provides us the tools to better understand this hidden reality. The powers-that-be (those who prefer the status quo) are uncomfortable with the raucous world of the Internet and have undertaken a campaign against it that seems to stretch back a decade or more.

We will learn, if we are willing to look, how dialectical paradigms are used to create control over our lives. Thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis is the tried-and-true methodology.

Among recent victims is Megaupload's Kim Dotcom, whose business empire was virtually undone by the US government on behalf of those in the entertainment industry who wanted Dotcom held accountable for alleged copyright violations.

In this case "law" was used to shut down a successful Internet facility that was making large, mainstream interests uncomfortable.

There are plenty of questions about the Megaupload affair, including why Dotcom's assets were confiscated, why the case was generated using criminal rather than civil statutes and why the supposed violations of copyright were Dotcom's responsibility in the first place.

But the way the case was framed initially in the mainstream media precluded these questions. Dotcom's Megaupload was "guilty" of copyright infringement (whatever that is these days) and all that was left to do was determine the penalty.

By framing issues via certain judicial interpretations and enforcing those interpretations via force (both military and civil), those interested in creating a desired outcome are forcefully defining the terms of the debate.

But what are we to make of Google's censorship?

It would seem, according to the CBC, that Google is a valiant anti-censorship force in the world for free thinking and unbiased information. Here's some more from the article:

Civil libertarians like to see the web as the last bastion of free speech. But the continuing worldwide controversy over the recent anti-Muslim video and two court judgments against YouTube in Brazil suggest that the internet may well turn into an arena of competing legal rules.

"We are very much in a regime where the internet is a different thing depending on where you access it," says Jeff Hermes, director of the Digital Media Law Project at Harvard's Berkman Centre for Internet and Society.

While there is much talk about freedom on the internet, expecting Google "to just defy censorship orders worldwide is probably unrealistic," he adds.

On Wednesday, Brazilian police arrested Fabio Jose Silva Coelho, the head of operations for Google in Brazil, after the internet company failed to heed a judge's order to remove a series of YouTube videos.

The videos made provocative statements about an alleged paternity suit involving Alcides Bernal, a mayoral candidate in the city of Campo Grande, and the court in the southern state of Mato Grosso do Sul ruled that they violate Brazil's electoral law.

This decision came on the same day that another court in Sao Paolo gave Google, which owns YouTube, 10 days to remove clips from the controversial anti-Muslim video currently on YouTube's Brazilian site.

It is the "anti-Muslim video" that should concern us here. The incendiary "Innocence of Muslims" was evidently and obviously an Intel effort designed to provoke Muslims abroad and has been extensively debunked on the Internet. You can see a Daily Bell article about the film here here:

Who REALLY Produced the Film 'Desert Warrior' That Is Now Convulsing the Middle East?

Now we are informed by the CBC that Google is coming under pressure to remove this inflammatory concoction from its YouTube subsidiary. But there are plenty of questions about Google, too, and its links to Western Intel.

In interviews, Robert David Steele, a former clandestine services case officer with the Central Intelligence Agency, has clearly linked Google to the CIA. He's even named Google's liaison there: Dr. Rick Steinheiser in the Office of Research and Development.

Literally thousands of cites (ironically, on Google itself) show clearly a pattern of deep involvement between the world's most successful search engine and Western Intel. In July, 2010, Wired reported that, "The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time – and says it uses that information to predict the future."

The publication added, "It's not the very first time Google has done business with America's spy agencies. Long before it reportedly enlisted the help of the National Security Agency to secure its networks, Google sold equipment to the secret signals-intelligence group. In-Q-Tel backed the mapping firm Keyhole, which was bought by Google in 2004 — and then became the backbone for Google Earth."

The linkages between Google and other major 'Net facilities such as Facebook are pervasive and apparently extend back to the founding and funding of such efforts. One could make a case that the Internet's largest ventures are successful BECAUSE of Intel backing.

And it is perfectly reasonable, therefore, that such efforts should be used in larger operations to curtail 'Net freedoms.

In the case of the film, "Innocence of Muslims," we have what seems to be a deliberately provocative movie that is now being used as a pretext to pass laws around the world attacking 'Net freedoms.

Part of these attacks will inevitably involve Google – and yet Google's response no doubt shall be adjusted by the Intel forces that have shaped it. These forces are the very ones that apparently had a hand in creating the film.

The CBC wants us to believe that governments – especially governments in developing countries – are passing laws attacking facilities like Google. And that such enterprises as Google are valiantly standing against such forces as strongly as possible.

But now add a further wrinkle to this meme: The governments of many developing countries are often supported by Western Intel as well. It is no great trick to encourage censorship in such countries.

What we have then is a situation where a movie has been produced as a kind of trigger for government censorship. Certain countries may be actively encouraged to pass laws censoring such movies and even attacking purveyors like Google.

Finally, the same Intel interests that have arranged the initial provocation and its response modulate Google's reaction to the impending censorship. Every part of the process is controlled.

After the process is complete, the mainstream media "covers" the story. But you won't find much about the real manipulations beneath the surface in narratives such as the one provided by the Canadian Broadcast Corporation. 

You'll have to turn to the 'Net for that. It's what we call the Internet Reformation that is changing the context of the power elite conversation and making these sorts of manipulations more necessary than ever, even as they are losing effectiveness.

The pervasiveness of the 'Net is increasingly serving as a battleground between those who wish to create ever greater global government and the rest of us.

It is this Reformation that is threatening centuries' worth of command-and-control structures erected to create a single world currency and a single governmental entity. Worldwide slavery, in other words.

The invention of the Gutenberg Press and ensuing Reformation of the 16th century provides us with a template for how this struggle will play out in the 21st century. Just as then, we see war, economic chaos and regulatory authoritarianism being used to deflect a growing awareness of elite manipulations and their planned result.

During World War II, the White Rose in Germany resisted what was becoming an ever more authoritarian and destructive environment by speaking out, through the form of printed pamphlets. One lesson to be taken from these students' courageous action is this: Silence is another form of aiding and abetting the power elite's process of authoritarianism.

Living in fear of power is no way to live at all. Courage is necessary to confront the powers-that-be and to energize truth telling. The growing pervasiveness of copyright laws, Internet censorship and other attempts to silence, including "hate speech" laws, are all intended to control the flow of information generated by 'Net facilities.

We stand against them.