Feds Prepare to Scour P2P Networks

From http://www.truthnews.us/?p=2157

Feds Prepare to Scour P2P Networks

Kurt Nimmo
Truth News
April 19, 2008


In order to “monitor and map illicit file sharing activity on popular P2P networks, web sites, and chat rooms,” the feds are pushing the scourge of child porno, supposedly rampant on the internet if we believe the corporate media.
“At a hearing yesterday before the Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs, anti-child porn activists urged the Senators to increase the FBI’s budget for combating child porn online and to move forward with plans to create a next-generation network monitoring and database system that can ferret out child porn trafficking on P2P networks, web sites, and chat rooms,” reports Jon Stokes for Ars Technica. “The new system would be hosted on the FBI’s Regional Information Sharing Systems (RISS) network and would give more law enforcement agents across the country access to an existing system, based in Wyoming, that’s currently being used to find and catch online child porn traffickers.”
But if we read headlines, we discover the FBI is more interested in snagging antiwar activists than child porno traffickers. “The FBI has collected extensive information on the tactics, training and organization of antiwar demonstrators and has advised local law enforcement officials to report any suspicious activity at protests to its counterterrorism squads, according to interviews and a confidential bureau memorandum,” the New York Times reported back in 2003, less than a year after the neocon bombed and invaded Iraq. “FBI officials said in interviews that the intelligence-gathering effort was aimed at identifying anarchists and ‘extremist elements’ plotting violence, not at monitoring the political speech of law-abiding protesters.”
As it turns out, a lot of those supposed anarchists are in fact government agents, as they were at the NAU summit in Montebello, Canada, a fact reported by the corporate media. In the United States, “law-abiding protesters” have been targeted and “neutralized” for decades by way of intimidation, harassment, discrediting, snitch jacketing, a whole assortment of authoritarian and illegal tactics, and the FBI trailblazed the way.

Sure, the FBI may grab a child porno dealer or two, but if history is any indication the intended target of the “next-generation network monitoring and database system” will be activists.
Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey hit on something back in 2005 when he “wondered if the FBI was considering any one who protested government policy as a potential terrorist,” as the Christian Science Monitor reported at the time. Lautenberg, a self-described “tree hugger,” worried that the Ministry of Homeland Security would go after the Sierra Club. No, of course not, as the Sierra Club is a machination of the Rockefeller and Ford foundations and enjoys protected status, but the same is not the case for antiwar and patriot movement activists, or at least those not associated with the feds. In order to destroy an resistance, the FBI needs pervasive snoop ability and a “next-generation network monitoring and database system.”
Busting child pornographers is simply the most effective way to sell it.