Alex Jones of PrisonPlanet.com and InfoWars.com is sponsoring a contest that gives you the chance to educate millions about the growing threat to freedom of speech on the web and the chance to win a top prize of $5000, with a total of $10,500 in cash prizes available to be won.

Paul Joseph Watson of PrisonPlanet writes:

In response to increasing flagrant attempts to censor political websites, including Infowars and Prison Planet, not in Communist China, but in the U.S. and the UK, we are running a special contest with a top prize of $5,000 in order to encourage people to get active and educate others about the growing threats to Internet freedom…

The necessity to warn people of this agenda is no more pressing than now, and this is why we are launching a contest to create the most powerful video presentation detailing the growing cancer of Internet censorship.

Using the audio of Alex’s rant at approximately eight minutes into the second hour of the Alex Jones Show on Monday, August 4, this contest requires you create a video documenting the censorship of Prison Planet, Infowars, TruthNews, the Jones Report and other non-corporatized, alternative media websites. The video must be under 10 minutes and be posted on YouTube and a secondary video venue on the internet. Contest deadline is the 19th of August. Contest videos will also be cross-posted on Prison Planet and Infowars.

Download the video of Alex’s rant at http://freespeech.vo.llnwd.net/o25/pub/media/20080804_Mon_Alex.wmv

First Prize: $5,000
Second Prize: $1,000
Third Prize: $500

We are also running three other contests in a similar vein with additional prizes.

BEST TRUTH RISING TRAILER

Using video clips from Alex Jones’ latest documentary, Truth Rising: The 9/11 Chronicles, remix a new trailer for the documentary. This video must be posted by Sunday evening, August 10, and the winner will be declared Monday, August 11, during Alex’s show.

Winner of Truth Rising trailer contest will receive $1,000.

NEW DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE ESSAY CONTEST

Like the original U.S. Declaration of Independence, the New Declaration of Independence will assert the right of the people to oppose tyrannical, oppressive government, and once again declare the right of all sovereign individuals to pursue “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Winner of the New Declaration of Independence will receive $2,000.

CRIMES OF THE NWO BILL OF PARTICULARS ESSAY CONTEST

In the third section of the original Declaration of Independence, there is a bill of particulars against the rule of George III, such as the imposition of standing armies among the people, taxation without representation, and obstruction of justice, etc. Our Bill of Particulars will charge the NWO with additional crimes against the people, thus establishing the global elite has no right to rule over us.

Winner of the Bill of Particulars Contest will receive $1,000.

Please send all entries to contest@infowars.com

Click Here for the Complete Article.

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Mike Finch
American Free Press
Sunday, July 13, 2008

A net-neutrality activist group has uncovered plans for the demise of the free Internet by 2010 in Canada. By 2012, the group says, the trend will be global.

Bell Canada and TELUS, Canada’s two largest Internet service providers (ISPs), will begin charging per-site fees on most Internet sites, reports anonymous sources within TELUS.

“It’s beyond censorship, it is killing the biggest ecosystem of free expression and freedom of speech that has ever existed,” I Power spokesperson Reese Leysen said. I Power was the first group to report on the possible changes.

Bell Canada has not returned calls or emails.

The plans made by the large telecom businesses would change the Internet into a cable-like system, where customers sign up for specific web sites, and must pay to see each individual site beyond a certain point. Subscription browsing would be limited, extra fees would be applied to access out-of-network sites. Many sites would be blocked altogether.

“We had inside sources from bigger companies who gave us the information on how exclusivity deals are being made at this moment between ISPs and big content providers (like TV production studios and major video game publishers) to decide which web sites will be in the ‘standard package’ offered to their customers, leaving all the rest of the Internet unreachable unless you pay extra subscription fees per every ‘non-standard’ site you visit,” Leysen said. “We knew the source to be 100% reliable, but we also knew the story would be highly controversial if we released the information. We did it because we knew that we’d get more official confirmations once we’d come forward with it. And indeed that is what happened. Dylan Pattyn, who is writing the soon-to-be published article for Time Magazine, received confirmation from sources within Bell Canada and TELUS after we released the information.”

The plans would in effect be economic censorship, with only the top 100 to 200 sites making the cut in the initial subscription package. Such plans would likely favor major news outlets and suppress smaller news outlets, as the major news outlets would be free (with subscription), and alternative news outlets, like AFP, would incur a fee for every visit.

“The Internet will become a playground for billion-dollar content providers just like television is,” said Leysen. “It won’t be possible for a few teenagers in their parents’ basement to start a small site like E-bay that then grows out to be the next big thing anymore. Right now the Internet belongs to those with the greatest ideas. In the future, it’ll belong to those with the biggest budgets.”

With plans in Canada uncovered, I Power thinks that companies in the United States and other nations are also planning similar actions.

“By 2012 ISPs all over the globe will reduce Internet access to a TV-like subscription model, only offering access to a small standard amount of commercial sites and require extra fees for every other site you visit. These ‘other’ sites would then lose all their exposure and eventually shut down, resulting in what could be seen as the end of the Internet,” Leysen said.

Such a subscription plan could possibly restrict free speech far beyond even the current restrictions set by the governments of communist China. Not only would browsing be limited, but privacy would be invaded, as every web site viewed would likely be recorded on a bill in a manner similar to a phone bill.

Why would the ISPs institute such a plan? One word: money.

“This new subscription model is commercially far more beneficial to them than how it is now,” Leysen said. “If Fox wants to launch a new television show online, they’ll have to pay big money to all major ISPs to ensure that their new show will be offered and pushed in the ‘standard package’ of sites/services/channels that people will get through their Internet access. Plus ISPs will also gain extra revenue out of people trying to access the rest of the Internet, as they’ll pay extra subscription fees for every web site they visit.”

But it’s not just the big ISPs that stand to gain.

“Marketing and big budget ‘content-pushing’ just doesn’t seem to work on the Internet, and this is something that several industries want fixed. ISPs know this and will benefit greatly by fixing this for the marketing and entertainment industry,” Leysen said.

The ISPs are said to be confident they can institute such plans through deceptive marketing and fear tactics.

“The Internet will be more and more marketed as a place full of child pornography and other horrible illegal activity in order to get people on their [the ISP’s] side once they start restricting it and make it ‘safer,’” Leysen said. “Unless we really make a stand for this and make sure that mainstream media thoroughly covers the issue, the whole thing will be eased in with proper marketing to make sure that most mainstream customers won’t make a big deal out of it. They will only realize what was lost long after it’s gone.”

For more information about this story see http://ipower.ning.com

For more information about Internet freedom: SaveTheInternet.com

Web users naive about agenda to turn Internet into regulated cable TV model

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Friday, June 13, 2008

The Internet is the last true unregulated outpost of freedom of speech but moves are afoot to stifle, suffocate, control and eventually pull the plug on the world wide web as we know it. These threats are not hidden nor are they hard to deduce and yet a significant number of Internet users remain naive as to their scope.

Despite many questioning the authenticity of a report that claimed ISP’s had resolved to restrict the Internet to a TV-like subscription model where users will be forced to pay to visit selected corporate websites by 2012, while others will be blocked, the march towards regulation of the web is clear and documented.

We have been warning about the plan to let the old Internet die and replace it with a restricted and controlled Internet 2 for years. In 2006, we published an article about how the RIAA were attempting to broaden intellectual property distinctions to a point whereby merely linking to external content is judged as copyright infringement.

At the time, the article was met with a mixed response. Many were aware of the imminent dangers that threaten to change the face of the Internet but others were more hostile to the supposition that the world wide web could be devastated by landmark copyright case rulings as well as plans to develop “Internet 2.”

Some accused us of yellow journalism and scaremongering yet the warning that the Elektra vs. Barker case could criminalize the very mechanism that characterizes the Internet was not concocted by Alex Jones or Paul Joseph Watson, it was a statement made by the very lawyer fighting the case, Ray Beckerman.

It was a danger also reported on by one of the UK’s biggest technology news websites, the Inquirer, which also highlighted the frightening development in an article entitled, RIAA wants the Internet shut down.

The RIAA’s argument was that defendant Tenise Barker downloaded music files and made them available for distribution by placing them in a shared folder. Though Barker paid for the files and downloaded them legally, and the files were not copied by anyone, the RIAA’s motion states that simply making the files available constitutes copyright infringement.

As Beckerman points out, the entire Internet is nothing more than a giant network of hyperlinks making files ‘available’ to other people. If we link to CNN.com, we are making the file that constitutes the CNN homepage ‘available’ to other users. We don’t own the copyright to any of CNN’s material therefore if the RIAA’s argument is accepted, by simply making that CNN file available from our website, even if no one clicks on the link, we are committing a breach of copyright.

At no point in our article did we suggest that the ruling definitely would shut down the Internet, we highlighted the fact that hundreds of transnational corporations like Amazon.com who solely rely on Internet trade would scream bloody murder. But what the ruling would grease the skids for is the move towards a strictly regulated Internet whereby government permission would be required to run a website and that website would be subject to censoring and deletion if it violated any “terms of use.”

This wouldn’t be much of a problem to giant transnational corporations, because their websites would remain accessible for everyone. Yet for thousands of political websites and blogs, the plug could be effectively pulled.

After a long legal fight, Elektra vs. Barker was decided largely in Elektra’s favor, after a federal judge essentially validated the RIAA’s position that having songs available in a KaZaA shared folder violates the distribution right under the Copyright Act.

The example that we cite in discussing what life would be like under “Internet 2″ was that running a blog would be like having a You Tube account – any politically sensitive or controversial information that the owners dislike would immediately be removed as it is frequently on You Tube.

In addition, the slide towards a licensed Internet that will be sold using fear of identity and credit card fraud could lead to mandatory biometric thumb or finger scanning simply to access the world wide web.

This is hardly a stretch of the imagination, since numerous public services and functions of society are increasingly accessible only through providing some form of biometric identification. Credit passes for travel, ATM terminals and access to theme parks like Disneyland are just a few of the many services we use that are shifting towards mandatory biometric gatekeeping.

Furthermore, Pay By Touch Online and other companies have already developed and launched keyboard biometric finger scanning terminals that require users to submit their biometric print before they can access the Internet or buy online.

Piggybacking the net neutrality debate, Internet 2 is being shaped to replace the old Internet, which will be allowed to self-destruct as it labors under the pressures of being relegated to slower and slower pipes and users will simply desert a painstaking system.

More than two years ago in an article entitled, The End of the Internet?, The Nation magazine reported,

“The nation’s largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online.”

“Verizon, Comcast, Bell South and other communications giants are developing strategies that would track and store information on our every move in cyberspace in a vast data-collection and marketing system, the scope of which could rival the National Security Agency. According to white papers now being circulated in the cable, telephone and telecommunications industries, those with the deepest pockets–corporations, special-interest groups and major advertisers–would get preferred treatment. Content from these providers would have first priority on our computer and television screens, while information seen as undesirable, such as peer-to-peer communications, could be relegated to a slow lane or simply shut out.”

Internet 2 is being billed as the next generation of the world wide web and it has already set global speed records in terms of data transfer, far outstripping the old Internet.

One of the fathers of the Internet, David Clark, who served as chief protocol architect for the government’s internet development initiative in the 1980s, has been given $200,000 by the National Science Foundation to covertly work on a “whole new infrastructure to replace today’s global network,” according to Wired Magazine.

Clark has vowed to create a “brave new world” in designing the new Internet, characterizing what he wanted for the new network to be “a coherent security architecture.”

Dovetailing the onset of Internet 2 are government propaganda campaigns to demonize the existing Internet as a wild backwater for hate crime, child pornography and a terrorist recruiting ground.

Establishment kingpins and their cheerleaders have increased their level of vitriolic rhetoric against the Internet in recent years , as legislation in both the U.S. and Europe to regulate, stifle and license the Internet moves forward.

The White House’s own recently de-classified strategy for “winning the war on terror” targets Internet conspiracy theories as a recruiting ground for terrorists and threatens to “diminish” their influence.

In addition, the Pentagon recently announced its effort to infiltrate the Internet and propagandize for the war on terror.

In an October 2006 speech, Homeland Security director Michael Chertoff identified the web as a “terror training camp,” through which “disaffected people living in the United States” are developing “radical ideologies and potentially violent skills.”

Chertoff pledged to dispatch Homeland Security agents to local police departments in order to aid in the apprehension of domestic terrorists who use the Internet as a political tool.

The European Union, led by former Stalinist and potential future British Prime Minister John Reid, has also vowed to shut down “terrorists” who use the Internet to spread propaganda.

The dangers to the freedom and very existence of the Internet as we know it are all too real and the way to counteract these developments is to get involved and get the word out. Simply burying our heads in the sand and being apathetic and naive about the threat is only going to aid those who wish to see the last outpost of freedom of speech shut off forever.