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Government Orders You Tube To Censor Protest Videos

Paul Joseph Watson | 13.06.2011 23:31 | Repression | Technology | Sheffield | World

In a frightening example of how the state is tightening its grip around the
free Internet, it has emerged that You Tube is complying with thousands of
requests from governments to censor and remove videos that show protests and
other examples of citizens simply asserting their rights, while also
deleting search terms by government mandate.



The latest example is You Tube’s compliance with a request from the British
government to censor footage of the [1]British Constitution Group’s Lawful
Rebellion protest, during which they attempted to civilly arrest Judge
Michael Peake at Birkenhead county court.

Peake was ruling on a case involving Roger Hayes, former member of UKIP, who
has refused to pay council tax, both as a protest against the government’s
treasonous activities in sacrificing Britain to globalist interests and as a
result of Hayes clearly proving that council tax is illegal.

Hayes has [2]embarked on an effort to legally prove that the enforced
collection of council tax by government is unlawful because no contract has
been agreed between the individual and the state. His argument is based on
the sound legal principle that just like the council, Hayes can represent
himself as a third party in court and that “Roger Hayes” is a corporation
and must be treated as one in the eyes of the law.

The British government doesn’t want this kind of information going viral in
the public domain because it is scared stiff of a repeat of the infamous
poll tax riots of 1990, a massive tax revolt in the UK that forced the
Thatcher government to scrap the poll tax altogether because of mass civil
disobedience and refusal to pay.

When viewers in the UK [3]attempt to watch videos of the protest, they are
met with the message, “This content is not available in your country due to
a government removal request.”

We then [4]click through to learn that, “YouTube occasionally receives
requests from governments around the world to remove content from our site,
and as a result, YouTube may block specific content in order to comply with
local laws in certain countries.”

You can also [5]search by country to discover that Google, the owner of You
Tube, has complied with the majority of requests from governments,
particularly in the United States and the UK, not only to remove You Tube
videos, but also specific web search terms and thousands of “data
requests,” meaning demands for information that would reveal the true
identity of a You Tube user. Google claims that the information sent to
governments is “needed for legitimate criminal investigations,” but whether
these “data requests” have been backed up by warrants is not divulged by the
company.

“Between July 1 and Dec. 31 (2009), Google received 3,580 requests for user
data from U.S. government agencies, slightly less than the 3,663 originating
from Brazil,” [6]reports PC World. “The United Kingdom and India sent more
than 1,000 requests each, and smaller numbers originated from various other
countries.”

With regard to search terms, one struggles to understand how a specific
combination of words in a Google search can be considered a violation of any
law. This is about government and Google working hand in hand to manipulate
search results in order to censor inconvenient information, something which
[7]Google now freely admits to doing.

You Tube’s behavior is more despicable than the Communist Chinese, who are
at least open about their censorship policies, whereas You Tube hides behind
a blanket excuse and doesn’t even say what law has been broken.

Anyone who swallows the explanation that the videos were censored in this
case because the government was justifiably enforcing a law that says scenes
from inside a court room cannot be filmed is beyond naive. Court was not
even in session in the protest footage that was removed, and the judge had
already left the courtroom.

The real reason for the removal is the fact that the British government is
obviously petrified of seeing a group of focused and educated citizens,
black, white, old and young, male and female, go head to head with the
corrupt system on its own stomping ground.

In their efforts to keep a lid on the growing populist fury that has arrived
in response to rampant and growing financial and political tyranny in every
sector of society, governments in the west are now mimicking Communist
Chinese-style Internet censorship policies in a bid to neutralize protest
movements, while hypocritically lecturing the rest of the world on
maintaining web freedom.

Via a combination of cybersecurity legislation and policy that is hastily
introduced with no real oversight, governments and large Internet
corporations are crafting an environment where the state can simply demand
information be removed on a whim with total disregard for freedom of speech
protections.

This was underscored last year at the height of the Wikileaks issue, when
Amazon axed Wikileaks from its servers [8]following a phone call made by
Senator Joe Lieberman’s Senate Homeland Security Committee demanding the
website be deleted.

Lieberman has been at the forefront of a push to purge the Internet of all
dissent by empowering Obama with a figurative Internet kill switch that he
would use to shut down parts of the Internet or terminate websites under the
guise of national security. Lieberman spilled the beans on the true reason
for the move [9]during a CNN interview when he stated “Right now China, the
government, can disconnect parts of its Internet in case of war and we need
to have that here too.”

Except that China doesn’t disconnect the Internet “in case of war,” it only
ever does so to censor and intimidate people who express dissent against
government atrocities or corruption, [10]as we have documented. This is
precisely the kind of online environment the British and American
governments are trying to replicate as they attempt to put a stranglehold on
the last bastion of true free speech – the world wide web.


References

1.  http://www.prisonplanet.com/british-tax-protesters-arrest-judge-in-act-of-lawful-rebellion.html
2.  http://www.ukcolumn.org/articles/cat-out-bag
3.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esGqizRDo6w&feature=player_embedded
4.  http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=1099103
5.  http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/governmentrequests/
6.  http://www.pcworld.com/article/194651/google_youtube_received_10000_government_requests_for_user_data.html
7.  http://www.precursorblog.com/content/google-now-admits-its-search-isnt-neutral
8.  http://www.prisonplanet.com/lieberman-has-power-to-shut-down-websites-with-a-phone-call.html
9.  http://www.prisonplanet.com/lieberman-china-can-shut-down-the-internet-why-cant-we.html
10.  http://www.prisonplanet.com/liebermans-model-for-america-purging-the-internet-of-dissent.html

Paul Joseph Watson
- Homepage: http://www.infowars.com/government-orders-you-tube-to-censor-protest-videos/print/

Comments

Display the following 5 comments

  1. IP Shielding — IP Shielding
  2. Actually — Peace
  3. Load of tossers — Grumpy Old One
  4. I'm unconvinced too — pinkolady
  5. @ Pinklady — Peace

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