July 4, 2008

Excited Delirium Book: Chapter 39 (OMNINet: Efforts With the FCC)

By liam

Author’s Note: The following is Chapter 39 of the my online book "Excited Delirium". Please post comments. Please tell your friends about this story. If you’ve missed a chapter, please click here for Chapter 1 (Prelude) or here for the full index .

Getting laws passed in the United States that are in your favour is easy. All you have to do is support a non-descript bill that won’t really get a lot of attention and have a friendly Senator tack on an amendment that represents your needs.

The real work is going to all the dinners, dances and other social affairs that take place nightly around Capitol Hill. Political funding today shows it head with donations to specific charities and research groups in the names of certain Senators and Congressmen or elaborate business trips and guest speaking tours in exotic locales, all funded by the organization that ‘wants change’.

Even if you don’t count these elaborate events designed to facilitate the exchange of cash, the US unofficially ranks as one of the most corrupt countries. All levels of representation thrive off a tattered array of bribery, graft, extortion, patronage, nepotism (dynastic planning at its best), cronyism, embezzlement and kickbacks, all of which are icons of the fine art of ensuring that policy favours certain institutions. The first that comes to mind is The Corporation.

These days, the post-9/11 privatization infrastructure would astound most Americans. When the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, all of those hard-working venture capitalists and programmers who were making wonderful marketing tools that would track every digital move you made online and elsewhere moved to Washington to lobby the government for more funds related to the security industry.

At a certain point, the process of voting and choosing elected officials became a great façade because those representatives simply see that as a minor hurdle to getting their friends to the massive trough financed by American taxpayers.

A single lobbyist holds more sway than the whole voting population, depending on what he or she has too offer a politician looking to enrich his family or companies that they own.

For decades, one of the commonly used strategies by the OMNINet is to create a few grassroots organizations that claim to need a change in certain guidelines so that they don’t allow terrorists or other villains to interrupt the regular flow of commerce throughout the land. The true intent is almost always, and with little doubt, related to at least two or three of what the leaders of OMNINet call COPS, or Centres Of Profits Sources.

Right now there are hundreds of these so-called grassroots shops lurking around Washington and Ottawa. Keeping the Internet and Digital Devices Safe, or KIDDS, was one such study group based in Virginia, just a stone’s throw from the NSA and a few other para-military intelligence offices. Of course, it had offices located around the world, focusing on major technological hubs like London, Brussels, Sydney and Toronto, but the creators of the group knew where they’d get the biggest bang for their bucks. And they spent a lot of bucks. In 2006, they invested more than $240 million in ad campaigns, study groups, PACs, donations and other fund-raisers to support the Republican President and his friends with the FCC.

So what was KIDDS all about?

The stated mandate of KIDDS was simple:

Protecting our children from the perils of the internet.

The mandate was repeated often at meetings, stood in bold font on their letter-head and was in a continuous advertising loop on some of the TV and radio shows that it sponsored. Most of their TV ads appeared on Christian TV networks, but they also dabbled with mainstream stations once in a while. In the papers, double-page spreads showing graphic images of children being lured by psychos, messages related to kiddie porn and identity theft and other issues were ubiquitous.

KIDDS was successful with a number of internet-related crimes, particularly helping authorities with baiting of under-aged children. What some of the volunteers would actually do is pose as either stalkers or children and follow through on some of the promises to meet in public places. In one embarrassing circumstance, the stalker and the child were both middle-aged men that met in a local coffee shop. They had a good laugh about what had happened, shared a latte, and then went back to their homes to bait someone else.

KIDDS was just one of the organizations that was well funded by the Univist Church, Tri-X, the OMNINet and a number of other related numbered corporations, particularly those that had affiliations with major American media companies.

KIDDS was also affiliated with a number of other organizations that focused on issues like gambling, porn, spam and various acts of online fraud and identity theft. These too were well funded by telecommunications companies and their stockholders.

KIDDS was a classic example of how the public was being told that the web was being “demonized” and turned into a cesspool of sin and debauchery that threatened the goodness of the average American citizen.

What the public would never know about KIDDS is that it was set up to help tighten the grip on internet activity and help lock down the level of dialogue that was rampant on the web in recent years. There are six major entities in the United States and the world, for that matter, that control about 80 percent of media related to entertainment, news, politics, sports and business. They intended to keep it that way and demonizing was the least costly and most effective way to encourage Americans and other web users to log in and register with “approved” channels that would control the flow of information a little more effectively.

Now, this also meant that the surge in communication between users in the North America, Europe and the rest of the world be severely limited, but that would be a critical alteration in the promise of the web in exchange for the health and protection of our children. Right?

Griffith Garamond was a major backer of all three organizations mentioned above and he was doing everything he could to ensure that information remained in the hands of the few. If lay-people were able to communicate again, there’d be another revolution in no time. Assuming, of course, these people were spirited enough to raise their fists in anger against those that kept them in line.

Garamond was scheduled to meet with Andy Wolf, the current chair to the FCC, golfing buddy to the Vice-President and brother to a Senator from Ohio, the state that delivered Bush to the White House in 2004.

With previous meetings, they met to engage in a “scrum”, or planning session to discuss what would be discussed and presented at the FCC. Present were Garamond (looking a little tired from his flight), Wolf, Hadlock and a small pack of other senior officials, both from the federal government and also from the OMNINet.

“KIDDS will be making a plea for tighter rules and tracking on internet activity, particularly with any unlicensed or unregistered individual or organization,” announced Hadlock.

“What does that mean? Do you want us to track everyone on the web?” asked Wolf.

“Not necessarily,” Hadlock answered smugly. “Just the folks who don’t register with our partners. You see …” he said as he leaned into the large mahogany table, inlaid with opal and ebony, “the best way to monitor the majority of the population of web users is to force them to be honest. What we’ve devised is being tentatively called ‘Web 3.0’, which will promise to offer access and transfer speeds well beyond anything that people have seen to date. This is not innovation – it’s just utilization. If people want to access this network, they have to pay to register and all of their activities will be monitored easily enough because they’re provided actual personal information in order to participated. Those that don’t participate will be forced to use the ‘slow lane’. These are the ones that we need the FCC and intelligence to monitor because, we’ll argue, they refuse to share personal information with the proper authorities and therefore, they must have something to hide.”

“Regardless of which route people take, we’ll be monitoring the actions of everyone. We’ll just be making more money for it,” Hadlock concluded.

“What will you do about people that register using other credit cards that are not in their name,” asked Wolf.

“We’ll use a lot of reasons for people to jump to the fast lane and if we find that the more obvious ones don’t work, we’ll use rewards programs and other incentives to pull them in. People only use their own cards when rewards and bonuses are on the line.”

“OK. That’s good. Now, Hadlock. We have no issues with keeping an eye on everyone, but we need to know how this is going to play into re-election and funding for more intelligence infrastructure.”

“That’s simple. Re-election: we help frame up a couple of pervs tracking the President’s daughters or the kids of some other high-level official or entertainment whore and make it a massive public issue. Worst case, we may have to have a couple of creeps take out a few little unsuspecting kids. The People demand justice. We deliver by introducing a private and federal communications initiative and call it ‘YourWeb’ or something else that’s nice and sweet and loving.”

“Intelligence: every new network we build is using DARPA and NSA technology, so there’s really no worry about not participating in the flow of information. In a few years, we’ll have everything that people do from the time they’re up to the time they’re back in bed and then some. Everything will be hooked in together and it won’t matter which network people use.

“Good stuff,” said Wolf while he folded up his binder and notes. “Let’s go out to the chair meeting and tell the public what we want them to know.”

“Excellent.” Hadlock reached over to shake Wolf’s hand and then looked over at Garamond in the corner and winked.

“Phase one was well under way,” Hadlock said to himself as he wiped off his hand on his two-thousand dollar pants.

(Note: "Excited Delirium" is a work of fiction. Any person, place or thing depicted in this work of fiction is also a work of fiction. Any relation of these subjects or characters to real locations, people or things are an unintentional coincidence.)

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