Never mind the lies Obama and his staffers have already told to the people or the billions of dollars in bailout moneys he divvied up amongst his corporate cronies–rest assured the man is truly devilish to the very core. And now, the current administration has simply taken it too far. Although, this time a lot is at stake.
In the first half of 1013 alone, Google was asked by the U.S. Government to remove 3,846 various Internet posts containing political reference–a 68% increase over the last half of 2012.
Dominic Rushe wrote for the Guardian:
“Over the past four years, one worrying trend has remained consistent: governments continue to ask us to remove political content. Judges have asked us to remove information that’s critical of them, police departments want us to take down videos or blogs that shine a light on their conduct, and local institutions like town councils don’t want people to be able to find information about their decision-making processes,” Susan Infantino, legal director, said in a blogpost.
“These officials often cite defamation, privacy and even copyright laws in attempts to remove political speech from our services. In this particular reporting period, we received 93 requests to take down government criticism and removed content in response to less than one-third of them. Four of the requests were submitted as copyright claims,” she said.
The recent spike in requests shows that the U.S. Government is indeed losing the “information war” as Hilary Clinton previously mentioned and is currently pushing forth, utilizing all means available to head off detrimental information incompatible to the current administration.
Coincidentally, Intelihub News suffered an attack on one of our 3rd party dedicated servers a few weeks back, causing us to lose nearly 5 moths of data along with backups, including articles deemed damaging to the establishment. A forensic investigation into the matter is currently underway and the results will be shared publicly when the findings are compiled.
While the U.S. is second to Turkey in regards to takedown requests issued to Google, the future of journalism and our free speech remains threatened like never before. Now more than ever, we the people need to get information like this out to the masses before all channels are shutdown, leaving us alone in the dark.