July 12, 2012: The Day ISPs Start Spying On Customers

July 12, 2012: The Day ISPs Start Spying On Customers

15 March 2012  –  Technology

By David K. Sutton
11:24pm

If you are in the habit of downloading copyrighted media, including software, music and videos, be warned that beginning on Thursday July 12th your ISP will start spying on your activity. The Raw Story reports, “That’s the date when the nation’s largest ISPs will all voluntarily implement a new anti-piracy plan that will engage network operators in the largest digital spying scheme in history, and see some users’ bandwidth completely cut off until they sign an agreement saying they will not download copyrighted materials.”

Of course the usual suspects are behind this plan including the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of American (MPAA). The plan is backed by all major ISPs (Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, AT&T) and has the support of the Obama administration.

Penalties for offenders can include reduced bandwidth, access reduced to a limited number of websites, and complete internet service cut-off. ISPs can require customers to attend “an education course” if they want service restored. And of course offenders can be charged with copyright infringement by the studios.

A CNET News article quotes RIAA CEO Cary Sherman, “Each ISP has to develop their infrastructure for automating the system.” Sherman said ISPs are developing systems to keep track of repeat infringers which will allow them to send “first notice or the third notice.” CNET reports that ISPs will use a “graduated response” approach. This approach requires ISPs to “send out one or two educational notices to customers accused of downloading copyrighted content illegally. If the customer doesn’t stop, the ISP is then asked to send out ‘confirmation notices’ asking that they confirm they have received notice.” If accused customers continue to pirate material the ISP can then begin to impose the before mentioned restrictions.

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Posthuman – The Ottawa Object

Uploaded by Posthumanmusic on Jul 14, 2010

Posthuman – The Ottawa Object, set to footage from Event Horizon

The War Machine

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Nomadology: the War Machine. Trans. Brian Masumi. New York: Semiotext(e), 1986.

(excerpted by Clifford Stetner)

Axiom 1: The war machine is exterior to the State apparatus.

Proposition 1: This exteriority is first attested to in mythology, epic, drama and games.

1

Georges Dumézil in his definitive analyses of Indo-European mythology, has shown that political sovereignty, or domination, has two heads: the magician-king and the jurist priest, Rex and flamen, raj and Brahman, Romulus and Numa, Varuna and Mitra, the despot and the legislator, the binder and the organizer. Undoubtedly, these two poles stand in opposition term by term, as the obscure and the clear, the violent and the calm, the quick and the weighty, the fearsome and the regulated, the “bond” and the pact,” etc. [n1] But their opposition is only relative; they function as a pair, in alternation, as though they expressed a division of the One or constituted in themselves a sovereign unity.

2

…the State… either…uses policemen and jailers in place of warriors, has no arms and no need of them, operates through immediate, magical capture, “seizes” and “binds,” preventing all combat – or …army, but in a way that presupposes a juridical integration of war and the organization of military function. [n2] …irreducible to the State apparatus…

Indra, the warrior god, is in opposition to Varuna no less then to Mitra. [n3]… He unties the bond just as he betrays the pact.

3

Chess is a game of State…internal nature and intrinsic properties, from which their movements, situations and confrontations derive.

Go pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic properties, but only situational ones.

4

The nomos of Go against the state of chess, nomos against polis. …chess codes and decodes space… Go proceeds altogether differently territorializing or deterritorializing it (make the outside a territory in space; consolidate that territory by the construction of a second, adjacent territory; deterritorialize the enemy by shattering his territory from within; deterritorialize oneself by renouncing, by going elsewhere . . . . Another justice, another movement, another space-time.

5

Dumézil analyzes the three “sins” of the warrior in the Indo-European tradition: against the king, against the priest, against the laws originating in the State (for example, a sexual transgression that compromises the distribution of men and women, or even a betrayal of the laws of war as instituted by the State).

It is not enough to affirm that the war machine is external to the apparatus. It is necessary to reach the point of conceiving the war machine as itself a pure form of exteriority, whereas the State apparatus constitutes the form of interiority we habitually take as a model, or according to which we are in the habit of thinking.

Veil of Isis

At the end of the eighteenth century, the same judicial metaphor is found in Kant, in the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. For him, physics began to make decisive progress from the moment when, with Francis Bacon, Galileo, Torricelli, and Stahl, it understood that it had to ‘oblige nature to answer its questions.’ With regard to nature, reason must behave “not like a student, who lets himself be told whatever the teacher wishes, but like an appointed judge, who forces witnesses to answer the questions he asks them.” Curvier’s celebrated formula takes up the same metaphor: “the observer listens to Nature, the experimenter submits it to interrogation and forces it to unveil itself.” And even when Bacon says that “nature can be commanded only by obeying it,” thus appearing to urge scientists to submit to nature, one cannot help thinking, with Eurenio Garin, evoking the comedies of Plautus, that for Bacon, “man is a tricky servant who studies his master’s habits in order to be able to do whatever he wants with him.

Here violence becomes ruse, and the Greek word that denotes ruse is precisely μηχανή, mēkhanē. For the Greeks, mechanics first appeared as a technique for tricking nature, particularly by producing movements that appear to be contrary to nature, and by obliging nature to do what it cannot do by itself, by means of artificial and fabricated instruments, or “machines”–scales, winches, levers, pulleys, wedges, screws, gears–which can serve, for instance, for the construction of war machines or automata.

– Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis (Harvard, 2004; 94)

TYRANNY OF REAL TIME

‘The chamber of wonders crops up in the sixteenth century in _a world that was opening up_ thanks to maritime conquest, which brought with it the discovery of exoticism in all its forms, notably with the _cabinet of curios_ of the seventeenth century. But the coming opening of the ACCIDENT MUSEUM is contemporary with a world that is _closing in on itself_ only to occupy itself, in the twenty-first century, with ecological endotism, in expectation of the first stirrings of a kind of eschatology that democracy will one day have to deal with if it wants to avoid disappearing under the threat of a new tyranny, the TYRANNY OF REAL TIME, this ‘accident in Time’ belonging to an instanteneity that is the fruit of a technological progress out of political control.’

-Paul Virilio, City of Panic (Berg, 2004; 68-69)

Rio+20

“We see the goals of Rio+20, the ‘Green Economy’ and its premise that the world can only ‘save’ nature by commodifying its life-giving and life-sustaining capacities as a continuation of the colonialism that indigenous peoples and our Mother Earth have faced and resisted for 520 years,” the declaration said. http://bit.ly/RioIndigenousProtest