Published on May 22, 2013
The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement is being negotiated in secret between more than 12 countries around the Pacific region. Find out why it’s the biggest threat to the Internet you’ve probably never heard of.
Published on May 22, 2013
The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement is being negotiated in secret between more than 12 countries around the Pacific region. Find out why it’s the biggest threat to the Internet you’ve probably never heard of.

The reversal was requested in papers [PDF] filed last week in the federal appeals court for the District of Columbia by Cox Communications; Bright House Networks, which is owned by Time Warner; and Verizon.
In the case—AF Holdings v. Does 1-1058 and Cox Communications, et. al.—the copyright holders allege that 1058 “John Does” engaged in file-sharing through BitTorrent of a sexually explicit film.
As part of the discovery process in the case, AF Holdings wants Cox and the other ISPs to turn over to them personal information on the John Does. The order came from a federal district court judge, Beryl A. Howell, a former lobbyist for the RIAA and Senate staffer who worked on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a federal law aimed to protect the rights of copyright holders in cyberspace.

The ISPs are asking the appeals court to overturn Howell’s decision ordering the disclosure of subscribers’ names as part of evidence discovery.
According to the ISPs, AF Holdings and its attorneys aren’t interested in obtaining the names of the alleged infringers to pursue their case in court, but in order to squeeze settlement money from the subscribers.
FILE – In this Oct. 18, 2010 file photo, an Amazon.com package is prepared for shipment by a United Parcel Service (UPS) driver in Palo Alto, Calif. States could force Internet retailers to collect sales taxes under a bill that overwhelmingly passed a test vote in the Senate Monday, April 22, 2013. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — You don’t see this very often: a majority of Senate Republicans voting to make people who buy stuff on the Internet pay state and local sales taxes.
Anti-tax guru Grover Norquist isn’t happy about it and the conservative Heritage Foundation is questioning the senators’ conservative credentials. But the issue of taxing Internet sales is getting strong support from Republicans and Democrats alike.
The Senate could vote as early as Thursday on a bill to empower states to require online retailers to collect state and local sales taxes for purchases made over the Internet. Under the bill, the sales taxes would be sent to the states where a shopper lives.
On Wednesday, the bill passed a test vote in the Senate, 74 to 23, with 27 Republicans voting in favor. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., vowed to pass the bill this week, before senators leave for a scheduled vacation.
“This is a matter of equity and fairness,” said South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard, a Republican. “The same people who are selling the same products should be paying the same taxes.”
Under current law, states can only require stores to collect sales taxes if the store has a physical presence in the state. As a result, many online sales are essentially tax-free, giving Internet retailers an advantage over brick-and-mortar stores.
It is part of GOP orthodoxy to oppose higher taxes, a central issue that divides Democrats and Republicans. That’s why the bill faces an uncertain fate in the House, where some Republicans regard it as a tax increase.
But supporters of the bill insist it is not a tax increase. Instead, they say, the bill merely provides states with a mechanism to enforce current taxes.
“This bill has nothing to do with imposing any kind of new tax or revenue generator,” said Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn. “What this law does is allow states that already have laws on the books to carry out the implementation of those” laws.
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Published on Apr 24, 2013
Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Max Baucus (D-MT) explain why the Internet sales tax bill, known as the Marketplace Fairness Act, is bad for America.
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Bastiat Institute.org Facebook page
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TUESDAY’S BIG STORY:
Online tax bill on the move: The Senate overwhelmingly agreed, 74-20, on Monday to end debate on a bill that would allow states to tax online purchases from Internet retailers located outside their borders, seemingly setting up passage of the bill as early as Tuesday.
Despite the support in the upper chamber, the bill could face resistance in the House. So far, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) has said he is going to take a close look at the legislation before giving it an all-clear.
Meanwhile, the White House gave the legislation a thumbs-up on Monday with Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, saying the bill would put online retailers on the same footing with businesses that have a physical presence in states.
“This administration has carefully considered the legislation, and our team has met with a broad array of people on the issue,” Carney said. “And we have heard overwhelmingly from governors, mayors and the business community on the need for federal legislation to level the playing field for our businesses and address sales tax fairness.”
Under current law, states can only collect sales taxes from retailers with a physical presence. Consumers using the Internet to buy goods are supposed to declare the purchases on their tax forms, although few follow through. Some online businesses have begun to voluntarily add the state taxes.
The Supreme Court ruled more than two decades ago that companies only have to collect from in-state customers, but also said that Congress could weigh in on the issue.Retail groups have long supported the issue and put their weight behind the measure, propelling it to this point.
Supporters say that the proposal could give billions in extra revenue to struggling state and local governments. The bill would also exempt small businesses with less than $1 million in out-of-state sales.
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who has been pressing for passage of the bill for at least two years, said the bill is needed to help states refill their coffers depleted by a lingering economic downturn.
“What it means is a lot of money for the states and localities,” he said.
Still, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said Monday that the online sales tax bill would create a new tax and leads America down a “dark path.”
Supporters’ efforts were revived by a vote last month on the Senate’s budget proposal in which 75 senators voted in support of the plan, giving them the go-ahead to press for a quick resolution of the bipartisan bill.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced last week he planned to bring the bill straight to the floor, bypassing the Senate Finance Committee and setting the stage for a vote.
This serves as a strong warning to those who value their anonymity. If you aren’t already accessing the Internet through VPN or another deidentifying service, you may be ‘on the list.’ Go silent today! VPN is one effective option. I use TOR. VPN will allow you to use some services that TOR blocks to protect you, but VPN costs money and TOR is free.
Important Message From JWR: The FBI’s Cookie Caper and the VPN Imperative
It has just come to my attention that from August of 2011 to November of 2011, the FBI secretly redirected the web traffic of more than 10% of SurvivalBlog’s US visitors through CJIS, a sprawling data center situated on 900 acres, 10 miles from Clarksburg, West Virginia. There, the Feebees were surreptitiously collecting the IP addresses of my site visitors. In all, 4,906 of 35,494 connections ended up going to or through the FBI servers. (Note that this happened several months before we moved our primary server to Sweden.) Furthermore, we discovered that the FBI attached a long-lived cookie that allowed them to track the sites that readers subsequently visited. I suspect that the FBI has done the same to hundreds of other web sites. I find this situation totally abhorrent, and contrary to the letter of 4th Amendment as well as the intent of our Founding Fathers.
I recognize that I am making this announcement at the risk of losing some readers. So be it. But I felt compelled to tell my readers immediately, because it was the honorable and forthright course of action.
Working on my behalf, some volunteer web forensics experts dissected some cached version histories. (Just about everything is available on the Internet, and the footprints and cookie crumb trails that you leave are essentially there for a lifetime.) The volunteers found that the bulk of the FBI redirects were selected because of a reader’s association with “Intellectual Property” infringing sites like the now defunct Megaupload. But once redirected, you were assigned a cookie. However, some of these were direct connections to the SurvivalBlog site (around 4% of the total.) So if they had kept this practice up long enough and if you visited us enough times then the FBI’s computers would have given you a cookie. This has been verified with sniffer software.
Bad Cop, No Cookies
For your privacy, I strongly recommend that you disable cookies when web browsing. Here are some detailed instructions on how to do so for the most popular web browsers:
•Disabling Cookies in MS Internet Explorer
•Disabling Cookies in Firefox
•Disabling Cookies in Safari
•Disabling Cookies in Netscape
•Disabling Cookies in Google Chrome
•Disabling Cookies in Opera
•Disabling Cookies in KonquerorBut beyond that, more must be done to protect your privacy. You need to be proactive.
Install and Use VPN!
I am now imploring all SurvivalBlog readers to immediately install and use Virtual Private Network (VPN) on their computers. This will allow you to surf the Internet anonymously. Anyone that tries to track web site visitors e-mails will see your visit as originating from one of dozens of anonymous URLs in Europe, or elsewhere in the United States. (With most VPN services, you may pick the city of your choice.) With VPN active, your connection to the Web is “tunneled”, emerging at a far-distant IP address, and it it would be very difficult to track back to your home IP address. Setting up VPN takes just a few minute to accomplish. Once installed, you can set VPN to turn on automatically by default when you start your PC, Mac, or Linux computer. Most VPN providers charge $5 to $20 per month. You can toggle off VPN with the click of your mouse. (You will find this necessary if you visit any of the few web site that disallow overseas IP addresses, such as Netflix). But I recommend that you leave VPN turned on, as much as possible. Set it up to turn on each time that you start up your computer. It is crucial that you use VPN whenever you visit web sites, blogs, and forums that are deemed politically incorrect, or whenever you purchase storage food or firearms accessories on the Web. For those of you that are not tech savvy, ask a friend or relative under age 25 to set up VPN for you. It is not difficult.
Some recommended VPN service providers include:
- StrongVPN ($55 to $240 per year. One of the most flexible in reassigning the far end of your tunnel on the fly. Superior speed.)
- 12VPN ($79 per year.)
- AceVPN ($55 per year. A bare bones service, but one of the least expensive.)
- HideMyAss. (Just under $79 per year.)
- PureVPN. ($75 per year for their basic service.)
(Some reviews of the various services are available here. )
Note that some of the lower cost services might see your connection speed suffer. Your Internet connect will seem noticeably slower than using your original ISP, alone.
It is my hope that in the next two months SurvivalBlog’s site visit map will shift substantially, giving the appearance that most of my readership has moved to Switzerland. Say “Ein Glück, dass wir den los sind” to the FBI’s snooping! It would warm my heart to soon see SurvivalBlog ranked as one of the most popular web sites for readers with Swiss IP addresses.
Beyond VPN
Because government agencies have access to lots and lots of computing power, VPN is not completely impenetrable. It is vulnerable to penetration during the key exchange phase. With the resources available to a state actor, sniffing the entirety of the traffic into and out of a web site is trivial these days. (They can use massively scalable horizontally-scaled virtual sniffers — i.e. using a visualization engine and a template they can keep adding more virtualized instances of a windows or Linux based sniffer program and not even impact the performance of the connections.) I believe that the next loop of the threat spiral in the privacy wars will be Quantum Key Distribution (QKD). But I must clarify that this will become important only for the most high profile media commentators, bloggers, and activists. This is because all the spook legions with all of the mainframe computers in the world simply cannot backtrack everyone’s VPN tunnels. (And, as VPN becomes more and more popular, this supposed goal will become even more elusive.) And if you are high profile, don’t worry. Some very bright people are already working on QKD. Stay tuned.
Our Liberty is Stake
I want apologize for the cost, inconvenience and time required in implementing the foregoing security measures. But you can sleep a little better, knowing that you’ve added a layer of anonymity to your Internet presence. We need to recognize that the early 21st Century is a delicate time for individual liberty. Technology is leapfrogging while at the same time databases are filling at an alarming rate. These databases could provide dossiers on demand, for nefarious purposes. How you vote and how you “vote with your feet” (physically or virtually) are both of tremendous importance. Pray hard. Choose wisely. Act accordingly.
P.S.: For those who are web software savvy, I had originally planned to post the latest version of the actual “foresee-alive.js” Javascript code that the FBI used to attach the cookies. But then it was pointed out to me that ironically, revealing this might constitute copyright infringement, opening me up to a intellectual property lawsuit. That has an odd sort of irony that got me thinking. This predicament somehow dovetails with two bits of history. The first instance is from the First World War: I have read that the U.S. Government paid patent license fees to Mauser before and during the hostilities of the Great War with Imperial Germany. This was because the M1903 Springfield rifle was correctly adjudged a patent infringement on the Mauser Model 1898. During the war, the patent payments continued, conveniently handled by Swiss bankers, acting as middlemen. The U.S. taxpayers paid Mauser of Germany about $1 per rifle plus additional penalties that would have eventually totaled $250,000 USD, up until the U.S. entered the war. It has also been rumored that some payments continued to arrive even after the U.S. Congress declared war on the Kaiser’s Germany. (We’ll have to wait for the release of Jon Speed’s next Mauser book to read the details.) This historical tidbit is just once notch below what happened two decades later when Germany’s Nazi regime had the temerity to sell full fare train tickets to some Jews, to cover the costs of their forced relocation to the designated ghettos before their planned extermination. Oh, but the Nazi bureaucrats were so conciliatory. They only charged children half fare to be sent to their deaths. (If you doubt this, then read the book Fathoming the Holocaust by Ronald J. Berger.)