Here Come the Black Helicopters!: UN Global Governance and the Loss of Freedom (9 page)

Likely all Democratic senators will back the treaty. But since a two-thirds majority is needed, the support of 14 Republicans, in addition to all 53 Democrats, will be required for ratification. With 47 Republicans in the current Senate, if 34 vote no, the treaty can be scuttled.

By a razor-thin margin, the Republicans in the Senate seem to be coming through. In July of this year, the bare minimum thirty-four Republican senators signed a letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid signaling their intention to vote against the treaty. Is the treaty dead? Not by a long shot! Several of the thirty-four senators only jumped on board the bandwagon at the end and expressed doubts about voting no. Most important, at this writing, the two top Republicans on the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Senate—Dick Lugar (R-IN) and Bob Corker (R-TN)—weren’t among the thirty-four opponents. Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Committee, supports the treaty, and Corker, the likely incoming chairman should the Republicans win the Senate (Lugar was defeated in a primary), is uncommitted. We need to keep up the pressure to make sure these folks stay committed to vote no.

Their letter began: “We are writing to let you know that we believe this Convention reflects political, economic, and ideological assumptions which are inconsistent with American values and sovereignty.”
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The Republicans laid out their reasons: “by its current terms, the Law of the Sea Convention encompasses economic and technology interests in the deep sea, redistribution of wealth from developed to undeveloped nations, freedom of navigation in the deep sea and exclusive economic zones which may impact maritime security, and environmental regulation over virtually all sources of pollution.”
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They particularly highlighted their concerns about the cessation of sovereignty to the United Nations. “To effect the treaty’s broad regime of governance,” they wrote, “we are particularly concerned that United States sovereignty could be subjugated in many areas to a supranational government that is chartered by the United Nations under the 1982 Convention. Further, we are troubled that compulsory dispute resolution could pertain to public and private activities including law enforcement, maritime security, business operations, and nonmilitary activities performed aboard military vessels.”
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They concluded flatly by saying, “If this treaty comes to the floor, we will oppose its ratification.”
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Bravo!

Here’s the list of the Republicans who signed the letter:

Jon Kyl (R-AZ)

Jim Inhofe (R-OK)

Roy Blunt (R-MO)

Pat Roberts (R-KS)

David Vitter (R-LA)

Ron Johnson (R-WI)

John Cornyn (R-TX)

Jim DeMint (R-SC)

Tom Coburn (R-OK)

John Boozman (R-AK)

Rand Paul (R-KY)

Ron Portman (R-OH)

Kelly Ayotte (R-NH)

Mike Johanns (R-NE)

Johnny Isakson (R-GA)

Jim Risch (R-ID)

Mike Lee (R-UT)

Jeff Sessions (R-AL)

Mike Crapo (R-ID)

Orrin Hatch (R-UT)

John Barrasso (R-WY)

Richard Shelby (R-AL)

John Thune (R-SD)

Richard Burr (R-NC)

Saxby Chambliss (R-GA)

Dan Coats (R-IN)

John Hoeven (R-ND)

Roger Wicker (R-MS)

Marco Rubio (R-FL)

Chuck Grassley (R-IA)

Jim Moran (R-KS)

Mitch McConnell (R-KY)

Pat Toomey (R-PA)

Dean Heller (R-NV)
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But what we really need to focus on is the ones who did not affix their signatures.

Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Dick Lugar (R-IN) have publicly endorsed the treaty. That leaves these senators as uncommitted:

Bob Corker (R-TN)

Lindsay Graham (R-SC)

Lamar Alexander (R-TN)

Thad Cochran (R-MS)

Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX)

Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)

Scott Brown (R-MA)

Olympia Snowe (R-ME)

Susan Collins (R-ME)

Likely RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) Snowe and Collins of Maine are going to back the treaty, all the more so since Snowe is retiring.

A bunch of senators from conservative southern states—Alexander (TN), Cochran (MS), Graham (SC), and Hutchison (TX, but retiring)—may be subject to pressure.

Murkowski from Alaska might feel she needs to vote for the treaty because of her worry about Russian Arctic claims. But can she be deluded enough to think that the UN would rule in our favor?

Scott Brown of Massachusetts comes from a liberal northern state and it will be harder for him to vote no, but he’s a man of deep conservative convictions and well might stand up for American sovereignty.

But the larger point is that the ball is in our court. It is not Blue Dog Democrats we must persuade but Republicans who trumpet their conservatism. It is within the Red States and among the Red Senators that we must find courageous members willing to vote no.

If you live in one of the states where these senators are from, go to work! Our sovereignty depends on it!

PART FOUR

THE UN TRIES TO REGULATE THE INTERNET

Authoritarian regimes throughout the world, including China, Russia, Iran, and the Arab nations, are trying to hijack an obscure UN agency, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), to take over the Internet and give them the power to regulate its content and restrict its usage.

And the mainstream media—with the exception of the
Wall Street Journal
—has yet to cover it (as of July 2012, when this is being written).

The world’s dictators realized long ago that their power rested, ultimately, on their ability to control the flow of information to their peoples. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, pioneered the “big lie” in assuring the Führer of continuing popular support. Now, facing the challenge of the free flow of information over the Internet, the world’s authoritarian regimes have spent billions trying to censor the flow of information to their citizens.

Reuters explains how China “has developed the world’s most advanced censorship and surveillance system” to police Internet activity in an effort to restrict the information flow to its 485 million Web users.
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The news service notes that “the Chinese model is spreading to other authoritarian regimes. And governments worldwide . . . are aggressively trying to legislate the Internet.”
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To understand the lengths to which Beijing will go to stop the free flow of information on the Internet, let’s remember that on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising, Chinese censors prevented the search for specific words connected to the massacre of students. Anything to keep things quiet.

Now these dictatorial regimes have hit on a new solution: United Nations regulation and control of the Internet.

Their chosen instrument of control, the ITU, was set up in 1865 to regulate the telegraph and was brought into the United Nations in the modern era. In 1988, the member nations of the ITU adopted International Telecommunication Regulations, which deregulated much of the industry. These days, this quaint nineteenth-century agency stays in business to regulate long-distance phone calls and satellite orbits.

PUTIN FINDS HIS INTERNET COMMISSAR

Then, Russia’s strongman Vladimir Putin had an idea: Use the ITU to regulate the Internet. Stop that pesky free flow of information and data that arms his domestic critics and stop his dissidents from using the Net to communicate their plans to resist his autocracy. He met with the secretary-general of the ITU, Hamadoun Touré, in June 2011. At the meeting “Putin commended a proposal from Touré for ‘establishing international control over the Internet using the monitoring and supervisory capabilities of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).’ ”
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Turning vocabulary on its head, the Russian ruler said, “if we are going to talk about democratization of international relations, I think a critical sphere is information exchange and global control over such exchange.”
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He did not explain how controlling information would promote “democratization.”

Putin shopped his proposal to his friends in China, who have worked ever since to line up support for crippling the Internet. The deed is to be done at the World Conference on International Telecommunications to be held in Dubai in December 2012. Russia, China, Iran, and others of the world’s worst countries are planning to use the forum to push through a new treaty expanding the powers of the ITU and, through it, their ability to silence the Internet and make it conform to their political agenda and to bring the Internet under the regulatory thumb of the United Nations.

Touré, a native of Mali in Africa, is the ideal person to suit Putin’s objectives. If ever Putin found the right man for the job of controlling the Internet, Touré is it. He studied at the Technical Institute of Electronics and Telecommunication of—get this—Leningrad, receiving a master’s degree in electrical engineering, and a PhD from the Moscow Technical University of Communications and Informatics.
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Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, is, of course, Putin’s original stomping ground. Touré’s Russian educational background may help to explain his receptivity to Putin’s proposals.

And a rebuttable presumption would indicate that Hamadoun Touré was—and perhaps still is—a communist. Born in 1953, he would have been educated in the Soviet Union during the 1970s and early ’80s when the nation was under the rule of Party Secretary Leonid Brezhnev. No glasnost reformer he. Brezhnev kept the USSR under iron communist rule until Mikhail Gorbachev broke open the nation’s politics.

Why would a young man from Mali want to be schooled in Russia? And, more important, why would communist Russia want him? And why would Soviet Russia help him acquire expertise in telecommunications, electronics, and “informatics”? We can only speculate, but the thought is not comforting.

Putin found his man!

And Touré is the person the UN would pick to be its Internet commissar—er, coordinator!

Never mind that the open, deregulated Internet has been the font of global creativity and innovation. Its free speech is politically inconvenient for Russia, China, Iran, and other third world dictatorships. Josh Peterson of the
Daily Caller
writes that “while many US policymakers and industry analysts agree that . . . deregulation is the reason why growth and innovation has been so explosive on the Internet in the past several decades, an international movement wants to give international governing bodies more power to police the Internet.”
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NEGOTIATIONS ARE SECRET

The negotiators who are drawing up the plan for Internet regulation—including the delegates from the United States—have been keeping their plans top secret as they prepare their proposals for presentation to the Dubai Conference. There all 193 UN member countries will meet to discuss and possibly adopt their proposal. Each nation has one vote and none will have a veto. The
Wall Street Journal
warns that the authoritarian nations pushing for Internet regulation “could use the International Telecommunications Regulations to take control of the Internet.”
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Particularly chilling is the ease with which the UN could assume the power to regulate the Internet. All the would-be regulators need is a majority vote at the Dubai Conference.
Journal
reporter Gordon Crovitz warns: “It may be hard for the billions of Web users or the optimists of Silicon Valley to believe that an obscure agency of the UN can threaten their Internet, but authoritarian regimes are busy lobbying a majority of the UN members to vote their way.”
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The proposal for Internet regulation has been gaining supporters outside of just the group of authoritarian countries that are pushing for its adoption. Brazil and India, for example, have joined Russia and China in backing aspects of the proposal. Together these four nations comprise the BRIC group (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), which is often poised as a counterweight to the power of the US and the European Union. Vinton Cerf commented that “Brazil and India have surprised me with their interest in intervening and vying for control [over the Internet].”
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Otherwise, Cerf noted that support for ITU regulation of the Net came from countries like Syria and Saudi Arabia, “who are threatened by openness and freedom of expression.” He said these countries “are most interested in gaining control [over the Internet] through this treaty.”
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It has not escaped the notice of the dictators and monarchs who rule these countries that the Internet and social media played key roles in the Arab Spring revolutions of recent years.

Under the one-nation, one-vote rules of the ITU, technologically backward and tiny countries can literally force the rest of the world to submit to regulation of the Internet! And don’t discount the very real possibility that Russian and Chinese leaders are working overtime to buy the votes of African, Latin American, Asian, and Oceanian nations. These countries, often with only very small Internet user populations, may have no stake in preserving Internet freedom and may be willing to sell it out for some financial reward (either to their countries or to themselves personally).

And what a welcome move Internet regulation would be for the petty tyrants and strongmen who rule most of Africa! The pesky revolutions and civil wars could be nipped in the bud by Internet controls. How happy they would be to rein in free speech so they can rule—and plunder—their populations in peace.

(See Part Ten in this book on the status of global freedom to understand how tyrants and dictators constitute a majority of the membership of the UN.)

All this has led Cerf, one of the founders of the Web and currently a vice president of Google, to tell Congress recently that these proposals for regulation mean “the open Internet has never been at higher risk than it is now.”
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Cerf warned, “If all of us do not pay attention to what’s going on, users worldwide will be at risk of losing the open and free Internet that has brought so much to so many.”
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Cerf said the implications of the potential treaty regulating the Internet are “potentially disastrous.” He added that more international control over the Net could trigger a “race to the bottom” to restrict Internet freedom, “choking innovation and hurting American business abroad.”
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Richard Grenell, who served as spokesman and adviser to four US ambassadors to the UN between 2001 and 2009, said that “having the UN or any international community regulate the Internet only means you’re going to have the lowest common denominator of 193 countries.”
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We would not know of this plan to squelch Internet freedom but for a courageous—and still anonymous—leaker who unveiled a 212-page planning document that Crovitz, writing in the
Wall Street Journal
, reports is “being used by governments to prepare for the December conference.”

The leak materialized when Jerry Brito and Eli Dourado, George Mason University researchers, frustrated by the secrecy of the talks, created a website called WCITLeaks.org and invited anyone with access to documents outlining the UN proposals to post them online “to foster greater transparency.”
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That those who would protect the freedom of the Internet had to go to such lengths to find out what is being contemplated is itself a scandal. Why on earth would the delegates from the United States and the European democracies consent to secret negotiations and allow the documents and proposals being distributed to be shielded from public view or scrutiny? These talks do not concern top-secret military or intelligence matters. There is no valid reason for having kept them secret. But the fact that the Western delegates consented to the gag order indicates how supinely they are confronting this threat to freedom.

Of course, the autocratic nations want to negotiate to squelch the Internet in secret. Secrecy for the likes of the rulers in Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran is the norm. The last thing they would want is for their own people to know of their efforts to keep the truth from them. And, these tyrants must realize that exposure of their plans would help to doom them. (That’s why we wrote this book!)

Dourado—one of the two courageous men who facilitated the leak—explained that “these proposals show that many ITU member states want to use international agreements to regulate the Internet by crowding out bottom-up institutions, imposing charges for international communication, and controlling the content that consumers can access online.”
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Crovitz, one of the only journalists covering this horrific development, notes that “the broadest proposal in the draft materials is an initiative by China to give countries authority over ‘the information and communication infrastructure within their state’ and require that online companies ‘operating in their territory’ use the Internet ‘in a rational way’—in short, to legitimize full government control.”
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The Internet Society, which represents the engineers around the world who keep the Internet functioning, says this proposal “would require member states to take on a very active and inappropriate role in patrolling” the Internet.
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Crovitz reports other proposals in the planning document:

• “Give the UN power to regulate online content for the first time, under the guise of protecting against computer malware or spam.
  
• “Russia and some Arab countries want to be able to inspect private communications such as email.
  
• “Russia and Iran propose new rules to measure Internet traffic along national borders and bill the originator of the traffic, as with international phone calls. That would result in new fees to local governments and less access to traffic from US ‘originating’ companies such as Google, Facebook and Apple. A similar idea has the support of European telecommunications companies, even though the Internet’s global packet switching makes national tolls an anachronistic idea.
  
• “Another proposal would give the UN authority over allocating Internet addresses. It would replace Icann [Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers], the self-regulating body that helped ensure the stability of the Internet, under a contract from the US Commerce Department.”
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  Currently, nongovernmental institutions, including ICANN, oversees the Web’s management and its technical standards.
  

The Russian and Chinese justification for Internet censorship—that it would fight hacking (at which they are the world’s masters)—is specious. Congressmen Michael McCaul (R-TX) and Jim Langevin (D-RI), the cochairs of the Congressional Cybersecurity Caucus, note that “[i]t must be made clear that efforts to secure the Internet against malicious hacking do not need to interfere with this freedom and the United States will oppose any attempt to blur the line between the two.”
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