Pat Toomey (R-PA)
Dean h.e.l.ler (R-NV)61
But what we really need to focus on is the ones who did not affix their signatures.
Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and d.i.c.k 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 Ma.s.sachusetts 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 a.s.suring the Fuhrer 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.1
The news service notes that "the Chinese model is spreading to other authoritarian regimes. And governments worldwide ... are aggressively trying to legislate the Internet."2
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 ma.s.sacre 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 Toure, in June 2011. At the meeting "Putin commended a proposal from Toure for "establishing international control over the Internet using the monitoring and supervisory capabilities of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU)." "3 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."4 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.
Toure, 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, Toure is it. He studied at the Technical Inst.i.tute 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.5
Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, is, of course, Putin"s original stomping ground. Toure"s Russian educational background may help to explain his receptivity to Putin"s proposals.
And a reb.u.t.table presumption would indicate that Hamadoun Toure 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 Toure 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 a.n.a.lysts 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."6
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."7
Particularly chilling is the ease with which the UN could a.s.sume 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."8