Free Republic

A long time ago, in a network, far far away, a great adventure took place! Out of the chaos of new ideas for communication, the experiments, the tentative designs, and crucible of testing, there emerged a cornucopia of networks. Beginning with the ARPANET, an endless stream of networks evolved, and ultimately were interlinked to become the Internet. Someone had to keep track of all the protocols, the identifiers, networks and addresses and ultimately the names of all the things in the networked universe. And someone had to keep track of all the information that erupted with volcanic force from the...

Congress has been assuring everyone, "Don't worry, we can defund the 'transition'." They already did defund the transition, and the defunding FAILED. Back in mid-August the Obama Administration proudly confessed to breaking federal law by announcing that ICANN's contract will indeed expire on September 30. The preparation to make that decision took what? Government resources. So now what does congress tell us? They'll defund the transition again. [more info / links coming up]

Government resources were needed to fast-track the internet giveaway. And that was a criminal act by Obama's administration. Here are a couple lines of the wonky specifics: The federal government had prohibited any use of taxpayer funds be used to transition out of the current the IANA functions contract. In other words: Congress told the President, "You can't use one dime's worth of government resources to plan the 'internet giveaway. Do it and you're breaking federal law." But he did anyway. He used your tax money to make sure that the contract would expire on September 30. That was a...

Arguing that internet freedom and the constitutional power of the purse are at risk, a coalition of more than two dozen civil society groups and activists are calling on Congress to lawyer up and sue the Obama administration. The Commerce Department has violated federal law, the coalition of groups argued in an Aug. 10 letter to lawmakers, by finalizing plans to relinquish U.S. control of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.Though led by digital specific interest group TechFreedom, the coalition includes a number of different organizations like Heritage Action for America and Americans for Tax Reform. And they all argue that...

Excerpt: Use of poisons U.S. intelligence officials believe that Marri trained for two years in Afghanistan, among other things receiving instruction in the use of poisons and toxins at the Derunta camp near Jalalabad, sources said. He is believed to have trained under Abu Khabab al-Masri, an Egyptian specialist in chemical and biological weapons who was killed ... *** U.S. authorities allege that Marri had gone to the United Arab Emirates in August 2001 to get more than $13,000 in cash from Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, the alleged paymaster for the Sept. 11 plotters. *** The Islamic Assembly of North America,...

GENEVA (AP) - Switzerland approved on Friday the handover of bank documents to the United States on the source of a donation to a U.S.-based Islamic charity suspected of money laundering and recruiting terrorists over the Internet. The supreme court's decision allows Swiss authorities to override banking secrecy and provide documents, including those for a $300,000 transfer made May 14, 1998, from a Geneva bank to the Michigan-based Islamic Assembly of North America. The decision was in response to a February 2003 U.S. government request for judicial assistance in its investigation of the assembly and its Idaho-based Saudi computer expert...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - An upstate New York doctor was found guilty on Thursday of illegally sending millions of dollars to Iraq, in violation of U.S. sanctions, authorities said. Rafil Dhafir was convicted of 59 out of 60 charges ranging from conspiracy to money laundering to Medicare fraud after a 15-week federal trial in Syracuse, N.Y., prosecutors said. Dhafir, an oncologist, used an unregistered charity named "Help the Needy" to solicit some $4 million in contributions in the United States and then launder much of it to Iraq through bank accounts in Jordan, prosecutors said. Prosecutors said he began sending...

From the Middle East Media Research Institute comes a recent video of Egyptian presidential candidate Bassem Khafagi on Al-Nas TV promising to “complete the implementation of Islamic law in Egypt” (HT: Zip). From the MEMRI transcript: (VIDEO AT LINK) Bassem Khafaji: Let me tell you, in all honesty, that as a Muslim Egyptian, I am convinced of [the need to] complete the implementation of Islamic law in Egypt. I do not hide this truth in any way, because it is in keeping with the inclination of the Egyptian people. We Egyptians – both Muslims and non-Muslims – refer to the...

Anthrax: Source of Fishy, Shaggy Dog Stories Pleads Fifth December 20th, 2007 by Ross E. Getman In October 2007, the former Criminal Chief of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, Daniel Seikaly, was deposed in the civil rights action by Steve Hatfill about whether he was the source of leaks relating to Steve Hatfill in connection with Newsweek and Washington Post stories about the use of bloodhounds and the draining of ponds in Frederick, Maryland. Attorney Seikaly pled the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination in connection with most substantive questions. Attorney Seikaly has had a very distinguished career....

Ali al-Timimi will be serving life for sedition. Specifically he was recruiting for al-Qaeda from the US. Scary enough, but read the whole article. It appears al-Qaeda had infiltrated US biodefense and has supporters/agents with access to the Ames strain of anthrax and the know how to make dried concentrated forms of the spores.Via Bloggernews.net:A colleague of famed Russian bioweaponeer Ken Alibek and former USAMRIID head Charles Bailey, a prolific Ames strain researcher, has been convicted of sedition and sentenced to life in prison. He worked in a program co-sponsored by the American Type Culture Collection and had access to...

There's been a few headlines decrying the Obama Commerce Department's decision to cede control of ICANN to "the world". Most people react to these with some mild foreboding or irritation. It really is a big deal though. If the US really does transfer ICANN control to some international body, it could permanently and irretrievably destroy trust in the entire Internet. In fact, it probably will.

New light is being shed on the 2001 anthrax attacks in a fascinating open letter to Ayman al Zawahiri of al Qaeda, written by a jihadi living in London. Numan Bin Uthman, a former leader of an armed Islamic group in Libya, provides yet more evidence that the global Islamic jihad movement is losing its resolve.  But the letter contains a startling admission. Uthman tells us of a conversation he had with al Qaeda leaders before the 9/11 attacks in which he urged them not to use WMD. From AKI News: Uthman also said that he had taken part in...

Illustrating that the jihadist enterprise transcends all borders, American Islamist groups typically preoccupied with remaking the U.S. have been leaving their fingerprints on the campaign to exchange secular authoritarianism for religious authoritarianism in the Middle East. As these organizations labor stateside to nudge the governing class to embrace Arab Islamists at the expense of liberals — prompting Egyptian intellectual Essam Abdallah to lament that "the most dramatic oppression of the region's civil societies and the Arab Spring … is led by the powerful Islamist lobbies in Washington" — several of the groups' past and current officials have emerged as key...

I never give time frames, because you never know where you'll have sufficient evidence to go public with a prosecution, " Mueller said.

BOISE, Idaho – A federal appeals court delivered a stinging rebuke Friday to the Bush administration's post-Sept. 11 detention policies, ruling that former Attorney General John Ashcroft can be held liable for people who were wrongfully detained as material witnesses after 9/11. A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the government's improper use of material witnesses after Sept. 11 was "repugnant to the Constitution and a painful reminder of some of the most ignominious chapters of our national history." The court found that a man who was detained as a witness in a federal terrorism...

Early this morning, the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) announced that it had been allocated two /8 address blocks from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA ). Those two blocks, 39/8 and 106/8, were the last unallocated blocks in the IANA free pool of IPv4 address available to Regional Internet Registries (RIR). With the allocation, the final days of IPv4 have moved closer as the number of available addresses that can be allocated will dwindle. "Please be aware, this will be the final allocation made by IANA under the current framework and will trigger the final distribution of five...

Without the ingenuity of America’s brightest minds and the investment of U.S. taxpayer dollars, there would be no Internet, as we now know it today. Now, the Obama administration has moved quietly to cede control of the Web from the United States to foreign powers. Some background: The Internet came into being because of the genius work of Americans Dr.Robert E. Kahn and Dr. Vinton G. Cerf. These men, while working for the Department of Defense in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the early 1970s, conceived, designed, and implemented the idea of "open-architecture networking."

Al-Hussayen's wife shared terrorist views, FBI claims She faces deportation hearing Nov. 7; ex-UI student's trial slated for January Bill MorlinStaff writer Agents are investigating whether money for terrorist activities was funneled through nonprofit, pro-Islamic charities set up in the United States. Sami Al-Hussayen, seeking his doctorate in computer science at UI, is accused of managing Web sites used by the charities and radical sheiks to further terrorism. Al-Hussayen's attorneys say he is far removed from terrorism, claiming he's a peace-loving family man who deplored the violence of Sept. 11, 2001. The declassified FBI documents say Maha Al-Hussayen "made statements...

"Tony McDonald, a member of the University of Texas Young Conservatives, sets up a protest anti- American Civil Liberties Union nativity scene, dubbed a 'solstice barn,' on the university's campus in Austin December 4, 2006. The display features a 'Nancy Pelosi' angel, a 'suicide bomber' shepherd, and Marx, Lenin and Stalin as the Three Wise Men." "Josh Perry, a member of the University of Texas Young Conservatives, spreads hay as he sets up a protest anti-American Civil Liberties Union nativity scene, dubbed a 'solstice barn,' on the university's campus in Austin, Texas December 4, 2006. The display features a...

This article will alarm you. Keith Ellison (Hakim-Mohammed), a black convert to orthodox sunni Islam is exposed by his own words, his nefarious associates, and his personal life as scofflaw. Do we now have a jihadist in Congress? Think that's hype? Read the story!