Fight Censorship in the US First

I was reading an article written by Dominic Rushe in the Guardian this evening: US to spend $30m Fighting Censorship

To summarize the issue, the US will be sinking $30 million into a project to fight censorship in “repressive regimes including China and Iran”. With the reactions that US government officials have had to the Wikileaks cable dump and the “Collateral Murder” video, I cannot imagine that the US Department of State could justify an expenditure this size to stop censorship anywhere.

Have these people lost their minds or do they believe that the people they represent have?

Bradley Manning is facing life in prison or death for *uncensoring* what they censored. There is still no way to know how many people involved with Wikileaks will be indicted, but we do know that there is a federal Grand Jury working on the situation.

Beyond the Wikileaks cables we have a complete failure of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) as many requests are ignored for years and others hit a brick wall. There have been FOIA requests for specific documents from the Cold War era and they still refuse to declassify the documents. They exceed their own time limitations on declassifying documents about half of the time.

The US military is circulating propaganda worldwide via sock puppets on forums and social networks. AT&T was given a free pass after allowing law enforcement to access accounts and wiretap without warrant. We are a lawless nation, but yet we need to shove our noses into the censorship issues in China and Iran at a cost of $30 million? Hell, we spend good money circulating propaganda relating to Iran's non-existent nuclear weapons program, so is this the next move to ensure that the propaganda reaches people worldwide?

The main problem with government officials in this country is that they clearly believe we all were born yesterday and will buy any line of crap they feed us. Not all of us though... not all of us.

So is it okay for so many to advocate censorship of adult business ads and publishing in the US while screaming about censorship in China and Iran? We are not talking porn here – we are talking about plain ads for adult businesses in many areas of the US. Publishers were pressured (read threatened with racketeering charges) into eliminating any adult business ads in print publications here in Orlando for over a decade and there are still no publications that accept escort business ads here, including yellow pages and all newspapers. If you don't believe me then you haven't read my story and you have no idea what was done to the Orlando Weekly back in late 2007: Operation MBI Shame

Censorship is alive and well right here in Orlando. I have written about the blocking of adult businesses on this blog and in Memoirs. Sure, there is a way around it and I know it, but it isn't something that I could do because of my former case and the fact that we are talking about Orlando, so it doesn't help me. This doesn't mitigate the fact that it does exist and has since at least 1992. No way that at least a few upper-level government officials are not aware of it – no way in hell.

These people have the audacity to spend $30mil in some weird game to fight censorship in China and Iran? Really it is so absurd that I am at a loss for words.