Blogger Conspiracy

SUBHEAD: OK, OK. It's the paranoia talking. Just the same what if the Google outage was just a test, not an accident.  

By Juan Wilson on 14 May 2011 for Island Breath -  
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2011/05/blogger-conspiracy.html)


 
Image above: An introduction page to new Blogspot users from ww.Blogger.com.

As you may have noticed, for almost a full day, beginning on May 11th and ending on May 12th the Google owned Blogger.com was unavailable to it's users: Meaning they could not log into their accounts to add posts or edit existing ones on their blogs.

This included where we (IslandBreath) store the contents of our articles (http://IslandBreath.blogspot.com). The bottom line for us was that for several hours our "front page" (http://www.islandbreath.org) and side menus were available but not the content of any articles created after November 2009. For others it was worse.

Those bloggers that relied only on Blogger.com were completely locked out of their sites. They were out of business - period. Blogs we frequently visit (as well as repost articles from)were shutout:
John Michale Greer - ArchDruid Report (http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com)
Nicole Foss - The Automatic Earth (http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com)
Dmitry Orlov - Club Orlov (http://cluborlov.blogspot.com)
Andy Parx - Parx News Daily (http://parxnewsdaily.blogspot.com)
Joan Conrow - Kauai Eclectic (http://kauaieclectic.blogspot.com) 
To add insult to injury shortly after this "accidental" outage occurred all posts and comments to sites operated by Blogger.com, created on May 12th, 2011, were deleted from the web. This affected millions of users.

At the end of the crisis those posts and comments that were deleted were reposted, but not before a lot of people were alarmed enough to be really upset. This may have been an accident, but it demonstrated the precise control that is possible in the censorship of this media: Total blackout and redaction of material across a vast body of publicated work.

What this means is that whenever the powers-that-be (CIA, State Department, NSA, POTUS, etc.) decide what is available on the free media (through Blogger, Yahoo, FaceBook, Twitter, etc.) and if they choose - cut it off with a switch, a command or a phone call.

If the "Arab Spring" ever morphs into the "Midwest Autumn", and things get gnarly, sites like ours could disappear in a flash. To that end I suggest you think about setting up your own bootleg mimeographed newsletter, xeroxed zine, or hand written flier network to cover your own neck of the woods.

We certainly will be planning on such an option here on Kauai. To widen our options we've opened a Twitter account @IslandBreath and continue on FaceBook. Peace.

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