Va Va Voom

Many of you have seen my barrage of tweets over the last few weeks both personal @studio1909 and with our company @vavavoomllc. I’m shouting out to anyone who will hear me about the infowar being waged against Wikileaks. While many people are happily watching “Dancing with Stars”, I’m watching in realtime the attack on your freedoms in the United States by the people who “represent” you.

 

 This is not the first time that the bureaucrats & politicians that don't represent you have decidedly start an information war with such fervor. You and I know it as the "War on pornography" (I am so sick of these ass hats war on this, or the war on that...). The Reagan administration's Meese Commission help prosecutors go after people they felt were peddling “Obscenity.”

 During the late 1980's and early 1990's the AG's of many states and the AG of the united states waged a war on pornography producers. They spent untold amounts of stolen tax payer funds on the criminal prosecution of these producers. Even though they really didn’t do much, they march up and down the streets proclaiming that they were protecting our children (Thank you very much, I’ll protect my own children). The likes of Larry Flynt and Phil Harvey are heros in the first information war. You should revel in their principled stand against those whom would censor information in your best interest.

 

Today, the same spineless bureaucrats & politicians are using the exact same tactics & smear campaigns to justify their "war". Attempts to delegitimization Wikileaks by telling the Sheeeple that "Wikileaks is not really journalism"  or "Wikileaks is killing our solders", is much akin to telling the sheeple that porn production leads to child porn.  We cringe at the thought of someone producing child pornography.  

 

Paypal gave into in to government pressure by suspended (stealing) the wikileaks account. They didn’t use due process, instead they pussied out and stated that WikiLeaks had violated their Terms of Service. I for one am happy to see that there is people out there whom are standing up to this criminal behavior and getting rid of their paypal accounts (myself included).

 

Anyone who has been involved with the adult industry know that this is a fear on any given day. We can have our financial services stolen from us at any time, not through due process, but through a violation of some financial institution’s terms or service. This doesn't happen through a long notification process, they just swoop in and steal your money. 

 

Companies such as Authorize.net (ran by conservative Mormons) or PayPal have obscure, arbitrary rules for people in the adult industry. They are not concrete or easily followed. Your almost afraid to say anything because they can come in and steal your legitimate, capitalist business cash flow in a heartbeat.

 

We've had this happen to Va Va Voom more than once. We can't sell it online but you’re free to walk into our store and purchase away, they’re fine with it. They’re afraid that Dildos and Vibrators are a criminal enterprises (Isn’t that ironic, banks calling legit business criminal). We even appealed Authorize.net showing that our online chargeback rate was .001%. Which is better than most retail operations. They wouldn’t listen.

 

Other companies are completely hostile to anything related to sex. Mark Zukerber must have some sort of sexual dysfunction as Facebook has deleted accounts over and over that relate to sex or sexuality. We had our first Facebook page deleted our account for linking to material that supposedly offended someone. The didn't specify what material offended someone, just demanded that we remove it. When I responded to the asking what was offensive they wouldn’t specify. I think it was weird that the person in question just didn’t “unlike” us to no longer receive our messages.

 

I do have to applaud Facebook for not taking down Wikileaks page. According to their statement:

  "We haven't received any official requests to disable the Wikileaks page, or any notification that the articles posted on the page contain unlawful content," Facebook said in a statement. "If we did, of course, we would review the material according to our rules and standards, and take it down if appropriate."

 

They did pussy out and left it their option in the future to suppress the information from Wikileaks if they feel the urge to or get pressure from some politician.

 

Just like wikileaks, we’ve had to replicate our servers in many places to make sure that bureaucrats & politicians can take down our material, or take it down for an extended period of time. 

 

Hosting companies terms of service are so vague on purpose, we ended up purchasing our own servers to make sure that we are in almost 100% control. We had to make sure  that we replicate our servers in a few different places as you never know when some government official is ready to steal your property to try and stop you.

 

I applaud Wikileaks for creating a system that allows other people to mirror the wikileaks site. Porn & Adult companies have been doing this for years, to protect their information. Event though companies like Amazon, whom are highly hypocritical in their business dealings, took down the Wikileaks site, Wikileaks was able to keep the information flowing by having at the time of this blog more than 200 sites that mirror their data.

 

There is one thing I know, when governments try to suppress access to information, very smart people quickly figure out way around their filters. Take a look at the hilarity of the Australian government. After they tried to censor the internet, they look at bumbling fools.

 

The founding principal of the United Staes is based in the First Amendment:

 

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

 

While this sounds good in theory, the truth is that our government is much akin to the appalling secret government of China. The only difference is that instead of using the government resources to try and suppress freedom of speech, we see that they are using fascist corporations [banksters] to do their dirty work. This way they don’t look like they get their hands dirty unlike their kin brethren the Chinese government.

 

Remember, when governments are trying to protect you from information, that information should be read and distributed as widely as possible. The second info war has started. They lost the first infowar on sex. They’ve now changed their tactics. They’re letting corporations become the censors and decide what you can or can’t see. It’s time for everyone to applaud Wikileaks and punish those bureaucrats & politicians whom try to suppress information in “Your Best Interest.”