UK Filters And The Slippery Slope Of Mass Censorship
from the slip-slip-sliding-your-freedoms-away dept
We've covered the ridiculousness of the UK's "voluntary" web filters. UK officials have been pushing such things for years and finally pushed them through by focusing on stopping "pornography" (for the children, of course). While it quickly came out that the filters were blocking tons of legitimate content (as filters always do), the UK government quickly moved to talk about ways to expand what the filters covered.The pattern is not hard to recognize, because it happens over and over again. Government officials find some absolute horror -- the kind of thing that no one will stand up for -- to push for some form of censorship. Few fight back because no one wants to be seen as standing up for something absolutely horrific online, or be seen as being against "family values." But, then, once the filters are in place, it becomes so easy both to ignore the fact that the filters don't work (and censor lots of legitimate content) and to constantly expand and expand and expand them. And people will have much less of a leg to stand on, because they didn't fight back at the beginning.
That appears to be happening at an astonishingly fast pace in the UK. Index On Censorship has a fantastic article, discussing how a UK government official has already admitted to plans to expand the filter to "unsavoury" content rather than just "illegal."
James Brokenshire was giving an interview to the Financial Times last month about his role in the government’s online counter-extremism programme. Ministers are trying to figure out how to block content that’s illegal in the UK but hosted overseas. For a while the interview stayed on course. There was “more work to do” negotiating with internet service providers (ISPs), he said. And then, quite suddenly, he let the cat out the bag. The internet firms would have to deal with “material that may not be illegal but certainly is unsavoury”, he said.It goes on, in fairly great detail, to describe just how quickly the UK is sliding away down that slippery slope of censorship. It highlights how these filters were kicked off as an "anti-porn" effort, where the details were left intentionally vague.
And there it was. The sneaking suspicion of free thinkers was confirmed. The government was no longer restricting itself to censoring web content which was illegal. It was going to start censoring content which it simply didn’t like.
But David Cameron positioned himself differently, by starting up an anti-porn crusade. It was an extremely effective manouvre. ISPs now suddenly faced the prospect of being made to look like apologists for the sexualisation of childhood.And, of course, the fact that the filters go too far, is never seen as a serious problem.
Or at least, that’s how it was sold. By the time Cameron had done a couple of breakfast shows, the precise subject of discussion was becoming difficult to establish. Was this about child abuse content? Or rape porn? Or ‘normal’ porn? It was increasingly hard to tell.
The filters went well beyond what Cameron had been talking about. Suddenly, sexual health sites had been blocked, as had domestic violence support sites, gay and lesbian sites, eating disorder sites, alcohol and smoking sites, ‘web forums’ and, most baffling of all, ‘esoteric material’. Childline, Refuge, Stonewall and the Samaritans were blocked, as was the site of Claire Perry, the Tory MP who led the call for the opt-in filtering. The software was unable to distinguish between her description of what children should be protected from and the things themselves.But, of course, no one in the UK government seems to care. In fact, they're looking to expand the program. Because it was never about actually stopping porn. It was always about having a tool for mass censorship.
At the same time, the filtering software was failing to get at the sites it was supposed to be targeting. Under-blocking was at somewhere between 5% and 35%.
Children who were supposed to be protected from pornography were now being denied advice about sexual health. People trying to escape abuse were prevented from accessing websites which could offer support.
And something else curious was happening too: A reactionary view of human sexuality was taking over. Websites which dealt with breast feeding or fine art were being blocked. The male eye was winning: impressing the sense that the only function for the naked female body was sexual.
The list was supposed to be a collection of child abuse sites, which were automatically blocked via a system called Cleanfeed. But soon, criminally obscene material was added to it – a famously difficult benchmark to demonstrate in law. Then, in 2011, the Motion Picture Association started court proceedings to add a site indexing downloads of copyrighted material.And it just keeps going on and on. As the report notes, "the possibilities for mission creep are extensive." You don't say. They also note that technologically clueless politicians love this because they can claim they're solving a hard problem when they're really doing no such thing (and really are just creating other problems at the same time):
There are no safeguards to stop the list being extended to include other types of sites.
This is not an ideal system. For a start, it involves blocking material which has not been found illegal in a court of law. The Crown Prosecution Service is tasked with saying whether a site reaches the criminal threshold. This is like coming to a ruling before the start of a trial. The CPS is not an arbiter of whether something is illegal. It is an arbiter, and not always a very good one, of whether there is a realistic chance of conviction.
As the IWF admits on its website, it is looking for potentially criminal activity – content can only be confirmed to be criminal by a court of law. This is the hinterland of legality, the grey area where momentum and secrecy count for more than a judge’s ruling.
There may have been court supervision in putting in place the blocking process itself but it is not present for individual cases. Record companies are requesting sites be taken down and it is happening. The sites are only being notified afterwards, are only able to make representations afterwards. The traditional course of justice has been turned on its head.
MPs like filtering software because it seems like a simple solution to a complex problem. It is simple. So simple it does not exist.Of course, if you recognize that the continued expansion of such filters was likely the plan from the beginning, then everything is going according to plan. The fact that it doesn't solve any problems the public are dealing with is meaningless. It solves a problem that the politicians are dealing with: how to be able to say they've "done something" to "protect the children" while at the same time building up the tools and powers of the government to stifle any speech they don't like. To those folks, the system is working perfectly.
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Filed Under: censorship, filters, uk
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See all of these things our magic tiger rock fixed?
And no one can hear the downside, because it was added to the list.
Someone wake me when the public finally figures out who screwed they are getting in all of this, I wanna see the match hit the gas.
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you must ALWAYS keep that in mind when you consider how much of the public will get 'fed up', versus the militant authoritarians who will support WHATEVER Big Daddy says...
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That is the problem with filters.
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I thought I'd do a little bit of research, and it looks quite simple, if depressingly predictable.
The URL of the official Rio 2 website is www.riomovies.com. The certainly sounds like something that could have been something else in the past. Lo and behold, if I use the Wayback Machine at archive.org, there's snapshots of that domain back in 2005 that do indeed indicate that it hosted porn. A whois search suggests that the site has only been owned by Fox since 2013, and there's a gap in the archive.org results between 2006 and 2013.
In short, whatever filter you use has not updated the information for this site for some time (at least a year, inif not since 2006), and Fox is being punished because someone with no relationship to themselves used the site for porn - presumably long before they even conceived of the first Rio movie, let alone owned the domain name. You're presumably just being blocked because of the nature of many of these blacklists - once you end up on them, it's difficult to get removed, and they're rarely checked to see if something is no longer deserving of the block.
This is actually the sort of block that sadly needs to take place. If MPAA members are supporting these blocks (and they are), it's only fitting that they lose traffic and revenue because of them.
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Coming soon to a country near me (Australia) if our cretinous government has its way.
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The government was trusted to do so, but they obviously have let their power go to their heads and overused it. This makes the situation worse in many ways , especially the fact that people are creating ways to overcome the blocks with one click or one setting in a browser. Making the whole thing useless.
If they are not careful the governments will create an environment where they are seen as the problem by the majority and they are blocked from accessing the sites that others visit on a regular basis, they will be on an internet that nobody really uses, while everyone else is using a decentralized internet that cannot really be blocked in any way.
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DansGuardian is available for free, and is one option the parents could use. By using it they can control what is and is not filtered themselves.
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Correct, but:
"needs to be removed"
Nope, sorry. Life does not get to be controlled according to what some random parent thinks is good for their kids. Whether they like it or not, millions of adults wish to access content, information and services that are not in any way suitable for children. Some of them might even offend other adults. So what?
Using the "for the children" excuse when going after things like child porn is at least understandable (although any intelligent person knew that this particular method is unworkable). But if it's not illegal, adults have the right to access any content they wish whether it's suitable for parents or not. They have hundreds of ways to filter things for their children, from not allowing unsupervised access to installing the many filters already available for them to use.
They have the right to censor their own homes, not anyone else's.
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{i wouldn't have been as polite...)
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Who exactly determined this "need" you speak of? You? A vocal minority of moral crusaders? The government?
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Human politicans
It's not only BBC which does it. (GB version)
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Then we just need a search engine to index DDNS URLs, so we can find DDNS registered websites. The only thing left to do after that, is watch Cameron run around like his hair is on fire.
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Has anybody being affected by a filter set their DNS to Google or OpenDNS to see if that defeats it?
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Of course the whole system relies on a clueless public that doesn't know how to configure a network in the first place, so the "target audience" probably doesn't even know what those acronyms mean much less what to do with them. But their kids probably do. ;-)
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Oops, isn't this how PATRIOT came about? Nice kneejerk reaction there, Congress.
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i hope there are some groups in the UK that bring actions against the government and win. once it gets established, with no court rulings being needed, you can bet your ass it will be spread to a lot more countries. the whole aim being total surveillance by a world government!
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The best internet filter I've ever heard of.
No blocklist required on that one.
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Re: The best internet filter I've ever heard of.
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Do a search for net nanny programs; there are tons of them and many are free. I'm all for voluntary censorship and site-blocking in the home. I can't stand ad farms and like having the ability to block them from my personal search results.
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Enjoy your freedom UK
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the point of course...
Thats the target, throwing a bone to the daily heil is a side effect.
Claire Perry's website getting blocked was wonderful to see, watching toys leaving the pram with accursations of her site being 'hacked'. Guido Fawkes has a thread or two on his blog about it (she accused the site owner of hacking her because he had a screen shot)
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Because it's not, at least not for the actual people affected?
"(or out)"
Oh, OK, so you're just desperate to attack this site for *something*, but even you can't bring yourself to support the actions taken by the UK government in your obsessive stream of replies so you have to make stuff up instead. Good job.
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Good article on Medium about this...
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The Geek Syndrome
What is the Geek Syndrome? It's a weakened ability to enter into the minds of other people, particularly people different from themselves, that seems to be common among those who find purely technical subjects appealing. The result is not only less sympathy, empathy and the like, but often no grasp of those inabilities. They're like blind people who don't realize they're blind.
It seems linked to a fascination with games, particularly computer games. Why? Probably because a game follows fixed rules that can be mechanically learned. A computer games has none of the complexities of dealing with human beings with their various moods. It requires no sensing or intuition.
There's no question that government efforts to control even areas such as child porn or children accessing what's misnamed 'adult' content often goes astray or looks ridiculous. But although those with the Geek Syndrome often use those arguments, that's not really what drives them. What drives them is their inability to empathize with either small children or their parents. They care about their 'access,' in part because simply don't care those others for who that 'access' is harmful.
I once worked with autistic children. The Geek Syndrome is part of a wide range of social inadequacies that includes Aspergers Syndrome and hard-core autism. People who have it should have the good sense and decency to talk with those who don't and use the latter's understanding to broaden their understanding. They can learn what doesn't come naturally to them.
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Your half-assed attempts to pretend that people who disagree with this crap "just don't understand" is a convenient lie, but like most such things is just a distraction from reality.
In case you disagree - did you miss the part about anti-child abuse charities, domestic violence charities, suicide prevention services, and other vital services being blocked by these filters? Do you really support this? These being removed just because some parents want the government to do the censoring for them is pretty despicable, and not something that makes your argument stick in any way.
Stop trying to dismiss the warnings of people who know what they're talking about with convenient stereotypes, and lets get real solutions to these problems, OK? Waving away the concerns of the people who know WTF they're talking about - many of whom are also parents - is the action of a coward and an ignoramus. Don't be that guy, talk about what's really happening.
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Your ad hominem attack fails to engage with the issues of freedom of speech. Well we're not going to be put off continuing to discuss it by fears that we're not fitting in.
And the article demonstrates empathy just fine by pointing out the harm being done by over-blocking sites that don't reinforce hard-right conservative patriarchal attitudes.
That's trivialising the real issue of censorship. Is your argument being driven by your inability to empathize with nursing mothers, mothers-to-be, the LGBT community, or children seeking advice on sexual health?
Many of us are parents, and we're not obsessed with ensuring ready access to porn and other unsavory material. We're concerned that the slippery slope to censorship may one day block access to legitimate sites by law, not by accident.
Enjoy authoritarianism until you fall foul of it, buddy.
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Care to elaborate as to why you think it is misleading?
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Re: Care to elaborate as to why you think it is misleading?
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When bad guys make laws, only bad guys get served by law.
By the Gawds!!! Is it possible??
Could the dream finally be coming to an end??
Are people actually starting to wake up?
If I didn't know better, I'd think that the thin veneer of bullshit being held up in front of the "system", is starting to finally dry up and blow away in the winds of change - leaving bear the ugly truths that nobody wants to see and that everybody has avoided looking at for thirty plus years.
Nah. I must be imagining it.
Otherwise, the "system" would have started a war in order to re-educate the slowly-waking public back to sleep...
... then again, there is a Prezidenshul (S)Election campaign just around the corner.
I understand they're going to run the three stooges against Obama this time.
Republicans know they'll never find a better Democrat than Obama to do their dirty work and keep their own party looking clean.
Three terms is the charm!
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Sigh
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