News Cameron to announce block-by-default web filters

You know the crazy thing is all this is already in place, its just not widely publicised

We have, Get Safe Online is a jointly funded initiative between several Government departments and private sector businesses. In fact, we are the Government’s preferred online security advice channel.
We have, CEOP's thinkuknow website, Giving advise on how parents, teachers, and children of varying ages can stay safe online.
We have, UK Safer Internet Centre, where you can find e-safety tips, advice and resources to help children and young people stay safe on the internet.

We have, software already supplied by the majority of ISPs including Virgin Media (Virgin Media Security), BT (NetProtect Plus), Sky (McAfee Parental Controls), TalkTalk (HomeSafe) and many more. There are also family filters built into Windows and Mac OS X

There will be no deciding whether to use it or not, every household in the country will be forced into using it. Its just some households wont be checked against a list of censored web sites, we wont have two separate networks, one for those who opt-in, and another for those that opt-out.
And latter down the line, as is happening in Australia there will be pressure for mandatory filtering.

 

So little Mary is doing a piece of homework on WWII but finds access to a site blocked.

The filter, I imagine can be turned on and off with a phonecall ...

No biggie.

I agree it is more than just the porn. I don't feel sick in my stomach watching a hairy BBW mature redhead being spitroasted by a couple of well hung Jamaicans - beheading videos and the photos of genocide the news stations do not show - that does. This is something else that needs to be kept from delicate eyes until they are ready, and able to analyse, identify, reason and psychologically cope with.

But the government is not proposing they control the filter. They are providing you with the filter to opt-in or opt-out. You also mention examples from other countries than our own as examples of what WILL happen worst case scenario. You don't know that. You are scaremongering the weak minded to believe that the government will ultimately try to censor everything.

Next you will fast forward 50 years and acuse a future government of committing genocide on us, and filtering the future internet so that no one knows about it. Really? You fear our country banning childrens books? You fear our country introducing state controlled censorship?

I don't think you do. You just enjoy the scary thought of it and debating it as a possibility even though it won't happen.

I tell you what might get state censored though. The next time a bunch of people try to recreate the riots - I expect the egging-on, the provocation, the Twittering about it - that will get censored. And so it should. I don't have a problem with that kind of censorship. The riots were a joke in the eyes of normal people leading normal lives, picking up the pieces and paying for it through their taxes and increased insurance premiums for the rectifying and rebuilding.

I sign on the dotted line to that kind of crime prevention.

 

How do you know that people are committing suicide over benefit cuts and long-term unemployment? Oh, hang on, because of a free press. Because of this access to uncensored public information, you know how government policies are not the success that the government claims, how the NHS makes mistakes, how our communications are not private, how politicians break laws, how ex-servicemen, the young homeless discharged from an overburdened care system and the mentally ill are committing suicide because of a failure by government to provide for them. Uncensored press: it matters. Uncensored access to public information: it matters.

As has been said many times: this is not about the porn. Not for us, not for the government.

 

And we're back to square one: unfiltered Internet. That was effective, wasn't it?

I think that we are talking across purposes here. You are able to make a compelling argument as to why internet filtering would in principle be a good thing. We are not disputing your arguments on that.

What you are not able to make a compelling argument for is:
- whether such filtering would be effective in filtering out the bad sites, and not accidentally filtering out the good, useful ones;
- whether such filtering, once in place would not be abused by the government or by companies that manage it.

Now please tell me:
- what evidence do you have that such filtering could work reasonably effectively;
- what evidence do you have that the government or the commercial computer industry earns our unconditional trust.

Argument ad extremis is not a valid argument. (although it has been done in other countries).

We're back to the original position: I base my concerns on past evidence, you base your trust on hope and optimistic assumption.

You're not thinking this through. During the riots there were 2.6 million tweets. How would we filter the provokative tweets from the ones by parents asking their children to come home? How would we filter the egging-on from warnings by concerned people warning their friends and family to avoid the riot areas? Do we just take down Twitter, Egypt and Syria-style? And what about news reporting: the images, the videos? Do we have a news black-out?

And was Twitter a factor at all?

But hey, once we do it once, how easy it will be to do the same when people protest against, say, another invasion in the Middle East, or another austerity measure like NHS cuts! We did it once, and the system is in place, so... But it is all for riot prevention and the public good, of course.

 

You only have to look to the past for examples of governments introducing small or short term policy's and how they have expanded on them.

Take income tax, initially meant to be a short term tax to finance the Napoleonic wars. But two hundred years later and its still with us. Or the laws passed to address terrorism and how function creep means that they are now deployed in much less threatening contexts, against fly-tippers and those suspected of lying in school applications.

Function, scope, feature creep happens all the time, governments are awash with examples of how seemingly innocent projects have been expanded upon and not used as they where originally intended.

We are sleep walking into state monitoring of our internet usage and giving up rights to privacy. These are freedoms that previous generations paid mightily to protect, but which governments are now casually destroying.

 

It's also about the ISPs being pressured into 'Volunteering' to do it for the 'greater good'. If it was being done through legislation, then that would have to discussed, debated and has the potential to be slapped down by MPs, the Lords, public opinion or all of the above... They're doing it on the sly, so it isn't being discussed or questioned, nothing official for people to say 'No' to... But once the main ISPs have 'volunteered' to filter content, the law becomes easier to pass under the banner of 'regulation' with the argument of 'they're already doing it, we're here to make sure they do it properly'...


TL-DR It's not just what they're doing... it's *how* they're doing it...

EDIT: Corky kind of beat me to it...

 

Its not like people need more reasons to oppose this harmful and dangerous 'Volunteering' of default on filtering. But a case in point, here is a full list of web sites reported to Blocked.org.uk as being incorrectly blocked between 1st January and 31st March 2012.
(Warning XLS Document) https://www.openrightsgroup.org/assets/files/files/BlockedReports.xls

The following are some highlights from the full list, as taken from https://www.openrightsgroup.org/ourwork/reports/mobile-internet-censorship:-whats-happening-and-what-we-can-do-about-it

This all has very worrying implications for Net neutrality, Will this upcoming blacklist of sites be made public ?
Will it be quicker for a site like facebook to throw lawyers at a problem of over-blocking than a small start up company ?

 

In general guys, a lot of these examples of censorship cock-ups were corrected when the right people were made aware. Sooooooooooooo? Temp blips that I don't believe constitutes a major concern. You already acknowledge that filters are only as good as they are made to be - and will have 'blips'.

But ... tax pays for stuff that we scream and shout when anyone tries to tamper with it. Surely tax is a great example of good government control?

 

These censorship cock-ups may have been corrected eventually, but these blips have caused people to lose money. If you where running a business you wouldn't call them blips or cock-ups.

There has been examples of a Dentists web site being blocked, she was never contacted to say she had been placed on a list of filtered web site, so its impossible to know how long her site had been blocked.

And yes Tax pays for stuff, but i was using that as an example of how once the frame work for something is in place it's easy to expanded on it to included things it wasn't intended for.

 

1. Eventually? I see examples of 1 day issues, possibly even a few hours?

2. Tax was then used in a positive way? I think. I'd rather we were paying tax and have the public sector, than not.

This proposal is definitely an agree to disagree one. I really don't see the drama. However when we start getting beaten in the streets by the .gov army, and the filters stop us tweeting to let the world know about it - you can say "told ya so!".

 

But the ability to filter content already exists already and has done for several years. Why do you feel the government is better placed than you to decide what your children see online?

Since you are pro-filter do you already have filters set up, or are you waiting for the government to do it for you?

 

We probably won't be able to... they'll have everything blocked


... but we did tell you so

 

That list is just a one time check to verify the report of a incorrect block, But even if it was only a day and i was running one of those sites i would be very concerned that a whole country has block my web site as a default option no matter how short a time it was for. at least with parental controls installed on a users device its just one user that cant get to your site.

So you are saying the Napoleonic wars was a good thing, personally i don't think any war can be a good thing, but you seem to be trying to debate if tax is a good thing or not, and i was using that as an example of how once the frame work for something is in place it's easy to expanded on it to included things it wasn't intended for.
Not if tax is a good thing or not.

 

You mean like TalkTalk immediately patched the holes in their filter?

Funny you should say that. Remember the death of Ian Tomlinson? It was someone's mobile phone video that revealed how he really died. Whenever the police cracks down on protests, and indeed opportunist criminals abuse protests as a means to steal and vandalise, there are thousands of 'Little Brothers' videoing what happens and tweeting about it. But if during protests there is a black-out of social networking websites as you are a proponent of, such transgressions may never come to light.

Why do you think governments in Egypt, Syria and Turkey took out Twitter? To discourage "egging on and provocation of riots"?

 

On the larger picture, it's very hard to justify the upkeep and costs of making such infrastructure. It could cost people money. It could erroneously block important sites. Sure, we have the conveneince of no longer needing to filter it ourselves. But we are not informed on what is an is not blocked.

That in of itself is dubious. The fact that your own tax dollars are paying to potentially inconvenience people to patchily censor material that may be explicit in hopes that children and teenagers won't circumvent it is at best, unrealistic. If the rollout were to be perfectly rolled out (which in the IT is literally a statistical impossibility) then perhaps you could justify it. But to me, paying for a filter that limits potentially explicit information which you have no control of the filter is foolhardy.

 

But its all good
Because when we have given up the hard fought for rights that our ancestors gave there lives to protect, the right to privacy, to a free press, free speech, freedom of association.

We can find comfort in knowing we saved a few parents the bother of having to talking to their children about the internet, or having to install some free software.

 

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety" --Benjamin Franklin

 

Porn filters: 12 reasons why they won't work (and 3 reasons why they might)
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/reality-check/2013/aug/08/porn-filters-evidence-for-against Link goes into more detail.

 

Can you guess which government said which? You can chose from the following: China, the U.S., and the U.K.

First: “Democratic governments must resist the calls to censor a wide range of content just because they or others find it offensive or objectionable.”

Second: “Put simply, there needs to be a list of terms—a blacklist—which offer up no direct search returns.”

Spoiler

It is a trick question. The U.K. government said both. The first was by Foreign Secretary William Hague, speaking at the Budapest Conference on Cyberspace in October 2012. The second was by Prime Minister David Cameron in July 2013

Premier League orders censorship of BBC and other legit sites, blasts ISPs for correcting their error

British Library's wi-fi service blocks 'violent' Hamlet

 

Yeah, the US and UK were all for internet freedom --until the WikiLeaks scandal.