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Web Censorship Proposed For Norway
Aqwis writes "A Norwegian Web filtering system (link in Norwegian), comparable to the Great Firewall of China, has been proposed to the Norwegian legislature. It would, if enacted, block all Web sites and servers that contain hate material (racial hate, pro-Nazi sites, hate towards the government, etc.), most kinds of pornography (not only child pornography), foreign gambling sites, and sites that share copyrighted or other material that it is not legal to share (such as most BitTorrent sites and services such as LimeWire). Reactions have been mixed; however they are mostly negative."
There's a thoughtful comment based on a complete view of the facts of the situation if I've ever seen one.
If you'd RTNorwegianA, it says quite clearly that this is merely a suggestion by a panel at a cybercrime law enforcement agency, and has seemingly been universally panned by politicians, media, and the populace alike.
Tore - The Norwegian Guy.
toresbe
GAH!, why was this modded Insightful....
This is a suggestion by a panel of employees at a cybercrime commission formed by the previous, conservative government, and none of the people on the board have been chosen by politicians.
As I've said in other posts, this does not stand a snowball's chance in hell of passing.
toresbe
Nope. Norway is puritan country. Porn (people fscking) is illegal. Pictures of nekked boobies aren't.
Even so, this has been blown waaay out of proportion (Slashdot, sensationalist?! Nah...) It's just a proposal by a panel so far and what's more, of the 6 members of the panel 4 were against. The minority, i.e. the remaining 2 members, have demanded that the Justice Department consider the proposal anyway and present it to Parliament regardless.
Whether or not that will really happen remains to be seen. Needless to say, just about everyone else are up in arms over this.
Democracy in action, folks. Nothing to see here, move along.
IAAN (I Am A Norwegian) and IRTFA.
And remember kids: Never trust a computer you can actually lift.
"Another government passing an idiotic and unenforcable law!"
Ummm I take it you didn't RTFA.
This is a proposal from a 6 member panel at the bottom end of the Norwegian Government. Thankfully, it's still unlikely the actual Norwegian parliament will even look at a bill based on the proposal (since it isn't yet even in bill form!!!), let alone make a law based upon it.
Two major problems have occurred here:
1) People should RTFA before posting!!!
2) Slashdot should stop people from submitting extremely misleading summaries. (and FireHose just makes the situation 10x worse due to point 1).
You wouldn't need to, you pretty much nailed it.i teten-skal-til-li.html
I'm norwegian myself, but if this goes through (and I doubt it), I'm moving away. To me, this would just make Norway into a China with higher taxes.
The guy in charge of the comittee that made this proposal, Knut Rønning, is pretty much the Ted Stevens of Norway, he annoys the crap out of me. Here's a video with him (again, in Norwegian): http://tbtv.tb.no/player/nyheter/362-datakriminal
The Liberal Party of Norway is currently a small-sized party in opposition, together with the conservatives (check out what sort of ladies can be in politics in Norway: how many milliseconds would she last anywhere else?) and Christian democrats. The thing most closely resembling the Republicans is the Progress party, a hate-spewing propaganda machine for the lesser mentally developed (yes, there is statistics showing Progress voters are less schooled than average; and yes, they actually bought the WMD bull back in 2003).
Current government is headed by the Labour party, the Socialist Left party (more or less like Labour, only more environment-focused and anti-NATO, and generally more left-leaning) and the Centre party (farmers).
I would not agree on the opportunity of using a link to Dagbladet to explain this issue (ok most people do not read Norwegian anyway), as Dagbladet is a low-quality tabloid focusing on flashy headlines. This article from Aftenposten indicates that censorship is a mindretallforslag, i.e. a minority proposition. The majority of the Datakrimutvalget (Authority for computer crime) actually voted against this proposal.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Actually, up to a ruling by the Supreme Court (ours, not yours ;) in december 2005, hardcore pornography was forbidden. Somehow, Norway never experienced the same liberalization as Sweden and Denmark, however, we do have a much more relaxed relationship to nudity than the US. For example in "Brødrene Dal og Karl XIIs gamasjer" which is a childrens/young teen series you get to see a female streaker in full frontal nudity - now show me that on US public television. Many were those who had satellite connections and set the texting to Swedish, goodbye censorship. Nevermind Internet when that got around.
The ruling came about after a reinterpretation of the law - there are only two things that are forbidden by Norwegian law. Child pornography and "offensive" (støtende) pornography. The courts gave them a run-around and said "people don't find this offensive, if you want the law to prohibit hardcore, say it". It's an odd variation of the Miller test, and it may still apply for vids that show rape etc. - nobody's quite found the new limits yet. In any case, the porn is flowing now but that is only in the recent year or so.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Take off every 'sig' !!
We were the first, actually, using a Honeywell 316 TIP as the node. The node name was NORSAR-TIP, and we used a 2.4Kbit satellite link. 20 minutes later, London was on the ARPAnet, through us.
toresbe
On the Monty Python front - the Norwegians (initially) banned the film "Life of Brian". So in Sweden it was advertised as "the movie that is so funny, it was banned in Norway".
(Sorry about my English, I am Norwegian)
Your English isn't bad because you're Norwegian, it's bad because you're an idiot.
You know, where the current administration are fighting private schools to avoid thoughts that are not socialistic enough.
No, it's to avoid religious nutcase schools like Liberty University and the like in the US. And it's a good thing, too. And the recent school reforms are as unsocialistic as they get.
Where the state takes most of what you earn by direct and hidden taxes.
The Norwegian populace doesn't exactly seem to be starving.
Where the state has their own media house to spew out their propaganda financed by anyone owning a TV,
Ehhh... NRK is not controlled by the state. It has complete editorial freedom, both in theory and practice, and is frequently critical of the government. NRK is BTW an excellent TV network, and is worth every penny.
and it for a while was illegal to watch TV that was not controlled by it.
Yes, it's called a TV license. It's a very common thing around Europe, and is more strictly enforced other places than here. It's a yearly fee you pay for owning a TV. I don't know what you mean by "controlled"... It's still illegal to own a TV without paying the license.
toresbe
Well, here's my translation of the dagbladet.no article, it's not a particularly good translation, and there's a lot of paraphrasing, but it should be good enough to give a understanding of TFA. Any norwegians are free to correct my translation if some parts aint good enough.
TRANSLATION:
Wants internet-censorship in Norway.
Photo-text HAIR-RAISING: Technologist Svein Willassen thinks that governemental blocking of the Internet is pure censorship, and crosses the principles of freedom , and freedom of speech.
Today the computer crime authorities(datakrimutvalget) presents a proposal that will make the ISPs block webpages with illegal content.
Pure censorship, and a strong hit against freedom of speech, says critics.
Against norwegian law.
One of the worst parts of this proposal is the governments possibility to actually block certain sites for norwegian users.
"Samferdselsdepartementet"s Christina Christensen, and Knut Rønning, leader of the Computer Crime Authorities (datakrimutvalget), thinks that the ISPs should be required to block webpages that contain contents that are against Norwegian law, and they want to propose a minority-proposal to add this to "straffeloven"
This could mean that Norway gets one of the strictest Internet-laws in the western world.
Pure censorship, says Svein Williasen at the Norwegian Technology and Nature-science University (NTNU), he's a member of the "Computer Chrime Authorities", this is a hair-raising proposal. The proposal could be compared to the chinese internet-censorship, says Willasen to Dagbladet. He thinks the proposal would harm the free flow of information, and that it crosses the principles of openness, and freedom. This is pure censorship, and a hard blow to freedom of speech, that really worries me, says Willasen.
Even though four of the six members of the Computer Chrime Authorities oppose the proposal, the new lawtext will be proposed as a minority-proposal to the ministre of law, and it will then be required to have some treatment in the Storting.
The end of gambling?
This means that the follow types of websites could become unavailable for norwegian users.
Foreign websites containing gambling, or any games where money could be gambled.
Webpages that allow downloading and filesharing of movies and music, if they are against the copyrightlaws.
Websites where shunning of foreign countries flag or "country mark" (riksvåpen" take place.
Websites where hatred towards foreign governments are encouraged, or where discirminating or hatefull speech is used.
Webpages that contain porn which may offend.
Fight against Children Pornography
In 2005 the Storting stated that Childrens Pornography should be filtered away for Norwegian users, where the ISPs would be encouraged to use a filter, but not required.
If this did not give the wanted effect, then the possibility of requiring the use of this filter for the ISPs, could become reality.
The minoritys reasoning behind their proposal is that the filtering hitherto hasn't functioned satisfactionally, and they therefore want to expand the rights to block webpages, to a more generic law-acknowledged filtering of ALL illegal webpages.
Willasen thinks that this is argument is'nt good enough.
Everybody opposes webpages containing childrens pornography. But the filtering we have against childrens pornography works well enough, he says.
Unique tool
The majority of the Computer Crimes Authoriy states that the law proposal wouldnt take the people behind the unlawful pages, but would take the people who make the communication possible, meaning the ISPs.
They also think that legitimate webpages would get filtered, because if a webpage is blocked, the entire server would need to be blocked. And since many webpages reside on the same server, the legitimate webpages on the server in question, would have to follow the illegitimate ones down the drain.
T