Slashdot Mirror
EU Commissioner Calls For Censorship of Web Search
An anonymous reader sends us a Reuters story on a statement yesterday by Franco Frattini, the EU Justice and Security commissioner, who believes that Internet searches for bomb-making instructions should be blocked across the European Union. The commissioner "intend[s] to carry out a clear exploring exercise with the private sector... on how it is possible to use technology to prevent people from using or searching dangerous words like bomb, kill, genocide or terrorism..."
I tried following the link but it was invalid on my machine, so I did a search for
bomb, kill, genocide or terrorism
It got me the intended results, but if this is implemented how will I find the article in the future?
If I cannot search for terrorism, how will I know if I am safe?
Addition to this, note that they think we should not be able to useor search the words, so if something does unfortunately happen, how can we warn others?
"Theres a man in the back with a skimask on holding a complex exothermic chemical compound over there, run for your lives" ???
liqbase
Not another one.
Searching for details on the 9/11 terrorism event...
Student doing research for school on the atom bomb or genocide for ww2 project
Some people are so stupid.
will they block slashdot now?
Once Google stops those terrorists from finding the secret recipy for furtilizer... whoops.. bombs, I'm sure they will have no means to obtain that information elsewhere...
What is this commissioner thnking?!? These guys go to Pakistan and Afghanistan to be trained in full operational training camps. And he thinks filtering Google will make them harmless? What utter naïvity.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
So they're going to block all these words, across all languages?
And what if someone is searching for the title of a Monty Python movie where they used, for example, Holy hand grenades? Or a scene from a novel, or a TV show?
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
What if somebody needs to learn about terrorism for a paper or something like that.
Also... if any terrorist really wanted to make a bomb there are plenty of other ways to learn how to create one. I think this is just another attempt to have government closer to total control of the Internet. Maybe we will eventually see taxes on it in other ways. Maybe I'm going to far?
V-Chips to be made mandatory at birth. Film at 11.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Erosion of civil liberties IS terrorism for me... I want to be able to see chemistry instructions for anything i please... even to recognize a bomb... besides bombs don't have to be meant to hurt people ! Next what are they going to make people eat with their bare hands just because a fork can be used to kill someone ?!?!? STAY OUT OF MY SPACE YOU FASCISTS ! politics should be paid to simplify the system, not to make it inoperable by addind kafkanian regulations that only a few of the people understand !
It protects them from knowledge, isn't that the real goal of people like this?
Knowledge only leads to questioning religion and authority.
So I'm assuming all that trouble in the Balkins started when Slobodan Milosevic did a Yahoo search and told everyone around him, "Hey guys, I'm not sure if we should get this new Michael Jackson album or not but I just came across this article on genocide. Ya know, we ought go to Srebrenica and wipe everyone out to find out if its cool or not. I mean, it sounds awesome, what do you say?"
"Does Google censor search results?
Yes, they sometimes do, in different countries, like Germany, France or China. Sometimes, specific content is censored globally (including US results, e.g. in the case of certain censored newsgroup messages)."
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-03-02-n19.html
1984 is calling.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Censorship can only go from bad to worse. At first it's only about blocking information on how to construct a bomb, but where does it end? It's a slope with no friction. It begins with anti-terrorism and it ends with a dictatorship. Censorship is never good, no matter what the original intention.
The obvious solution is to allow access to all information, but set up rules that send alerts on who is searching for the offending words, and disallow anonymous web use, if that even still exists.
Make using the web at all require a login.
Issue copyrights on all information related to manufacturing explosives. Turn over the copyrights to the RIAA. Oh, wait ...
[Insert pithy quote here]
That's interesting. FTA: ... on how it is possible to use technology to prevent people from using or searching dangerous words like bomb, kill, genocide or terrorism," Frattini told Reuters.
"I do intend to carry out a clear exploring exercise with the private sector
So in other words, Frattini is in fact trying to make information on holocaust inaccessible, among other things. Score one for neo-nazis!
>How can we learn from our past if our past is blurred?
One thing we learn from the past is that it's always distorted. Is there anything really new about internet censorship?
Do Europeans consider free speech or free press important enough to kill, die, dissolve political alliances or revoke currency in order to protect them?
Freedom of speech is one of the very few things actually *worth* killing or dying to protect. But do Europeans feel that way? Or are they willing to surrender their rights?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Ever since Barosso and the Italians came in the EU Commission, the only thing they care to chime about are rules and legislation about civil liberty rights. Lastly they were in favor for a rating system that would ban violent video games, now this. I'd rather vote for the inclusion of Turkey than to vote for Italian commissioners.
With great power comes great electricity bills.
Apparently there are detailed instructions on genocide online..
We wouldn't want the kids to accidentally start wiping out entire races by accident, you know with those genocide machine schematics online.
www.how-to-make-a-bomb.eu
(The domain's freshly registered so DNS might not be working everywhere yet).
I was a substitute teacher for a chemistry class. We were discussing reaction rates as part of the class material, and I pointed out that a local flour mill explosion was the result of a flour/air mix that was ignited by a spark or over-heated equipment. The flour particles could oxidize (burn) extremely quickly because they were suspended in air, and being contained in an inflexible building the pressure from all those hot gases shattered the building, as opposed to another local fire in a grain silo that was still smoldering after two weeks because the paticles were large and air supply was limited.
On my return to that school, some days later, I was blamed for teaching the students how to blow up the trash barrels! Extrapolating from my information that flour/air mixes can go KABOOM, they shook flour into a barrel from a large kitchen shaker (the kind used for powdered sugar spreading), jammed on the lid, and gave it a spark from a battery-powered circuit. It was apparently an impressive KABOOM, although maybe not an earth-shattering one, and the trash barrel looked like it had been run over by a large truck.
These sites would contain incorrect information on making bombs, but close enough to be mistaken.
Most of the "anarchist handbooks" in circulation contain recipes that either don't work or are too dangerous to attempt without a full explosives lab. Either the authors were really bad chemists or they were deliberately planting bad info. A good chemist would use the widely available "CRC Handbook of Laboratory Safety" and the "CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics" to doublecheck any recipe for efficacy and safety.
Similarly, if I were looking to diffuse a bomb, I might need to research different types of bombs to learn ... ... how strong the lens will need to be to withstand the blast?