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UK Culture Secretary Wants Website Ratings, Censorship
kaufmanmoore writes "UK culture secretary Andy Burnham calls for a website rating system similar to the one used for movies in an interview with the Daily Telegraph. He also calls for censorship of the internet, saying, 'There is content that should just not be available to be viewed.' Other proposals he mentions in his wide-ranging calls for internet regulation are 'family-friendly' services from ISPs, and requiring takedown notices to be enforced within a specific time for sites that host content. Mr. Burnham wants to extend his proposals across the pond and seeks meetings with the Obama administration."
The government _can't_ decide what can be viewed and what can't, won't stop 'em all from tryin' though!
I'm already proxying myself through servers in other countries to avoid the censorship that the big UK ISPs recently signed up for.
Don't panic
What do you mean "bring"? The UK already has a lot of censorship. The BBFC has been censoring media for quite some while.
The BBFC's job is classification, not censorship. It has no power to ban material or demand cuts in any material. It can withhold certification, but certification is only withheld where it's considered the material in question would breach the criminal law, usually the Obscene Publications Act.
It's worth noting that over the past 10-15 years the BBFC has trended towards permissiveness, granting certification to previously 'banned' films, often attracting the ire of politicians in the process and effectively pushing the boundaries of what can be considered (legally) obscene material.
It's also introduced the principle that artistic merit can be an overriding factor, such as a few years back when the German film Taxi Zum Klo was granted a certificate enabling it's broadcast on television, despite it containing a scene featuring actual urolagnia between two gay men.
Censorship is enshrined in law thanks to the likes of the Obscene Publications Act so any criticism should be directed at our politicians, not at a body which has no choice but to work with the law presented to it and which tries to be as liberal as possible within that law.
His idea seems to be (although he is being vague about it, probably on purpose) to have ISPs only allow access to sites (in context presumably meaning IP addresses) that have a certificate - one we can only assume has to be applied for.
If this is indeed what he is suggesting, its horrific. For crying out loud, Iran only operates blacklists. We would officially have worse Internet censorship than a nation that executes women for being victims of rape.
The reason totalitarian nations haven't tried a whitelist by the way, is the amount of work it requires. Of course, that may work to the advantage of the UK government. A slow process of being allowed to publish controversial material on the web would prevent non-government groups being able to react quickly to government abuse. By the time your web page got through the government approval (after your personal details have been lost a few times) the controversy has died down, government wins.
I don't want to live in a society where you need to apply to the government for permission to speak.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
If you don't like any of the available parties then the realistic option is to start your own party and stand for government. If the Internet is useful for anything, its for stirring up action. It shouldn't be too difficult to win at least one seat with a viral campaign and enough supporters. That's the great thing about Democracy. If you don't like the government, you start your own. Take advantage while you can.
Fear not, as the UK Govt is losing credibility all by itself already. We had one comedian saying this week that Gordon Brown trying to fix the economy was the equivalent of sending Bomber Harris to offer to repair some windows in Dresden. Time will come when we get an elected PM again...
Haha! This happens because every government reflects its people in one way or another. Like somebody said before in this post: there are lots of people who believe that internet censorship is a good thing. These people still does not see the internet as a tool for free-speech, but as a toy for teenagers.
IMO, from the government point of view, this is the right moment to impose a internet censorship: the generation that actually understands the internet does not have any political power yet. More and more they wait, more it will be difficult.
Not to be melodramatic, but computers and the Internet are probably the single-most important human acheivement in the past 1,000 years. Free communication has the power to transform our society from warring tribes to a true global civilization, concentrating efforts to better our lives. It's the first truly accessible bidirectional network (or "peer-to-peer" as corporate/government drones like to say).
It has the power to dislodge those who seek to position themselves between productive people (for tax or ideological control). These are people who don't produce anything useful; they are simply parasites on the system. Thus, the loss of a global communication network is of little negative consequence to them.
And these are their opening shots; thousands of petty little dictators from all walks of life (government, religion, busybodies, corporate) have zeroed in their guns and are beginning to fire. If they are not stopped, the end result will be disasterous. I did not spend the last 20 years of my life building another glorified cable TV entertainment network.
We, the technically inclined... the engineers who conceptualized, and then actualized this network... we hold the cards. We build and install the equipment, we write the software, and we understand what's at stake. We need to organize, and we need to do it now.
Perhaps a worldwide RBL that completely deletes a hostile force from the Internet, based on a vote. Australian government implementing a censorship plan? No packets to any subnet associated with the Australian government until those responsible are found and punished. New bill to restrict anonymity on the Internet, forcing people to use identifying information? Let's see how well that senator does without email. After all, if he gets his way - to damage our ability to communicate - should we not get ours?
Perhaps a worldwide union of engineers for a collective maintenance; all member engineer will refuse to cooporate with unethical requests (routing to censorship hardware, violating principles of net neutrality, etc), and the union will pay their salary, and assist in finding a new position, if they are terminated for insubordination. In any case, firing an engineer is expensive. Let's make these companies hurt.
The net routes around damage... yes. But nothing is invincible. If we fail to defend it, we lose everything. If a critical mass of governments succeed in inserting themselves as gatekeepers, we have lost. Not because secure communication will be impossible... nothing can stop the individual. But because it will stop the masses. And that's all they want.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
"The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe."
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Don't worry; he's talking out of his arse, he hasn't a cat in hell's chance of getting a Bill through parliament to implement this spatchcock guff. We have this thing called the Human Rights Act... and if they repeal that, there's the European Court.
The problem is that even if a law is incompatible with the ECHR, there's nothing stopping the Government passing the law, and you've then got to wait until someone pays the large amount of legal fees to take this to the european courts. To pass the law, the Government just has to claim that the law is necessary for the "protection of morals". They've already done this to pass a law that criminalises even possession of images of adults they don't want people to see, so I fear that classification of websites could come just as easily, if that's what they wanted.
You may be right - sometimes these laws are just a bit of self-publicity that the Government have no plans in doing. But occasionally a law gets passed, no matter how draconian and ridiculous and unlikely it might have seemed.
Constitution would not necessarily stop them.
We here in Finland have internet censorship. It is very clearly against our constitution. It is not only my IANAL opinion but when that law went to our parliament the creators sent it to be evaluated to University of Helsinki's Faculty of Law and were answered that such a law would be clearly unconstitutional.
Guess how much that slowed the law from going through? Not at all.
The thing is that not all laws need to go through the committee for constitutionality of law here. Laws just can be sent there when politicians think they should be checked. (I am not certain how the exact procedure goes) After a law has been denied from there it can't be passed without changing constitution first and that isn't easy.
But guess once if those preparing that censorship law sent it to the committee after hearing from the university that it could not pass if they would. Yeah, they didn't. And everyone opposing the law was pretty much marked as pedophile so politicians in the opposition didn't have guts, interest or knowledge to begin contesting that.
They use quite a lot of tricks to censor films. For example, they will sometimes pass the film back to distributor with notes explaining why they cannot pass the film at the requested certificate. The best bit? The distributor makes the changes as specifies and then resubmits the film which is then passed. The BBFC then report that they didn't have to make any cuts.
It gets even better as the distributor (notice that I didn't say, "the film makers") have a rough idea of the what the BBFC will and wont allow at each certificate. This means that they cut it to BBFC rules in advance.
Note that the UK doesn't have an X certificate.
Using this policy, the BBFC gets away with censoring everything while claiming that they hardly ever have to make cuts.
Don't get me started on their procedures, criteria for "obscenity" and the qualifications of their staff.
Melon Farmers used to be the best site for monitoring the BBFC although I haven't used it for a while.
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.