Slashdot Mirror
EU To Monitor All Internet Searches
Xemu writes "The European Parliament is issuing a written declaration about the need to set up an early warning system to combat sexual child abuse. However, the substance of the declaration is to extend the EU data retention directive to search engines, so that all searches done on for example Google will be monitored. If you are a citizen concerned about the right to privacy and freedom on the Internet, you can help by sending e-mail to the MEPs from your country and explaining the issue to them."
Yeah, i'd say this is a good opportunity to dust off my gopher skills.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
I guess search engines like StartPage (also known as Ixquick) that don't keep logs of your IP address are gonna see a nice jump in traffic.
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
It's the only way to actually do much of anything about child sexual abuse.
Because pedos are totally going to Google "kiddy porn downloads".
If you're not doing anything wrong, I don't see why you wouldn't want to let the government see what you're doing. In this post-9/11 world, we *have to* to give up some of our personal priveleges, or else the terrorists will win. The sooner we get remove the word "freedom" from the dictionary, the sooner everyone will stop whining.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
If the EU doesn't uphold this, it's members will.
In the eastern parts of Europe you had to be careful on the phone.
The West smiled when it saw the vast data collection systems and rows of tape.
Now you have to be careful what you type into Bing, Yahoo, Google ect.
Interesting to see the line about "based on the existing system for food safety" [laws].
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
If I see a crime I'm supposed to report it. But this system can't differentiate between someone looking for child porn, and someone who is trying to use their spare time to locate and report people who deal in child porn.
Basically, we're teaching the public to turn a blind eye. Together with the mandatory filters implemented in even my "free" country the problem is just being buried even deeper.
.: Max Romantschuk
Pedophiles use children for their own self-serving purposes, and now the government wants in on the "fun". They're using these poor children to achieve the government's broader political goals, getting away with things they otherwise could not. "Think of the children", the oldest trick in the book since the Victorian era.
Perverts and legislators -- it's like they're made for each other.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
God help you if you are researcher (private or government) and search for naughty terms. At my local library they tried this a few years ago and some high school girl almost arrested because she was searching for terms like 'child porn' and 'naked kids'. Turns out she was actually writing a report on how easy it was to find illicit porn online. She even made to the local talk show circuit for a while.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
This declaration doesn't seem like a law, more like the equivalent to a US Congressional Non-Binding Resolution, having no force of law on its own, and hoping the parties being addressed will react to the non-binding request. In other words, it seems to me like hot air to feed special interests.
Here's the actual text:
---
"I am pleased to inform you that, together with my colleague Ms Anna Záborská MEP, I have submitted
Written Declaration No 29 requesting the establishment of a European early warning system for
paedophiles and sex offenders. A normal childhood for our children means a solid future for our, and
for their, European Union. Any act of violence suffered by a woman or a child is an indelible defeat of
the rules of civilised coexistence. We would therefore be very grateful if, as many other colleagues
have already done, you could support this important Written Declaration No 29 'On setting up a
European early warning system (EWS) for paedophiles and sex offenders'. The proposal does
not involve the establishment of a new European agency but rather greater levels of cooperation
between the public authorities and civil society in order to defend the weaker members of society
and protect the rights of all.
I may be contacted as follows:
Tiziano Motti MEP
ASP 9E209
Tel. 45247
tiziano.motti@europarl.europa.eu
Declaration No 29 may be signed:
- Outside the Hemicycle during the part-sessions
- At the office of the Members' Activities Unit in Brussels, PHS 2A 019
Thank you in advance,
Tiziano Motti MEP"
---
They seem to do these a lot, in terms of declaring a condemnation of Israel, or having a declaration on violence against women - hot air to feel good and influence constituents, without any real legal meaning on its own.
To put it in programming terms, it seems to me they're declaring an intention - not instantiating a law. Bad in terms of intentions towards what little privacy remains, but not yet acting to change law.
My interpretation could certainly be wrong - but that seems to be how the wording strikes me.
Ryan Fenton
CP is just an excuse, not the real thing they want to look for.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
"We need to monitor your internet searches. You know, to prevent pedophilia."
"But I don't want anyone's internet searches monitored without a warrant to monitor them."
"SO YOU'RE PRO-CHILD MOLESTATION AND YOU WANT GRAPHIC SEXUAL DEPICTIONS OF THEM ON THE INTERNET?!"
"What in the hell? That's not what I said at all!"
"Maybe we should be monitoring YOU, pervert."
Will they ban it?
Fuck the EU and fuck the children. Fuck the assholes who use "child porn" as an excuse for every thing!!!
When has Google Trends ever listed a single Kiddie Porn search string?
If Kiddie porn was such a problem on search engines, surely it would be right up there on #1 of Google Trends right?
Give me a break.
The child fucking boogieman is not real. Its not the children that are getting fucked... ITS YOU.
Burn your governments down.
Without government control of the internet the same search logs would be kept and used against you by the RIAA. Who do you think is "more bad"? Which one do you trust less? Do you honestly think that without government regulation you'd be able to withstand the onslaught of megacorps (or whatever power structure would exit in the absence of said regulations)?
Internet searches aren't child molestation. Child molestation is a sex act. So the EU must monitor every sex act to prevent child molestation. Otherwise it's just wasting everyone's time while the real killers run free!
--
make install -not war
All someone interested in breaking this system at a basic level needs to do is to gain access to some popular server to put some code (plain HTML img tags, or javascript if site is vulnerable) that will automatically do searches based on those "monitored" search terms when a user-agent accesses it. This will incriminate all innocent parties that browse those "infected" pages (as if something like is bad), which naturally flood the monitoring tools with garbage.
Please direct all bug reports to
Or you can just search for your MEP's name along terms related to paedophilia. And then do it again, and again...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I almost got kicked out of college because I, from school, googled "6 year old girl in sundress." I was looking for reference images for finishing a photoshop painting of a man walking with his daughter on a beach. I had the beach, I had the man, the ice-cream he was holding and in the middle of class I goggle images of kids because the bone structure of kids is different than adults. 2 days later I'm in the deans office getting a "Letter" added to my records. I'm like WTF? Did they think I was looking at child porn in a room full of twenty three people and the only one who noticed was the IT filter? So it's on my permanent scripts now.
If I go to a 4 year program I have to hope they explained it well enough I'm not just denied for "viewing inappropriate material" on campus. My teacher even backed me up and explained he was in the class with me and that the images where completely harmless, fully clothed, yet they still put it on the record. Pissed me off.
The world has gotten so freaking paranoid about pedos it's crazy. What's next public burnings? This pedo-paranoia has to be screwing up the kids too. When I was a kid we played with all the kids in the area, went where ever we wanted and were pretty damn safe. Now kids have play dates and a small circle of friends. Adults act like kids are made of glass and might break. If we screw up 90% of these kids childhoods with paranoia to save 10% of the kids who are going to get molested how the heck is that good for the human species?
We are going to have whole generations of social cripples afraid to be around each other and eating/drugging themselves to death while they wonder why they can't feel happy. The human race has moved along quite well without fenced in play grounds and cops policing public parks constantly. Kids shouldn't have to live in fear that the boogie man might touch them in their private places. "Keeping the kids safe" is doing more harm than good if you look at it from the big picture. Let them act like kids for Christ's sake.
But I'm sure by posting this I'll be marked as a child stalker. *rolls eyes*
just send an e-mail to your mom, they'll read it too.
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
The problem I have with Freenet, and I'm personally glad it exists, is this: Nobody has actually tested their "plausible deniability" in court, have they? I mean lets say for the sake of argument you are running a Freenet node which has 5Gb of cache, okay? Lets say that 1Gb of that cache is CP, which some cop accesses and is able to track the source down to your node. Now as far as I know the law says you have to possess CP or distribute it, NOT that you yourself have to have access to it. If you handed me a safe that I didn't have the combo for and I get pulled over delivering it and they break it open and find CP I'm pretty sure that MY ass will be going to jail, even though I had NO way in hell of knowing what was in it. How is Freenet ANY different?
I have a feeling if the feds decide to shut down Freenet it really will be easy, as I can't remember ever seeing a statute that says you have to have access to the CP, only that you have to have distributed it. Total bullshit I know, but it wouldn't be the first time that someone has rotted in jail from bullshit charges. So has anybody actually tested Freenet or any other caching anonymous style app in court?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
So basically, all the pedophiles (who don't spend thier time doing google searches for 'child porn', I'd hasten a bet) are unaffected, while all the people who search for information on the subject (reporters, worried mothers, hell, anyone looking for information on a subject, which we should be allowed to do in the modern world) gets monitored. Seriously. Great plan.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Kill catholics (a good idea in general)
Why do you want to kill me? What have I ever done to harm you? Last time I checked, I was spending large amounts of my time and money fighting hard to protect people's privacy and freedom of expression. Now you're calling for my death?
Pirate Party UK
First of all, RIAA is American - we're discussing the EU here. Obviously, there are similar institutions in Europe, so the remark is still relevant.
Who says that we are not going to a situation where both the government and the record industry and all kinds of other organizations will control internet logs of everyone? ISP will log it, and distribute it.
They all will find a valid reason to protect the very important interests of something really important (like "Children" or "The Economy" or "Safety").
Anyone who will object to this monitoring of the internet is obviously either a Terrorist, a Child Molester or a Communist.
(I strongly believe that you can't argue with such points, which is why the discussion should be shifted away from single problems, and should instead be about the internet or even information in general).
On a side note, this is an initiative by some members of the European parliament. They sell it to the public as a urgent thing to stop child abuse. The word privacy isn't mentioned anywhere.
Why don't you monitor all the post and telephones too?
The EU already has data retention mandates for telephone and E-mail. Supposedly, those are not data-mined, but do you really believe that?
I want everything monitored. I want cameras in my room and on my shitter too!
You may already have them if you're subject to police monitoring based on your suspicious phone calls or E-mails. Drug monitoring for your "shitter" is probably coming too as soon as the technology comes down in price.
The Church is opposed to freedom of expression.
Wrong.
Doesn't that make you at best, a bad catholic?
No.
I mean, if you disagree with the church's or pope's interpretation of the bible in public, you're a heretic.
Yes. But I don't think any modern Catholic would argue that you shouldn't be free to choose to be a heretic, if you so wish. It's your immortal soul, not mine. I do of course reserve the right to disagree with you and possibly even to attempt to explain to you where you've gone wrong. ;-)
Pirate Party UK