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Italian MEP Wants To Eliminate Anonymity On the Internet
m94mni writes "The European Parliament wants to monitor your Internet searches for child porn offenders, as previously reported. The declaration was adopted yesterday, and in an interview with the Swedish news outlet Europaportalen.se, the Italian MEP behind the declaration, Tiziano Motti, shares his views on the Internet and anonymity. In essence, Motti wants to completely eliminate anonymity on the Internet. 'Each upload of text, images, or video clips must be traceable by the authorities', says Motti. This is in line with the secretive UN initiative Q6/17, revealed two years ago." The doublespeak here seems to go beyond the imprecision of automated translation.
"And hand over all your freedom"
Why does that work?
We are all God's parents.
It is a sad state of our societies that child pornography can be invoked to justify absurd and highly unethical changes that would infringe of fundamental rights. It is almost certain that these would fail to successfully deter those seeking child porn but conveniently would be easy to use by the police and political system to silence dissent.
But I'm sure that fact is just a coincedence...
Governments are only going to get so much mileage out of crying wolf by invoking "Because...well...BECAUSE...CHILD PORNOGRAPHY".
If they keep this up, it's going to dilute honest, real efforts to fight child pornography because people will be conditioned to equate "child pornography" with "government power grab".
It is interesting to point out that child sex offenses have an average sentence in 2009 of 41 years, where first degree murder has an average sentence of 34 years.
There are over 300 people serving "indefinite civil confinement" for child pornography. Many states adopted these rules for sex offenders during the last 15 years, and in many of these states NOBODY has EVER BEEN RELEASED after being placed in such a confinement. This is de facto "life sentence" for possession of digital images.
I won't even BEGIN to argue that the creation of child porn is a good thing, but I will strenuously argue that its mere possession does not warrant a life sentence, regardless of what sort of doublespeak you can come up with about which sort of non-human that person is and what sort of evil deeds they "might one day do".
Will they let us see everything that politicians do?
Or is this surveillance all one-way?
I am anarch of all I survey.
Basically Berlusconi via a proxy, Motti, is using a classic "Think of the children..." argument in order to convince people of the need to remove anonymity from the internet when really he wants to eliminate anonymity to be able to track down political adversaries. It's classic misdirection. I'm just surprised that he thinks the rest of the world does not see through his ruse, but then again, like Putin, he is a very arrogant man accustomed to acquiescence.
At least as low as the people who have used DWIs/gun-violence/terrorism/boobies/other-boogiemen-of-the-day to infringe on our rights?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
what if....
what if you've got a 'speed' up plugin for your browser that spiders and preloads loads of stuff, there could easily be links to all kinds of stuff and it would/could look like your browsing, and the files will be stored and cached on your computer.
and anyone not wanting to get caught will use one of the many ways of proxying yourself, or a public connection, or a hacked connection / proxy.
gees, some one needs to give the people that run the world an education, or at least pass a law making it a requirement that all laws are run by several experts, hobbyist and professionals in the field for the obvious and not so obvious errors and pointlessness or even counter productiveness of the legislation being passed. Maybe even run a few fake trials based on the legislation and see what kind of prosecution vs defense comes up.
I would expect that the defense side have an open forum so that anyone can contribute and discuss the prosecution and so aid the defense, we want our laws to be as good as possible and waste as little time as possible. And we want as few of them as possible.
Time spent making them in the first place is time and money saved later down the line, and it would also give some people a little 'respect' in the only profession that comes lower than lawyers and bankers when it comes to honor and decency.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I suspect a lot of the politicians voting through these laws are old people who haven't really taken up Internet usage. They have people who bring them printed out reports and do the typing up of their notes for them. They get their news from papers or television and they communicate with their friends by meeting up or telephone. For people like this, it may not have even sunk in that Internet is a part of people's everyday communication with each other and that's what they're snooping on. They probably think of communicating by Internet as some sort of aberration or tool for criminal behaviour. After all, it's a method of communication and socialising used by other people.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.