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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.
Rule of thumb: take out "on the internet" when you're discussing civil rights (or ... well, anything, really.) In other words, the question is not "is anonymity on the internet a fundamental right?" but simply "is anonymity a fundamental right?" And the answer of history is "yes, it is." From the run-up to the American Revolution to samizdat in the USSR, the cause of freedom has always been better served when those who would be persecuted for speaking out can keep their identities secret from the persecutors.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
"Child pornography" is the current excuse for oppression in the US. "Communist infiltration" stopped being a serious concern around 1975 or so. Terrorism has been slow lately. Militant Islam isn't getting any significant traction in the US. (Some European countries have real problems there, but the US doesn't seem to.) The "war on drugs" had a good run, but it's turning into a real war in Mexican border cities, and that focuses attention on real problems, not rhetoric.
The excuse has to be for something that doesn't have complaining parties who want their cases solved. Where law enforcement has to deal with victims who report crimes, law enforcement performance is measured by the percentage of crimes solved. This keeps cops focused, and they don't get to set their own agenda.
It's significant that the FBI's "child pornography" enforcement operation hasn't been involved in the Catholic child abuse scandals. There don't seem to have been any cases where the FBI actually caught a priest abusing a child. Yet, given the statistics, that's an obvious place to look.
Note what we don't have. There's no "war on financial fraud". There's no "war on tax cheats". There's no "war on polluters". There's no "war on employers of underage kids".