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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.
This troll was not posted anonymously in order to comply with regulations in Italy.
Le français vous intéresse?
"And hand over all your freedom"
Why does that work?
We are all God's parents.
Of course, It's the best excuse...
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".
What about the people producing child pornography? I absolutely agree that simple possession of an image should carry no legal penalty, but I also think there should be a punishment for causing a person to engage in something potentially psychologically damaging before that person has reached the age to make an informed decision about whether to do so. However, I do think that the age of consent to appear in porn should be lowered to 15 or so.
Also, "this wasn't illegal for a long time, and society did fine!" is a bad argument. Hundreds of years ago, most people lived in abject poverty without what we would consider today to be the most basic standard of food, housing, education, or health care. It's only because in rich countries we've mostly solved those problems that we can turn our energies to comparatively minor issues like child pornography.
Le français vous intéresse?
Will they let us see everything that politicians do?
Or is this surveillance all one-way?
I am anarch of all I survey.
They put more effort into hunting down the "addicts" than the "dealers". This does not work.
Your alluded-to attribution is incorrect. That quote comes from an essay by Rabbi Lapin:
http://www.aapsonline.org/brochures/lapin.htm
It is pretty amazing but not suprising just how misguided the above poster is.
It is indeed a very a good question asked by the gp, where does it say anonymity on the net is a fundamental right.
Because WE declare it so? Who is this WE? Because part of "WE" seems to want this anonymity to end.
Entitlement only works if you are willing to fight for your entitlements. Not just shout very loudly about them on some nerd forum.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Using child porn to take away our freedom. How low can these guys stoop?
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.
"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".
I'm looking at you Silvio.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
...and certain sites like Wikileaks, which uses its own private Tor-based network.
So right now we have the USA crying over "national security" and Italy weeping for the children. That covers the "Terrorism" and "Child Porn" buzzwords. Soon we will learn that drug lords and illegal immigrants use the Internet, too...
So yeah, right, war against the pedos... When the government of Berlusconi, of all people, says it, it's a lie.
That man likes himself some barely legal girls in parties, and while nothing confirms he goes with actual minors, suspicions have been raised.
Of course we'll never know if it's true, or if the denied claims are the effect of his political power.
Shame this wonderful tool can't be used against politics by the citizens (politicians who like dirty play *will* abuse it for sure against rivals).
I bet many politicians will surely regret this eventually. Power is not forever and precisely politicians are the type to have bizarre fetishes.
...Also, while we're at it - I wish there was a way to eliminate form office any politicians who uses any of the following rhetoric:
"think of the children"
"if you don't have anything to hide, then there's no reason to worry about monitoring/spying/us analraping your privacy"
"the constitution* was written over 200 years ago, it's no longer valid for our times." (*if we're talking about non-US entities, then change that to whatever law/document/convention gives people their rights).
This isn't about the children at all....The goal is the same as it's always been, regardless of the argument: Control. They want control, they don;t like people being able to anonymously share information and organize - and if I were them, trying to do a lot of the things these people are doing, I would feel the same way - because they're basically criminals - they want to manipulate us out of our freedoms and protections with scare tactics.
In this day and age people should be educated enough about history to recognize these ploys and know what they mean..Unfortunately (particuarly in the US) the majority aren't.
Original article from europaportalen.se
Headline: "I do not want to save Google searches"
Caption: Tiziano Motti now says he does not want to save Google searches. Photo: European Parliament
Italian Tiziano Motti, who was behind the proposal to save searches on Google says he has been misunderstood. Yesterday, his proposal got a majority in the European Parliament.
"It's not the colour of the cat that matters; it's that the cat catches the mouse. And I'm the cat."
This is how Tiziano Motti presented himself in an Italian TV programme when he was a candidate in the EP elections last year. He was a private entrepreneur without a political party who travelled around in north-east Italy and met young people to get their votes with the slogan: "Vote for me – I'm like you".
The campaign was successful. In just a few months, Motti succeeded in getting enough support for a Christian democratic party to "adopt" him three days before the lists of candidates were to be published, and in the election, he defeated the region's incumbent MEP.
Motti did not do his campaigning in marketplaces or party meetings. Instead, he went to night clubs, where he often stayed until six in the morning. "You have to be where the young people are, and they're at the discos. On on the Net", says Tiziano Motti.
He has a tan, a flawless smile, wears a jacket and jeans, which is unusual for a MEP, especially an Italian one. The election campaign is not the only connection to the Net in Tiziano Motti's case. He is the author of the high-profile proposal to expand the controversial data retention directive to include search engines as part of the fight against child pornography. "Another step on the way to a surveillance society!", critics say.
After Europaportalen wrote about Motti's proposal a few weeks ago, a few MEPs started to withdraw their support. They had not understood what they had signed, since the data retention directive was not mentioned in the proposal. Only the technical identifier, 2006/24/EC, was mentioned. Cecilia Wikström (Liberal People's Party, Sweden) sent a letter to alla 736 MEPs, warning them.
Tiziano Motti is aware of the Swedish debate. He feels it is unfair, but is not surprised. "I expected these reactions. Every time one discusses data retention and the Internet, it's like two worlds colliding: one that wants broad freedoms on the Internet and another that is of the opinion that the right not to be violated on the Net is very important.
And a defender of rights is what Tiziano Motti considers himself to be. He is the founder of the Europe of Rights movement with more than 100 000 members in Italy. Among the honorary members are several MPs, mostly from Silvio Berlusconi's party The People of Freedom. The movement aims to protect ordinary citizens' freedoms and rights.
How does the defence of citizens' rights go together with storing everyone's Google searches? "It doesn't", says Tiziano Motti.
He does not want to save all searches on the Net. "The proposal is actually about so-called 'content providers'; the people who let you put material on the Internet, such as Facebook, Youtube or blogging tools. They are the ones who should retain IP numbers, just like ISPs must do today according to the data retention directive.", he says.
Motti says that the debate is built on a misunderstanding of his initiative. However, the text is clear: "The European Parliament [...] Asks the Council and the Commission to implement Directive 2006/24/EC and extend it to search engines in order to tackle online child pornography and sex offending rapidly and effectively".
Why, then, did you write 'search engines' instead of 'content providers'? "I did t
Logic and reason are behind "think of the children." It's really "think of the profit losses." The corporations that cannot make a profit off the internet have decided to fundamentally change the nature of the internet itself to rig the game. When album sales aren't good they never think that maybe album sales drop when the economy is bad. They never take note of the fact that when the economy is doing good the album and movie sales rise. They only look at the internet as something they cannot control and they don't like it when you and your friends download mp3s or avi's. So they want to monitor the entire internet so they know who to sue.
While there are pedophiles and terrorists, the majority of individuals on the internet are not pedophiles or terrorists. In fact I'm willing to bet that less than 1% of people on the internet are pedophiles or terrorists. On the other hand probably more than half of the internet is downloading mp3s and avi's. And it's the very young college aged individuals who do this the most.
So what would the result of this surveillance be? More young people being punished and either locked up in prison or sued into even deeper debt. It's another way to keep young people in debt. I suppose if you were smart enough not to take out college loans, and smart enough not to use credit cards, you still might have been dumb enough to use bearshare or limewire.
It's ultimately not a solution to increase surveillance unless it's TRULY going to be done in a way that the results of this unlimited surveillance does not result in increased criminal prosecutions. If the increased surveillance is supposed to result in an increase in crime and an increase in criminal prosecutions, this means an increase in the amount of prisons being built, which means there will be a need to fill them up, and you'll have the same "War on Drugs" type of situation in Europe via these laws that the USA has.
Get ready to have a million + prisoners. If they are SERIOUS about going after terrorists then they need to limit the scope of when this technology can be applied. If they basically apply it to every kind of possible crime then the results will be obvious and this will be bad for the economy of Europe and for the "children." as they say.
Even if Hitler was 60+ years ago, he actually did try to take over the world. The talk about the pedophile elite on the other hand, what evidence do they have that this pedophile elite even exists? And even if it does exist somewhere, it's probably not going to be in the sort of numbers that would require this level of surveillance.
I know there are pedophiles, rapists, and generally sick individuals in the world. But most estimates are that it's less than 5% of the population. Even in prison it's less than 5% of prisoners. So we are getting into a frenzy over a fear that isn't based on any known statistics.
If they come out with a statistic that 20% of the people on the internet are rapists, pedophiles, terrorists, or just all around dangerous individuals, then maybe putting surveillance on the internet to protect the children makes sense. But to do this level of surveillance without there being millions of dangerous criminals, risks creating an environment where the technology itself and the political pressure PRODUCES the criminals AFTER the fact.
Do we expect them to built the technology, the prisons, and hire a bunch of cops, and not use it against us? Once the technology, the prisons, and the cops are in place, then it's just a matter of tweaking the laws so as to generate as many or as few criminals as they want.
That is the problem. The laws create the criminals, the technology and cops catch the criminals, and the prisons house them. Usually the technology comes first, then the prisons get built, then the cops get hired, and finally the laws are tweaked so that it looks like the cops are doing their jobs. The law gets tweaked for political reasons, think of the drug laws which were tweaked in the 80s and resulted in over a million prisoners in the USA.
I say we need to invert these things: the drinking age should be 16, the driving age 21. People should learn how to drink from their parents, and that includes how to drink at restaurants and bars, and teenagers should not be driving cars.
Palm trees and 8
At its finest. Citizens need no anonymity or privacy from their government, if they aren't doing anything wrong. And those that speak out and complain need to be investigated more closely as they are a threat to the stability of their government.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
One of the MEPs who started this initiative Mr Motti is an interesting figure. After the vote on the Telecoms package - one of the MEPs who initiated this topic - Mr Motti already foreshadowed his intentions:
Also notable is, how much he is is interested in anonymity and blogs:
In another speech Mr Motti also addressed freedom of speech in Italy, i guess this points in the same direction like what is happening currently in Italy regarding google.
On an ironic side note Mr Motti also seems to be highly interested in setting up cameras in kindergartens:
and
It's ironic, how someone fighting pedophilia wants to setup cameras in childcare centers.
all his debates are available, also his parliamentary questions
...if the Romans had had the power to seek out those who fail to keep their thoughts and speech within the bounds of what is condoned by "the State"? If the Romans had had the power that today's politicians seek? One message on the web, and John...Paul...all of 'em would have been crucified, right quick. Poof...no Christianity.
Fitting, that an Italian MEP should seek to be the new Pontius Pilot - V2.0, as it were. Or would he be 4.0, after Mao and Stalin?
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"