Slashdot Mirror
EU Debates Installing a Black Box On Your Computer
bs0d3 writes "EU MEP Tiziano Motti (Italy), wants everything you do online to be logged and saved, for the sake of the children. Like a black box installed on every computer. He proposes an early warning system of criminal activity, specifically whenever an image of sexually abused children is detected, an alarm, goes to the authorities to be able to see who uploaded it. Tiziano Motti was a politician who just over a year ago managed to get a majority of European Members of Parliament to support the proposal to expand the data storage directive to Google searches. The purpose was to protect children from pedophiles — the same excuse he is using now. His proposal involves a technology called Logbox. And just as with an aircraft's black box, Logbox is installed on computers, laptops, smartphones, and e-readers because yes, all that can be connected to the internet."
Fuck you!
Would someone from Italy like to explain why you voted this authoritarian cunt into the EU. Go on! I'd love to hear it!
"Welcome to our world. We are the wasted youth. And we are the future too." Yes, I know these are stupid lyrics.
Studies have shown a negative correlation between the availability of porn and rape cases. IIRC this is also the case specifically with CP and child rape. If anything, this will make it worse for the children.
Not to mention the problems with a software based solution. The software will, of course, only run on certain operating systems, who is the government to mandate I purchase a particular operating system/or agree to a contract (e.g. the GPL)? Anyone who knows what they are doing can get around this anyway. Even if it calls home, it could be faked by using a VM.
I dream of a nation where a man is not judged by his skin color but by an number assigned by a credit rating agency.
FTFA:
If it were China, North Korea or Saudi Arabia who had proposed this, what would we say then? It's scary in a democratic Europe to even hear a politician suggest such a thing. It is so absurd that I really hope we never have to discuss it seriously in Parliament.
-MEP Lars Christian Engstrom (Sweden)
The proposal claims to be based on users' rights and claims they are protected, that they should feel safe. He writes at the beginning that he did not want to create a new Big Brother Society. But then the whole document is about just that.
-Former Piratbyran founder and current telecomix hactivist Marcin de Kaminski
Like Members of Congress in the USA, EU MEPs come in all shapes, sizes, and states of sanity. This guy's just flying a kite, but any such law would apply the the MEPs too, and you can assume some of them have skeletons in their hard drives. Fuhgeddabouttit.
(this is not a
... EU MEP Tiziano Motti (Italy) can't tell the difference between desktop PCs, laptops, smartphones and e-readers. Like most of the politicians anyway. Six or seven years ago in Greece some morons (a.k.a. the parliament majority) voted for a law to prohibit electronic gambling - On their way, they made Internet Cafés illegal as well as coin-up arcade games. It was fun to watch the police bust into Internet Cafés and arrest their owners just because they had 5-6 desktops PCs connected to the Internet.
Even if this were not grossly misused(which would surely happen), with this in place the child molesters will figure out that actually molesting children is less likely to get them caught than child porn. Making an incentive to do it for real instead of looking at it...
OK, this is Slashdot but 1 MEP suggests something, and it becomes "EU Debates Installing a Black Box On Your Computer". No one is debating anything !! (Unless TFA says more: it is currently Slashdotted.)
So if someone wants to research on the subject of child porn (not search for it, but search for information about it), and therefore enters that term into Google, he will cause an alarm at the police. Yeah, that makes perfectly sense. And of course they have the perfect algorithm to detect whether a photo shows an abused child. So it will never trigger if you e.g. send a holiday photo of your child at the beach to a friend.
And of course, that box will never be used for any other purpose. Well, OK, they'll probably will soon add terrorist triggers, because terrorists are very bad, too. Don't complain about the police knocking on your door, you just shouldn't have used the word "terror" when you referred to the experience with your ex. Oh, and copyright violations for sure are also a target to be added soon. Oh, and since it is installed everywhere anyway, why not use it also for criminal investigations? And of course the secret service should have access to it. And it would surely come in handy for finding whistleblowers ...
Ah, and if it's already there, why not add more functionality? Maybe not just report, but also block unwanted content? After all, it's bad stuff you want to be blocked. And of course it will never block legitimate but unwanted stuff ...
And of course pedophiles, terrorists, copyright violators etc. won't ever find a way around it. Sure.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Wait, you are putting pedophiles in the same category as pagans, Jews, witches, anarchists, gays and communists. Terrorists, Christians and Muslims though...
Children are sure going to hate life when they become adults and these black boxes were installed "for their protection" during a brief phase of their lives.
Both this Slashdot story and TFA have a very misleading title. ONE MEP is thinking about this insane idea. It is not even in Parliament for discussion. Another MEP already vehemently spoke against it.
Come on, ideas like these pop up and fizz out all the time. I bet there are other MEPs thinking about imprisoning gay people, reinstating a theocracy, establishing re-education centers, idolizing Hitler and Stalin, and so on and so forth. That doesn't mean any of these wacky ideas come through. There are no indications that this one will.
Plus, it is not technically feasible, even with deep packet inspection. To connect the dots, to know who uploaded what where, is far from trivial, especially if the bad scary pedophile uses non-standard ways of transmitting this data. For example, what if he uses zip files? Also, there is encryption, which totally defeats this "logbox".
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
1984 is not a manual for politicians.
Hitler is back, in Brussels,. But don't worry. What could possibly go wrong ?
One out of over seven hundred MEPs, one out of over seven hundred members of a body with very little real power within the EU, one man says something technologically illiterate and Slashdot runs for the hills for fear of Blackshirts and deathcamps?
Your post is absurd, absurd, hysterical and absurd. But thank you for keeping the world safe from totalitarianism. It's the thought (well, not thought, in this case... sentiment, perhaps) that counts....
P.S. Never, under any circumstances, watch C-SPAN. Your terror will know no bounds.
Yes - you will, and Big Brother will be watching you.
Don't forget that this can easily be changed to also take care of political opinions and just about everything.
All while the criminals will find out that you can circumvent the filters one way or another.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
The people who actually molest kids are those with easy access to them. most cases of abuse are from moms, dads, stepmoms, aunts and uncles, sometimes even a teacher. They don't care if you monitor their computer because they don't need one to get what they're after. No amount of computer monitoring or demonizing things that are even tangentially related to kiddie porn will prevent or even slow down actual cases of actual abuse.
These laws are about removing people from society who don't have a "healthy" sexual attitude. That's why drawings are illegal in many places. Because it's not about reducing abuse, it's about people making themselves feel less uncomfortable about their own sexuality. In my own country, the people here are absolutely bat shit crazy when it comes to sexuality. They fear it, and they hate people who have a different attitude about it than they do. My generation is the first where simply being gay is not a crime. Hell at this point I can see things at the beach that would be illegal on my computer. There have even been people investigated for looking at porn of adults who are young looking. And if you let yourself get wrapped up in this paranoia you are helping no one and hurting everyone, including yourself.
And this needs to be said:
I would rather live in a world where occasional child abuse happens, than one where it never happens because we're all under constant surveillance.
Yep. Somebody needs to ask him why there aren't video cameras in politician's houses/offices so we can watch them and prevent corruption.
Lead us by example!
No sig today...
Forgive me for being a bit rude, but I woke up to this article. Mr. Motti, considering the reputation your PM has been gathering I must say screw you.
I am at the point I am no longer phased by the phrase "think of the children". All of this to protect kids? Dear god, at this point you might as well just take all the kids away from their parents in the hospital and raise them completely isolated from adults. Maybe even other kids so they don't even know what kids look like to be turned on by them.
An image of a child being abused? I mean, obviously this guy has no clue about technology. Still, he did not research prior censorship attempts first? The whole Green Dam (or was it River) of China's blocking a website for showing too much skin was horribly broken. Should Europeans expect their equivalent of SWAT Teams to start charging in if they look up pig farming?
And... and... *double face palms and sighs* Why the hell are politicians so apt to look at 1984 and like books as guides rather than warnings?
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
"Excuse my french," is a saying that indicates "I'm going to/have just sworn, please don't get mad/offended." It isn't literal.
I just mailed this to tiziano.motti@europarl.europa.eu:
And I mean it!
How about you?
But what will we do when all the politicians are dead?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
But what will we do when all the politicians are dead?
There will be much rejoicing.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
You make no distinction between the 19 year old who went out and had sex with a 17 year old girl, and the rapist who likes to grab little boys and anally rape them?
17? The age of consent where they're considering this black box, Italy, is 14
"The age of consent in Italy is 14 years, with a close-in-age exception that allows those aged 13 to engage in sexual activity with partners who are less than 3 years older. The age of consent rises to 16 if one of the participants has some kind of influence on the other (e.g. teacher, tutor, adoptive parent)."
Teachers can legally have sex with their 16 year old students. Wow, in the US you'd get 20 years for that.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Sure. It's only recently that pedophilia has been demonized. It was actually a custom in ancient Greece and Rome. Having been a victim of rape myself at age 5, I can't say I stand up for pedophilia. However when I see people accusing each other for non sexual images of children (like the old Coppertone ad, for example), cartoon images (like say, Lisa Simpson), or for statutory rape when say an 18 year old goes out with a 17 year old, I just have to shake my head and conclude that people are over-reacting and not sane. There's a difference between feeling sexual attraction for a 16 year old girl in a tight bikini and raping a 4 year old child. If people can't see this then they are not much better.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
NO, because it will be a box attatched to/inside your computer that will log what you do on the Internet that the police can access when they suspect you of supporting the opposition party....I mean, of acessing kiddie porn (of course, we all know that the opposition party websites are havens for kiddie porn).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Ah yes, beautiful government, where two legal adults cannot legally have sex with each other without express permission from some old fat bastard hundreds or thousands of miles away....
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Adolf Hitler, Mien Kampf:
"The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people.
As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children,
the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation."