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EU "Clean IT" Project Considers Terrorist Content Database
schliz writes "Internet users could contribute to an official blacklist of suspected terrorist content under a budding 'Clean IT' project, backed by the European Commission. Participating governments are putting together 13 proposals in a text that commits web hosts, search engines and ISPs to helping to weed out content that incites acts of terror. From the article: 'Among those 13 courses of action is a proposal for a system that will allow users to "flag" content they believe to be illegal when surfing the web. These alarms would be sent for review to the service provider and in turn, a government agency.'"
All that is needed is malware that randomly flags sites. The amount of submissions would create so much noise the system would be unable to serve its purpose. Game over.
Users... the only thing keeping 1st level support from being the bottom feeders.
It's broken even without needing someone to write malware that abuses it.
Have you interacted with some of the people on the Internet? They're fucking insane already.
Giving them an opportunity to flag anything they disagree with for "governmental review" would result in them flagging just about everything.
If one, by way of a thought experiment, imagines that there existed a corrupt, secular, society ruled by satanic decadence, impious appetite, and foreign policy injustices, could it theoretically be argued that jihad would constitute a duty under certain historically extant strains of abrahamic divine command theories of ethics?
Flag or no flag, team EU?
In all seriousness, this seems like a dreadful idea both on just about every level.
Cultural? I'm trying to think of ways to make more of a mockery of the sort of Enlightenment ideals that Europe managed to produce at one time. I'm having a hard time thinking of one. Yeah, why not build a massive system of sniveling, anonymous censors in order to combat a 'threat' that kills fewer people than seasonal hot/cold snaps by at least an order of magnitude. Good plan there.
Practical? Well, let's see here: As with the relentless 'zOMG Craigslist prostitution!!!' moral panics, what better place for those who wish you harm than shouting about it on the internet? Highly visible, way less anonymous than it feels unless you really do it properly, and comparatively easy to see which fish are biting. You want to drive them away from the venues where your pet geeks can monitor at wire speed and into more clandestine locations where you need to groom human intelligence assets with convincing beards and accents? Dumbass.
Technical? Bots will probably be programmatically flagging things in order to downrank them more or less as enthusiastically as keyword comment spam is currently deployed to uprank things. Never mind the less relentless; but more dangerous and focused, potential for assorted political/commercial/psycho ex/psycho roommate drama.
Legal? Say hello to endless wrangling about what is and isn't 'incitement', most likely with clumsy overreactions against the harmless, clueless, and impolitic, along with free traffic in assorted slang, inuendo, and more or less subtle dog-whistle stuff.
This plan has holes that(where one to be so inclined) a truck bomb could be driven through...
From TFA:
“So why not try and create a database where internet companies can check it to see if it's known illegal material? There are many known YouTube videos, for example, with content like be-headings. You don’t need to watch them to know if they are illegal or not.”
So what is the answer? Is a beheading video illegal? Why? What is the law that makes a beheading video illegal? What happens if it's legal in one country, but not in another? Does this magic content filter know where a user is watching content? Is it illegal if it's in a depiction of a beheading from a movie? How about if I stage a fake beheading of my own in my back yard, but I claim it's real, is that illegal? Likewise, what if I post a beheading and claim it's fake.... but it's so well done, no one knows if it's fake or not. Is that illegal?
(I'm ignoring the obvious questions like, what happens if my movie promo with a fake beheading gets flagged as illegal (even if it's not), and now suddenly it's banned from the internet and I can no longer show my promo)
In the current economic crisis they really do not have anything better to do than create proposals which we know will not work, will not address the root causes of terrorism (which really is a negligible issue within the EU anyway) and which will add costs to IT companies? Way to get your priorities wrong.
The European Commission is the biggest mistake in the whole EU structure; unelected, not accountable and downright underhanded when dealing with legitimate opposition from the at least democratically elected European Parliament.
Captcha: "behead"... go figure...
Even the name sounds like White IT, another recent attempt to indroduce blacklists in Europe. Last time it was child porn, now it's the terrorists. This gets old fast.
And will the people doing this flagging be trained to know what is and what isn't illegal content? Didn't think so. I don't think the proponent of this idea has thought enough about the unintended consequences of such a capability.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
What could possibly go wrong?
and remember, whats illegal in X country, isn't illegal in Y country
Verily, verily.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6D1gpNbM1Eg
The point isn't to prevent terrorists. Governments create terrorists.
The point is to use terrorism as an excuse for censorship, in the same way terrorism is used as an excuse for resource wars and political oppression.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Of course they have. They found Facebook like buttons, Google +1 buttons, they like it and want in on the deal.
"Carefull there, I will +Terror your post. See you at Gitmo loser."
And that's why the girls don't like you.
Governments train, fund and supply arms to people with terrorist and criminal intentions. I don't know any gay people to did that to promote bigotry.
Governments create terrorists only in the sense that gay people create bigots.
let's not pretend that there are not some very real people out there who would and do kill and maim others to spread their way of life.
I hope you'll notice the irony in your comment...
Some governments might commit acts comparable to terrorism, but the supposedly insightful statement "The point isn't to prevent terrorists. Governments create terrorists." is a load of crap. When was the last time Norway went around killing people? And yet they had a bunch of children massacred all the same.
Terrorists exist independent of governments, and governments do want to prevent terrorist acts. To say otherwise is unbelievable dishonest.
You must have voted for Bush
"Internet users could contribute to an official blacklist of suspected communist content under a budding 'Clean IT' project, backed by the House Un-American Activities Committee . Participating representatives are putting together 13 proposals in a text that commits web hosts, search engines and ISPs to helping to weed out content that incites or advocates communism. From the article: 'Among those 13 courses of action is a proposal for a system that will allow users to "flag" content they believe to be communist when surfing the web. These alarms would be sent for review to the service provider and in turn, a government agency.'"
There, that adequately represents my feelings on the subject.
You should turn signatures off.
Resposible for multiple murders in Iraq, Afhganistan... oh the list is endless...
http://www.army.mod.uk/join/join.aspx
Openly recruiting via the internet !
Usually when illegal material is found on a server hosted by an Internet company and is removed,
If content can be illegal and be removed, the system is already broken.
So we shoud submit stuxnet and flame? That is THE definition of terrorist content that executes actions -- far more dangerous than the simple free exchange of ideas, even if offensive or morally wrong.
What's going to happen when the "wrong" kinds of terrorists start getting reported? What about when (n.b. not if) someone finds terrorists supported by a "friendly" (or possibly their own) government.
I thought those Fusion Centers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_center, were already doing this sort of thing?
Some Germans (me is one, however, I am not elegible I guess) should be especially qualified for this job.
Reminds me of my youth when my mother tended only to whisper fearing that someone could hear what was being talked about (During the 'Drittes Reich' a person with the fuction of 'Blockwart' was installed for every apartment building, spying on the renters.)
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Some governments might commit acts comparable to terrorism
Some governments, e.g. the US and UK, have been caught supporting, funding, even training terrorists. (Including turning a blind eye to them or releasing terrorist suspects from police custody.) Some governments, e.g. France, have been caught carrying out things which cannot be distinguished from those carried out by "terrorists".
And will the people doing this flagging be trained to know what is and what isn't illegal content?
Since ignorance of the law is not an excuse, everyone should know the law already ;)
I don't think the proponent of this idea has thought enough about the unintended consequences of such a capability.
Don't you already have a place online you can tip the police? I checked and here in Norway the police do. The categories listed there are:
- Hate speech
- Human trafficking
- Sexual exploitation of children
- Economic crime
- International crime
- Other crime
Nothing prevents me from taking an URL and pasting it in under any of these today. I suppose with a "flag this" button you save about 10 seconds of Googling, you don't need to hit Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V but apart from that I'd say the opportunity is there already today. Unless you want to automatically take down sites if it gets enough flags, that surely couldn't be abused in any way....
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Have you all not noticed a little flag next to each published comment. Where do you think your contact details go when I click it?
helping to weed out content that incites acts of terror.
Let's see, there's the bible, then the koran and all other forms of aggressive, conservative proselytizing religions including BTW scientology... then there's the right wing parties such as the nazis and the klan ...oh and climate change deniers...
But this would amount to a form of leaving these people alone amongst themselves. Isn't sunshine , mockery, debate, parody and shaming the best antiseptic in these cases?
I hope we can all agree that governments (or more correctly, states) are by far the dominant force that kill and maim people to spread a way of life. Whether they do this to empower the will of their peoples (spreading some regime, religion, etc.) or some ulterior motive is of course debatable. I think it's some mixture of both in all cases.
People like you are quick to point to a non-existent double standard that allegedly benefits Christianity, ignoring the fact that Christian violence toward Islam has almost always been either in self-defense or irredentist in nature. You ignore the fact that most of the land in the Middle East that is Muslim used to be Christian, Jewish or Zoroastrian; Syria, Lebanon and North Africa were predominantly Christian when conquered and forcefully converted by the Muslim Caliphate. Two hundred some years prior to the first Crusade, Muslims had marched up the Iberian Peninsula and were stopped in France by Charles Martel at the battle of Tours.
This has been the norm for Islam. Muslim armies were marching on Europe to annex and conquer-by-the-sword even into the Enlightenment period. That's how recent this unrelenting pattern of expansion-by-the-sword by Islam has been since the very beginning of Islam's power. But heaven forbid Christians fight back harshly or invade some minor provinces of the Islamic world to regain some of the ground taken by the sword.
"Christian jihad" is exempt from mainstream scrutiny because it is something that has never really existed. The closest moral equivocation that can be made is to compare a handful of anti-abortion extremists who use violence against what they believe to be cold-blooded murder of babies to a mass movement in the Islamic world that attacks people because of their religious beliefs and/or what their governments are doing.
The very reason they went to explore was to find an efficient trade route to India. Once they realized it wasn't India, they returned to gain new land and gold. It was imperialism, plain and simple.
The Spanish hardly conquered the Aztecs on their own strength. Do you really think 500 white guys with 15th and early 16th century muskets defeated the over 100,000 strong Aztech imperial army on their own strength and with the aid of Smallpox? Bullshit. When they marched into Tenochtitlan, they did so at the head of a multi-ethnic army composed of tens of thousands of soldiers recruited from the ethnic groups that were sick of being victims of Aztec sacrificial state terrorism.
The irony is that the treatment the Christian Spaniards gave them was far more humane than what the Muslims or some of the advanced pagan civilizations of antiquity would have given a people who practiced a religion as barbaric as the Aztec religion.
On a national level the same group previously used the old "child abuse" pretense to gain support for their plans to implement country-wide snooping systems and net filters.
The only real terrorists involved in this thing are such bastards who continuously try to undermine our civil liberties.
...the Jews, But I wasn't a Jew so I didn't speak up. Then they flagged the Communists, but I wasn't a Communist, so I didn't speak up... etc.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user