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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)
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
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.
"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.
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.
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.
While you are remembering that, also remember that getting extradited from country X to country Y for something that you did while being a citizen and residing in X is a distinct possibility these days. Of course, it's only true for one particular country Y, and a somewhat limited set of Xs (for now), but even so.