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Leaked Letter Shows UK ISPs and Government At War Over Default Filters
An anonymous reader writes, quoting the BBC: "A letter sent to the UK's four leading ISPs from the government has made them very cross indeed. The letter comes from the Department for Education but it sets out a list of demands from Downing Street, with the stated aim of allowing the prime minister to make an announcement shortly. The companies are asked, among other things, for a commitment to fund an 'awareness campaign' for parents. They're not particularly happy about promising cash for what the letter concedes is an 'unknown campaign' but it's the next item on the menu which is the source of most of their anger."
That next item is making and marketing Internet censorship filters as "default-on" rather than "active choice": "'It sounds like a good idea until you think it through,' said one industry source. 'There are three reasons why it doesn't work. First it may be illegal under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers. Then there's the fact that no filter is perfect, and finally kids are smart enough to find their way around them.'" From the sound of it, it might just be newspeak vs newspeak. The entire letter is included in the article.
This is what you got when a nation-wide filtering system is created in the first place. Not satisfied with merely blocking the pedo-porn they went after the pirates and now they want to go after everything not whitelisted. It only gets worse from here guys, kill the national filter system dead before it grows, kill it before it grows.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Let me guess: all good and dandy until some parents will sue the ISP for "having their kids accidentally exposed by a hole the filter" (as in "letting the kid find a way to bypass the filter and try get some money from the ISP").
Then the idea of "default-on filter" will be busted for good (or, alternatively, the Internet as seen by UK will look like a puny list of white listed sites, all the others censored).
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
It'll start out banning porn, or so they'll claim, but pretty soon things like Wikileaks will be included on the blacklist with the general public never noticing.
No automatic filter works better than actual parenting...
"level it may not be too bad."
What would the UK gov like to memory hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_hole ?
Some past stories that would be so tempting to just filter down just a bit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharine_Gun
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakeknife
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/30/iraq-torture-allegations-uk-military-investigations-reopened
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2163799/UK-soldiers-beat-innocent-Iraqi-men-black-ops-jails-new-secret-justice-law-means-torture-hidden-forever.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/24/undercover-officers-police-chief-met
http://www.information-age.com/technology/mobile-and-networking/123457043/ee-and-ipsos-mori-face-privacy-backlash-over-mobile-data-analysis
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/9750403/MI6-codebreaker-Gareth-Williams-probably-locked-himself-into-sports-bag.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/9337175/Soldiers-sacked-days-before-pension-date.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2127453/M16-1m-bribe-silence-torture-victim-Spies-gave-dissident-Gaddafi-thugs.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/11/gchq-staff-war-crimes-drones
With some "filter controls" for a few days after publication and pay walls long term, an individual in the UK could have their news just reshaped a bit long term.
Ideas like the http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2013/jun/14/what-are-secret-courts will shut the press out from some UK court reporting.
This mass filter idea might be the next step.
Australia shows the mission creep eg just for a few suspected fraud sites.
http://delimiter.com.au/2013/05/16/global-eyes-are-watching-eff-condemns-australias-new-internet-filter/
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
To make it clear, anyone who believes this filter will stop at porn or to protect children is on cloud 7.
This push is not about that. It is to apply a filter to content that the government can not control. The filter is here the goal. And any means is just to get popular opinion to support it.
Once this filter is in place the scope will increase incrementally, with every new legislation round. Copyright holders will push to include sites like ThePirateBay, never mind TPB is listing a lot of legal torrents; it will include radio streams that somehow slipped paying the PPL;
Later of course the filter will include "terrorists sites". And more later any critics and articles on the government politics and programs, that are deemed crucial "national security", like the Snowden leaks.
The press like the Guardian have rights like freedom of the press. But the Internet does not have any rights. There is no right to Twitter or to Blog.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
Your government says "If you have nothing to fear if......" Wait, they given us rather a lot to fear haven't they.