UK ISP Filter Will Censor More Than Porn

The UK's on-by-default censorship, as you might expect, presses with a heavy thumb: coolnumbr12 writes "The Open Rights Group spoke with several ISPs and found that in addition to pornography, users will also be required to opt in for any content tagged as violent material, extremist and terrorist related content, anorexia and eating disorder websites, suicide related websites, alcohol, smoking, web forums, esoteric material and web blocking circumvention tools. These will all be filtered by default, and the majority of users never change default settings with online services."

Comments

Esoteric material?

[Anonymous Coward]

So will it also block cult sects like scientology and other major religions like cristianity? How about homeopathy?

Re:Esoteric material?

[SuricouRaven]

It'll only block cults that are too small to sue in retaliation.

Re:Esoteric material?

[dintech]

extremist and terrorist related content

No doubt opting in for porn will get you on the 'special attention at MI5' list.

Re:Esoteric material?

[nosfucious]

"You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it."

"Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him"

I think it's very easy to make this all unworkable. Every and any website, publication, speech or media appearance of a supporter of net cencorship should be analysed to death. Any remote measure that would fall under the terms of the ban should be reported. Make sure the supporters of this ban are the first to feel its bite.

Most religious sites are easy game. Not one of the backers of this legislation will be pure as the driven snow and there has to be a reason for them to be banned. Then it is so easy to show inconsistencies and favouritism that the whole lot will be abolished because the responsible minister will look like an idiot.

I give it less that 12 months from the day of implementation until its fall.

Re:Esoteric material?

[gadget junkie]

extremist and terrorist related content

No doubt opting in for porn will get you on the 'special attention at MI5' list.

No. it will mark you as "normal", but with a less than ignorant approach to technology. Expect a movement to help people opt out of the filter altogether tough. If it happened here, I'd start one myself. Where in the world, except in the book "1984", the government decides what I am allowed to see? it only decides the media, anyhow: child pornography or else will not stop because Joe Soap does not see it by default. And the reasoning by which access to an uncontrolled internet is the fountainhead of social problem is beyond moronic, it's deceitful.

Re:Esoteric material?

[AmiMoJo]

You don't even have to submit a lot of material. Just leave comments arguing in favour of having sex with 9 years olds (because Mohammed did it so it must be okay, endorsed by God and all that). Then submit the site for blocking due to the comments. Should be possible to get most many pages on the BBC and various newspaper web sites banned that way.

Re:Esoteric material?

[jaseuk]

Known Child Porn is blocked by all or most UK ISPs anyway. There is no opt-out of this.

Jason.

Re:Esoteric material?

[lightknight]

It may look like incumbent interests, right or, as usual, wrong, are working to carve up the public's attention so that they can remain in power...because they are.

If you tell them that normal people don't need 'their protection'...well, they manufacture circumstances where a public outcry occurs to prove you wrong. In short, they are people who need to feel needed...by taking care of someone else, preferably seen as less capable / intelligent than themselves, so that their selfless nature (need for attention) may be more publicly seen. Lol, I remember when they taught Christians to do good acts, and tell no one, so that God would have something nice to inform others of when they came to lampoon you...I suppose that went out of style at some point, or perhaps the culture has become so political that not walking around proclaiming that you have done something 'selfless' that day for someone else is grounds for others gathering stones.

It's almost as if these types do not see any inherent worth in themselves...nor do they understand the damaging effects of their actions, the false prison they've placed themselves in, or that they must, at some point, let the children make their own decisions and abide by those consequences...much like how their parents, and their parents before them, sat them on the proverbial throne (or behind the steering wheel of dad's priceless Mustang), guided their hand as needed, but let them understand that this is what it's like to be in charge (it's going to be scary, you're going to have to grow up, and you will, in time, have to make a lot of decisions which, love it or hate it, you will remember and wonder for the rest of your life if there wasn't a better way). The first time you get into a car accident, no one is Mr. Cool...not your parents, not your grand-parents, etc. The fifth time you get into one it will still be nerve-wracking ("Am I cursed?"), but you will at least be able to get the appropriate information out of the glove box, and move your car out of the way of oncoming vehicles...before accessing the realistic damage to the car (sheet metal looks bad, but cleans up strangely well with a rubber hammer....things look worse than they are...usually).

Re:Esoteric material?

[SuricouRaven]

Be fair to him: It was a political marriage, and he did manage to postpone the sex - she was six or seven when they married. By the standards of the time, eleven wasn't shockingly young - people didn't live as a long, so there was a lot of pressure to start breeding as soon and as many as possible.

He'd be a pedophile by the standards of our time, and we'd lock him up for at least a few decades. But by t his own culture, this was really nothing exceptional. Political marriage to children was a common practice, and girls/women were generally considered ready for breeding at their first period - the point at which they were known to be fertile.

It is true that in many Islamic countries, Aisha and the 'if Mohammed did it' argument are used to justify very low age of consent laws. Egypt was discussing a proposed law that would have reduced the age of consent for both sex and marriage for girls to 9 (or 11, it wasn't decided) in line with Aisha, until recent events left their legislative processes on hold.

Re:Esoteric material?

[Patch86]

Indeed, young marriages were common in Medieval Europe far later than Mohammed's time. Mohammed died in 632 AD. Take this list of marriages from some random website:

Bianca of Savoy, Duchess of Milan was married aged 13yo (1350), and aged 14yo when she gave birth to her eldest son, Giangaleazzo (1351).
Theodora Comnena was aged 13yo when she was married King Baldwin III of Jerusalem (1158).
Agnes of France was 12yo when, widowed, she was married to Andronicus Comnenus, Byzantine Emperor (1182).
St Elizabeth of Portugal was aged 12yo when she was married to King Denis of Portugal and gave birth to three children shortly thereafter.
Caterina Sforza was betrothed aged 9yo, married aged 14yo, and gave birth aged 15yo.
Lucrezia Borgia was married to her first husband aged 13yo and bore a son within a few years.
Beatrice d'Este was betrothed aged 5yo and married aged 15yo.

And that's us "civilised Christian folk". Racism is a subtle creature...

Figured this might happen

[Goose In Orbit]

Though most people are still too busy cooing over the royal baby to notice...

Re:Figured this might happen

[Godwin O'Hitler]

I'm not sure royal babies are rich enough in content to keep a whole nation cooing for long.
I'm sure most people probably won't even notice or care anyway regardless.

When I was with O2 in the UK five years ago these things were already opt-in.

Nanny state. Pan. Water. Frog. Heat.

Re:Figured this might happen

[gweihir]

Most people are stupid. That is what budging totalitarian regimes usually ride in on. The Nazis, for example, promised jobs (and did create them) and everybody besides the few that were actually looking at what these guys stood for was happy. The British government now promises a "clean" Internet and everybody is happy, besides those that actually understand what censorship is and how hugely dangerous it is. But people remain stupid, despite ample examples from history. And the enemies of freedom use that and move in slowly.

Opt in??

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know how you do it, but I "opt in" by sending a page request in the form of a URL.

"Web forums"

[eexaa]

...seriously?

On the other hand, more stuff they block, more users will opt out. I guess it can easily become a "traditional first thing you do with Internet", like removing IE and installing fox/chrome is now.

Re:"Web forums"

[SuricouRaven]

I'd argue that Facebook is many times more dangerous to children than pornography.

Re:"Web forums"

[Zemran]

Anyone that uses Facebook must be a terrorist and should burn...

We will start with a simple test where we tie their hands and feet and throw them in the river. If they float they must be a terrorist and we must burn them. Simple.

Re:"Web forums"

[Anonymous Coward]

Not later, now!

Cameron has already stated that the list should be available to police and Social Services.

Social Services have said they would like to use the list to determine custody of children.

Re: "Web forums"

[gl4ss]

No, no, no. Go RTFA. In fact just go look at the picture in the article. Violence, et al, is in the same group of settings as porn and the others but it is not one opt-in for all the categories listed in the summary. Each category has its own opt-in.

that's actually much worse. profiling.

Re:"Web forums"

[AmiMoJo]

Facebook's minimum age for signing up is 13, so there is a pretty good case for adding it to the list of blocked by default sites. At the very least there is a vast amount of hate material and pornography on individual pages which could be submitted.

Re:"Web forums"

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd question how, rationally and with a sane mind, pornography is *at all* dangerous to children.

I have yet to see a sane answer not based on oppressive tactics invented by churches to perform eugenics on religious schizophrenics. (Who gets to have or even think about sex and who doesn't: Only those "married" do. And only if the church approves it, is it "marriage". At least that was the plan. And since everything else that's sex-related is a "sin", everyone is a sinner, and everybody has to "repent". Aka obey or be punished.)

Hell, I know of tribes where big sex orgies in the village center were a regular occurrence used for all kinds of reasons, much like parties are in the "western" world. And kids would run around the outskirts, and playfully imitate the grown-ups.
Am I the only one who thinks that's cute and so stunningly natural and healthy?

I mean, who else, apart from a religious nutjob who repressed his sexuality, to the point of being basically a compulsive predator, would think of child abuse in that situation?

Re:"Web forums"

[dlingman]

So when exactly did the Usenet Cabal get into British politics? Who else would want the end of web forums, and be subtle enough to slip it into the middle of a list of bad stuff?

What a surprise

[El_Muerte_TDS]

And in the future years it will also include sites critical of the government, large corporations, etc.

Re:What a surprise

[Savage-Rabbit]

And in the future years it will also include sites critical of the government, large corporations, etc.

The UK introduced the European Convention and it's freedom of expression guarantees into it's Human Rights Act. Then they added a whole legion of exceptions to freedom of expression such as:

• - Threatening, abusive or insulting words or behavior.
• - Causing alarm or distress or causing a breach of the peace.
• - Sending somebody an object deemed indecent or offensive with the intention to cause distress.
• - Inciting racial or religious hatred.
• - Inciting and encouraging terrorism.
• - Possessing information likely to be useful to a terrorist.
• - Imagining the death of the monarc.
• - Advocating the abolition of the monarchy.
• - Sedition.
• - Obscenity and Indecency.

So with all these exceptions the conservatives do not seem to be stepping outside of any legal framework here. Many other European countries have at least some of these exceptions on the books as well as ones on trade secrets, copyrighted material etc. but It is pretty rare to see a government in a democratic western country actually implement across the board opt-out censorship of most or all of the things listed above. They usually content themselves with a subset. Regulation of many cases of things like indecency and obscenity usually happens on a case for case basis through the courts when somebody feels the line has been crossed. Other things on that list seem unenforceable, such as 'imagining the death of the monarch' (seriously?) and 'advocating the abolition of the monarchy'. I know a whole bunch of Britons who'd love to abolish the monarchy and are not afraid to advocate it. Basically the conservatives are testing the limits of the exceptions in the Human Rights act and are using porn as an excuse to get censorship in place. It will be interesting to see what happens if this gets dragged into the UK supreme court. It's also interesting to see the conservatives, who usually can't shut up about how they represent liberty and the free market and how the political left represents the nanny state, turn around and do something like this. I can't imagine many things that you can do that stink more strongly of the nanny-state than this which makes the tories guilty of a massive hypocrisy. Even more interesting is that TFA points out that the HomeSafe system singled out by Cameron is actually operated by Huawei, I take it that I don't have to explain to people here why this is also a massive hypocrisy. The only thing that remains is what to call this thing? Cameron's firewall? Limes Ignis Britannicus?

Re:What a surprise

[BobTheLawyer]

That post is not remotely correct.

Some of the items on the list are laws enacted after the Human Rights Act, but they are not exceptions to it - the Human Rights Act has priority.

Others - sedition and advocating the abolition of the monarchy - were criminal offences two hundred years ago, but there have been no prosecutions in recent times and the courts have acknowledged that the idea any prosecution would survive an HRA challenge is "unreal" (see Lord Steyn's judgment in the ex parte Rushbridger case).

Just like 1984.

[bejiitas_wrath]

The ministry of truth will define what is allowable content and which is not. This using the Royal baby as a distraction to implement totalitarian control of the Internet. Just waint until they start blocking all "unwanted" content.

Re:Just like 1984.

[SuricouRaven]

With conspiracy theorists you must remember that, occasionally, they are actually right.

A year ago it would have looked like paranoid rambling if someone claimed the US government was secretly tracking every phone call and email, and could intercept any communication they wanted at will without any warrant or accountability. Turned out, the conspiracy theorists were spot on. They just didn't realise the British and French governments were helping.

The idea of announcing something very unpopular on a day when an event of great media coverage is certainly established. That trick has been used many times before. I don't know if it was deliberate in this case, but it's certainly possible - there is no evidence the filter speech was scheduled more than one day in advance, and Cameron must have read the opinion polls and know his filtering is actually quite unpopular.

The idea that the filter could be subject to 'scope creep' is also quite plausible too. After all, there are many things that various parties would like to see censored, for entirely well-intentioned reasons. Once the filtering is in place, it would be quite easy to pass a new regulation requiring blocks also be applied to sites giving instruction on suicide techniques, for example. Again, it would be justified as 'protecting children.' It should also be remembered that even if the current government is to be trusted, there is no assurance it will still be in power in ten or twenty years - Hitler came to power democratically via his political skill, and it could happen again in any country, so even a well-intentioned and well-administered filter could potentially be abused for political oppression in the more distant future. Note that China, known for their extensive political filtering operations, justify their 'golden shield' by claiming its first purpose is to protect public morality against the dangerous influences of pornography.

Re:What one has...

[SuricouRaven]

The USA doesn't have universal health care. What you have at the moment is a system where everyone (almost) will have some level of health insurance coverage - but they still have to get their healthcare paid for by companies that continue to profit by doing everything they can to avoid paying for it.

Schools And Universities

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a school governor here in the UK. We will not be in a position to 'Opt Out' of this blocking for our School'. I expect it to be the same for universities. I would also image that Corporate Governance would find it very difficult to opt out too. So just forget the internet at all those places.

Re:What one has...

[Zemran]

Not letting poor people die of preventable illnesses vs. censorship?

Point one, America is no where near getting the health care options that the UK has. A good free system as well as excellent private options. Or to simplify that, the US does not have any health care options that are not available in the UK but the UK does have health care options that are not available in the US.

Second point, the UK is going to filter it, bad, the US spies on its people and will arrest you for accessing it, worse.

Point two has a lot of scope for discussion but do not start propaganda from Fox News.

How will this be sold?

[longk]

Will they continue to call these connections "Internet" connections? At what point does it really become an "Intranet"?

Re:This is the fucking Nanny state

[peragrin]

How can the people of the USA stand idly by while the NSA snoops through their personal files by the minute?

How can the people of the USA stand idly by while the TSA has the authority to search your car while your not there.(see Rochester NY about a month ago)

How can the people of the USA stand idly by while the Border Patrol are allowed to randomly inspect and any within 150 miles of the border at any time without a warrant?(again in NY)

All those things have been done in the USA in the last two years.

(Un)forseen beneficial side-effect

[HetMes]

UK's citizen becoming experts on web technology, encryption and obfuscation in 3... 2... 1... I mean, take a man's porn away and he'll build a rocket to Mars to get it.

I see what they're doing

[magpie]

The ISPs don't want to implement this as it will cost them money to run so what they are doing is stymieing it by putting everything that could possibley be non-child friendly on the filtered list. Thus making the net largly usless to the majority of adults, thus getting everyone to opt out and then they can say to the gov, "look we implemented it, infact we went beyond what you asked". As almost everyone opted out they can put most of the kit they had tied up running this to more profitable use.

Re:What one has...

[SuricouRaven]

About 2004: http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/october2004/291004toystore.htm

The DHS enforces patent and trademark law. The official justification is that patents are vital to US economic prosperity, prosperity is part of national security, therefore patent infringement is a threat to national security.

removing of the filtering can be an embarrasment.

[blackest_k]

Opting out of filtering isn't easy,
I use 3 mobile and after several years of unfiltered content began hitting the blocks fairly regularly and not because of porn.

With the rather extended winter in Ireland the traditional start of spring and the gardening calender is 17th of March but this year the cold miserable weather continued through to May. One area I looked into was grow lights and thats where I started to run into blocks, as the greatest source of information on grow lights are cannabis growers. The filter provider, who ever that is, obviously thinks its impossible for an adult to want to investigate grow lights for anything else.

In my youth i might have been interested but as an older adult with little interest in fecking up my life any further not really. I just wanted to have a nice garden.

So then I went to the phone shop for 3 and asked about getting these blocks removed, having to deal with 20 something women and being the typical neck beard geek wanting the porn filter removed it was pretty obvious what they thought of me and what I wanted the filter removing for. Being the type not to give a crap what anyone thinks of me I jumped through the hoops, I had to provide Id they had to get in touch with the area managers office for his/her personal approval and it was something nobody had asked them for before apparently. Eventually the middle aged pervert got the filters lifted on his internet access.

The real problem with internet filtering is the blocking of any and all sites deemed to be unsuitable. I'm an adult I can make my own choices. Is my aged mother going to jump through hoops so she can get an unfiltered connection? I don't think so and who else who cares about their reputation will stand up to these tactics.

The wholesale blocking and censoring of objectionable material is fundamentally wrong because what is objectionable for the censors will never match up with what people being censored want and need to know. Even if 95% of what is blocked we have no interest in its the other 5% which matters.

I would be surprised to think that many people on this site wouldn't have long been aware that we are monitored and censored already, just mostly unobtrusively. It doesn't make a big difference if your not interested in becoming a terrorist or criminal.

Unfortunately the public outing of Prism seems to be not causing a retreat on the states attempt to control our access to information but instead a more overt approach. To be honest there is little we can do about it, we change our political leaders of one shade to another and you'd have to be an idiot to think that the surveillance and censorship ever recedes with a change of office.

Maybe a fringe party might change something if they ever got any power but that will never happen while the majority of people are apathetic to whats going on. Doesn't help that most fringe parties are usually complete loons over some core value which right minded people will never accept.

There is a chance that the "Porn" filters will not hold, there is a more liberal society, we don't twitch behind the net curtains like our parents generation who are long retired. May be enough people will opt out of filtering if they realise that its necessary to resist the decay of our freedoms to think and make our own informed choices. The wisdom of age, tends to be to keep your head down, work hard and don't get noticed but with popular public support from the younger generations the older generations may quietly revolt too.

Hey! What happened?!?

[tlambert]

Hey! What happened?!?

I ticked the "block intolerance" checkbox, and now I can't reach the web filter configuration page any more!

Cultural Anomaly?

[painehope]

The last time I was working in the UK, I was assigned a small house as my temporary residence. Where I did not have cable TV, yet at almost any time of the day I could find a nude or semi-nude figure of either sex doing something (generally streaking). My coworkers took 4 hour "pub lunches". I spent the nights pub-crawling with them (until I started wandering into the more "dangerous" parts of town to drink and pick up women - to someone from Houston, London doesn't have a ghetto). I generally woke up mildly hungover next to a woman somewhere between 18 and 36 who may or may not have been rescued from a freak show (depending on how much I'd drank). After kicking her out with taxi fair and a half-hearted promise to call, I stumbled over to the nearby Underground station and got a breakfast and cup of tea that, between the two, clogged my arteries to the point of failure and then rocketed everything back into place.

After which I'd go into work for 10 hours. On smoke breaks, I could enjoy the nude girls from the Sun or whatever that had been pasted all over the smoking area. The only time anyone looked at me funny is if I mentioned my firearms collection back home.

How did the British go from a relatively hard-drinking, smoking, swearing, fucking, nude, fighting-in-pubs, generally relaxed culture (I actually had a cop ask me nicely to throw up in a trash can once - in the U.S. I'd have at least spent the night in jail, possibly been in a fight and gotten tasered about four to eight times [it would help if I stayed down, I suppose]) to this? It just doesn't make sense from my experience...

Forums include slashdot by the way. This is a good

[serviscope_minor]

When I got 3G on my phone, I had to call them to unblock the porn filters because I wanted to read slashdot. Seriously. It is blocked as a forum and therefore "adult material". I've never downloaded porn on my phone.

Oddly though the mobile ISPs only filtered data being displayed on the phone, plugging it in and having it presented as a CDC modem device and connecting over PPP went through a different machanism and did not cause filtering. That's a curious aside.

The reason that it is a good thing that everything of interest will be blocked is that it massively removes the stigma from getting it unblocked.

While the whole thing is full of stupidity, if it's so stupid then there is less useful information to have on people if they unblock. This (or a massive U turn) is the best we can hope for.