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UK Government Wants "Unsavory" Web Content To Be Removed

Posted by samzenpus on from the won't-somebody-please-think-of-the-children? dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The UK minister for immigration and security, James Brokenshire has called for the government to do more to deal with 'unsavoury', rather than illegal, material online. 'Terrorist propaganda online has a direct impact on the radicalisation of individuals and we work closely with the internet industry to remove terrorist material hosted in the UK or overseas,' Brokenshire told Wired.co.uk in a statement."

3 of 250 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Too bad. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Been in the UK in the last 50 years? They've got ludicrous bureaucracies for *everything*. There are reasons that "1984" and "V for Vigilante" were set there, and that London has the highest percentage of government mandated CCTV/capita. Note also that they don't actually *use* the CCTV's to fight crime. They use them for bureaucratic monitoring, such as insisting that people pay the tax for cars in London, or that they park correctly. They're not used for pickpocketing, luggage theft, or even prosecuting vandals. (Those personal crimes are not considered "important enough" to justify checking the video records. Been there, done that.)

    Having yet another bureaucracy means more control of political discussion, pure and simple.

  2. Oh yeah, wasn't that the filter... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...designed by an advisor who was later arrested for CP?

    ...in a country whose government has collected a million pictures of naked Americans cyber-webcamming on Yahoo?

    ...that has one surveillance camera for every 11 people in the country?

    ...whose brilliant standards of morality lead to the persecution and destruction of everyone from Oscar Wilde to Alan Turing?

    Fuck you, James Brokenshire. How's that for unsavory?

  3. Re:headline != article by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The minister is not a bureaucrat. I can't tell whether you don't know what a "bureaucrat" is, or whether you don't understand the UK's political structure

    James Brokenshire is a politician. So a bunch of people vote for James, rather than the other options they were given, to represent them in the Commons, the elected part of the Parliament of the UK. Then, David Cameron - also a politician, and the leader of the biggest political party in the Commons, thus Prime Minister - selected James to be in charge of immigration and security. The actual people running immigration and security are all bureaucrats, but the guy at the top of the pile, deciding what to do, rather than doing it is the Minister, James, who is a politician.

    Now, "immigration and security" has bugger all to do with the Internet, so you are correct that James' opinion is not magically UK Government policy, but it's a mistake to say he's just a "bureaucrat". James gets to make policy, albeit not directly on this subject.