Calls For European ISPs To Filter Content Could Be Illegal

jfruh writes Last week, justice ministers from EU countries called for ISPs to censor or block certain content in the "public interest." But a legal analysis shows that such moves could actually violate EU privacy laws, since it would inevitably involve snooping on the content of Internet traffic to see what should be blocked.

Comments

Freedom of speech should be paramount

[Anonymous Coward]

It drive me nuts that the European Convention on Human Rights makes censorship so easy. Article 10 starts off so well:

Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.

But it then proceed to open the door to all sort of restrictions:

The exercise of these freedoms... may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.

Man, you can drive a truck through that. "for the protection of morals" - whose morality? Who defines it? "for the protection of the reputation or rights of others" - what the hell does that mean?

We need to resist this creeping censorship - stomp on it whenever some idiotic politician brings it up.

Re:I hope it works

[skovnymfe]

They don't actually block content. If you use your ISP provided DNS service then lookup requests for certain domain names will be hijacked, and redirect to a "This page done bad" website.

As the article states, actually blocking content requires snooping on content and that's not just expensive, it's legality is questionable. As such, if you want to torrent and whatnot, you are still free to switch to a public, unfiltered DNS service á la Google or OpenDNS.

Re:I hope it works

[TheRaven64]

Depends. It's only snooping if they do it for recursive DNS lookups or DNS cache queries to third parties. If you set your DNS to 8.8.8.8 (Google's public DNS server) or OpenDNS or similar, then modifying this requires inspecting (and hijacking) traffic intended for a third party. Most of the time, however, users will have their DNS config set to whatever DHCP provides, which means that queries will go to an ISP's server. This doesn't require any interception or inspection of traffic, it just requires sending responses that don't match. If more places would roll out DNSSEC then this would be much easier to spot.