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

I hope it works

[houghi]

I hope that they will not block said content. I understand the fear for certain content. However I think it is better to allow it as it will otherwise go underground.

Re:I hope it works

[Kkloe]

what I understand is that ISP's already "voluntary" block content, that content mostly involves sites with child pornography, that thing people can understand is blocked, but to begin to block hate messages content could lead to "voluntary" blocking of peoples opinion that a state/eu doesn’t like

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.

Re:I hope it works

[Cley Faye]

I hope too. Even with the best intention in the world, doing this would only have negative consequences (and not the expected one).

• Filtered content would still exist and grow happily with at most the small annoyance of hiding it slightly. Or simpler yet use a vpn that even a grandma could set up nowadays and proxy to an unfiltered ISP.
• People responsible for "drawing the line" of what is forbidden will go haywire. Any situation where the lines are fuzzy need dedicated examination and reaction, not a handful of guys saying "hey, block me this just 'cause".

But I'll admit I might be a bit optimistic trying to use logic and basic thinking about what will be a political discussion.

Re:I hope it works

[AmiMoJo]

The system used in the UK, Cleanfeed, does not use DNS blocking. It intercepts HTTP requests. The justification is that it is automated and (the claim) does not log, so is not interception. They may have a point, legally speaking, as things like caching proxies are legal and likely immune from both claims of interception and copyright infringement.

Re:I hope it works

[TheRaven64]

It's quite difficult to argue that something that is a transparent cache and will always provide the requested data, just sometimes from a local copy, is equivalent to something that either requests or does not request the remote data and instead substitutes something else based on some external policy are equivalent.

Re:I hope it works

[MrL0G1C]

could lead to "voluntary" blocking of peoples opinion that a state/eu doesnâ(TM)t like

It's already happening I tried to visit http://www.gilad.co.uk/ on my mobile and was surprised that it is blocked by default by O2, to view this page I was supposed to prove to the provider that I was 18 in order to get this site of a musician and political commentator unblocked. Gilad's crime - being Jewish and not supporting Israel.

We are more than half way down the slippery slope.

Re:I hope it works

[Opportunist]

I'd rather side with pedos than with censors. Simply out of opportunistic self interest, there is exactly zero chance that pedos will ever target me.

I'm too old for that shit.

Bureaucrats defining "public interest"

[Severus Snape]

Here is a crazy idea, don't block any content and let the public decide as individuals what content they want to look at, and what content they don't. That would actually be the definition of the phrase itself so lets not get our hopes up.

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:Freedom of speech should be paramount

[TheRaven64]

Every single article in the ECHR looks like that. They're all basically of the form 'Governments may not do X, unless they really want to'.

Re:Freedom of speech should be paramount

[LainTouko]

It's really more "the courts get to decide when government may do X", modulo cases needing to get to court and so forth.

VOIP?

[rtb61]

Voice over internet protocol, basically private phone calls via the internet. So filtering content, censoring person to person phone calls and deleting speech the corporations disagree with. Exactly where does the limit on internet censorship reach, apparently right in your home. Hey, why stop at deleting people's speech, why not replace the deleted speech with approved speech, the US government already does it with seized web sites. Why stop there, why replace person to person speech upon a individual basis, computers can do it quite readily.

Re: Legal?

[TheRaven64]

If you think moving to China gets you away from greedy capitalism, then I can only imagine that the last time you saw any news from China was some time around 1960.