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UK Risks Over-Blocking Content Online, Warns Human Rights Watchdog (arstechnica.co.uk)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The UK is at serious risk of over-blocking web content, the Council of Europe has warned in a scathing report. "Governments have an obligation to combat the promotion of terrorism, child abuse material, hate speech and other illegal content online. However, I am concerned that some states are not clearly defining what constitutes illegal content. Decisions are often delegated to authorities who are given a wide margin for interpreting content, potentially to the detriment of freedom of expression," said CoE secretary general, Thorbjorn Jagland. The 32-page report also concluded that some British practices may be in breach of the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, and that the current framework seems more concerned with protecting ISPs from liability, than the general public's freedom of expression. The study singled out the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) whose job it is to police online child abuse material. The IWF has existed in some form since 1996, but is not a government body or law enforcement agency, but instead, a registered charity, funded by the European Union and the wider online industry, including big players such as Google and Microsoft. Although the report noted that "the IWF has taken a number of steps to better ensure that its operations are transparent and proportionate, in the absence of legal safeguards against over-blocking, the threshold for the kind of material which may be subjected to removal is therefore much lower than that which might otherwise be set out in law."
Governments know they can't ever hope to effectively block all of those things. They also know they can very effectively use them as an excuse to block things that are politically inconvenient.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
"Governments have an obligation to combat the promotion of terrorism, child abuse material, hate speech and other illegal content online. However..."
No they don't. This is a classic fake "opponent" trick, who "opposes" while actually setting the baseline of an argument. In this case setting a bunch of things Govenments are OBLIGATED to censor. And that baseline is so broad they didn't even enumerate it: "other illegal content".
They HAVE an obligation to permit free speech. Everything below that is a BAD thing.
Well, I appreciate the fact that I'm unlikely to run into child porn with a casual Google search. I think that the Web will migrate to separate levels: Facebook crap for unimportant things and tor for anything important. The way I see it, increased restrictions on something the average person views as a free-for-all will only encourage end-to-end encryption. The tighter they grip, the more subnets slip through their fingers. Bastards like child pornographers may escape the net, but there is always a price to be paid for civil liberties. Increasing the restrictions on online expression is a little late; the cat is out of the bag. However, the average person isn't prepared for civil disobedience, so the UK will likely be successful here. Sad.
Nope, you can't be more wrong !!
When China blocks their internet it is known as Censorship but when it is England, or France, or any of the Western so-called 'democracies' the Net-blockage is called 'protection'
I live in the UK. My ISP blocks the pirate bay and other similar pirate sites. No big deal, I just use Tor to get around the blockade.
That'll probably work fine until the conservatives decide that using Tor qualifies as "accessing content illegally" under their shotgun interpretation of "promotion of terrorism, child abuse material, hate speech and other illegal content online".
When have you ever run into child porn? I've been moving through the various levels of the internet now for about 20 years, and I cannot say that I ever stumbled upon anything that could remotely be considered child porn. Maybe because they do not WANT to be stumbled upon? If you did something illegal, would you want someone "innocent" to just happen to stumble in? That has little if anything to do with some entity blocking content.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.