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."

Comments

Re:Classic PR trick

[Kjella]

Governments have an obligation to keep their citizens safe AS WELL as protecting free speech. (...) But would you rather have a government that learns about plans to bomb half the country and go "Meh, better not stop them from doing that, they have a right to say they're going to."?

This is the position of Bush and the NSA, either you support us or you support the terrorists. No, the government has no obligation to keep their citizens safe because that would imply that every time a crime is committed the government has failed. If I walk out the door and punch the nearest person I see, that's a failure. If I find a rock and throw it through a window, that's a failure. Sure I expect crime to be investigated, prosecuted and the guilty convicted but pretending the government could or should have the power to prevent all crime is folly. In that case, we'd all be locked in padded rooms.

In fact, the consequences of even trying are so wide open for abuse that they in the Bill of Rights made an explicit amendment so the government can't just search through anything they want for no reason, like opening all the letters or in modern day terms listening in to all the phone calls. But in a beautiful end-run around the constitution they've found that if you run a secret program nobody knows their rights are being violated and if you're exposed you can use national security to prevent any evidence from seeing the light of day. So with no standing and no evidence, the cases will be dismissed.

Snowden, Facebook, "the Cloud", Windows 10... it's pretty clear the frog is already cooked and couldn't jump out if it wanted to. Unless you want to be a modern-day Amish stuck in the 20th century your life will be tracked and monitored. Last century we saw great advances in democracy and freedom, the last decade has been ambivalent with the Democracy index flat. The way technology is going, I expect this to be the century of the authoritarian regimes. All this massive surveillance has given governments the power to stomp out any resistance in its infancy.