UK Risks Over-Blocking Content Online, Warns Human Rights Watchdog (arstechnica.co.uk) 68
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."
Nah (Score:2)
Any blocking is over blocking.
Re:Nah (Score:5, Insightful)
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They're just following China's lead. How the Bwittish have fallen. Actually, no, no they haven't. They're still stuck in their Victorian gutter.
Engineers keep finding things to engineer.
Accountants keep finding things to account.
Protecters keep finding things to protect you from.
Re:Nah (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Amateur teen porn (Score:2)
There are an awful lot of amateur images out there of girls that very likely could be under 18, which is technically child porn although not of the elementary school age child porn variety.
I don't know how you would block for it, because the age is entirely ambiguous.
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You quickly learn not to touch the stove after getting burnt.
Re: Nah (Score:1)
If you were 12 it wasn't real child porn then was it? To you it was just porn. They were your age.
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In out society, I wouldn't consider it far fetched that a 12 year old rubbing one out thinking of a classmate is considered a pedo.
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He would be if his girlfriend sent him a naked selfie.
Here in the UK, the police acknowledge that possession of such an image is a serious crime, and records it as such, but will always conclude that prosecution is not in the public interest.
Here's an example case: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-3... [bbc.co.uk]
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There's no sense and logic in laws concerning sex, drugs and copyright.
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Due to spying and mass invasion of privacy, I and many of my friends already use a VPN for daily browsing. Such VPNs rarely bother with the IWF blacklist, and of course ignore court mandated blocking of torrent/streaming sites by the BPI and co. because the orders don't apply to them.
I'd be happy to have certain stuff, like child pornography, blocked, if there was accountability and transparency. Clearly that is going to be extremely difficult when dealing with illegal imagery. So, the only reasonable way t
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I don't object to blocking all child porn (that involves actual children) because its production involves the commission of a crime. I am also happy with systems that prevent people from inadvertently stumbling on content that a significant number of people would find offensive, or that is inappropriate for children.
Where I do not agree with current policies is in blocking any political speech. I don't care if that speech encourages jihad, racism, etc. There have been too many cases in history where topic
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A lot of social revolutions that are now acknowledged to be great advancements in society had their roots in direct illegal actions.
Would Rosa Parks have sat in the front of the bus without supporters calling on her to violate the law?
Protection vs Censorship (Score:5, Insightful)
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'
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We live in a Max Headroom [maxheadroom.com] world already, so I'm not even surprised.
Re: Nah (Score:2)
The Council of Europe is not the EU.
That's a feature, not a bug. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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".
Re: Just use Tor (Score:1)
I live in the UK. My ISP doesn't block anything, not even the IWF list. They don't log anything either. Yes, they're more expensive than talktalk or BT, but it's worth it.
Classic PR trick (Score:2, Insightful)
"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 thi
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Why do you get to decide what governments are obligated to do? If I say they have an obligation to eliminate cats does that make it true?
It's up their constituents to decide. Different people have different priorities to you. Get over it.
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They should eliminate cats. They carry toxoplasma gondii, a rather nasty parasite that easily infects humans and does bad things to the brain. Subtle bad things, usually too slight to notice, but enough to have influence on a population level - infection is a risk factor for suicide.
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Not necessarily.
Governments have an obligation to keep their citizens safe AS WELL as protecting free speech. It becomes a very difficult balancing act when you look at things like whether to permit or block encouragements to go bomb the local town hall.
Are governments doing the right thing all the time? Of course they aren't. They never will, they can't - they are ultimately made up of humans and humans are prone to make mistakes. But would you rather have a government that learns about plans to bomb half
Re:Classic PR trick (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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.
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Yeah, this is a late reply.
I looked at the Wiki page and the "index", ohh scare quotes, isn't really useful at all.
It doesn't list like 30 countries, including Somalia.
It also even mentions on it's 'methodology' section many of the problems.
I noticed your frog part.
Don't insult frogs, they aren't as bad as people.
They actually will jump out at some temperature, unlike humans who wouldn't and do agree with the analogy.
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Those nasty stuffs will still keep being shared and accessed via encryption and disguise, unless of course, actual police job is done and the people producing the material in first place get sent into jail.
At a basic level, its a battle that can't be won, but on more serious levels, "overblocking" mean blocking everything the government or people paying corrupt people in the government to block.
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Why do you have a problem with 'shared' and 'accessed' but seemingly not 'produced'?
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Why do you seem to be defending the producers of kiddie porn?
See, you're not the only one who can misinterpret what someone else says to cast a fake shadow. Besides which, blocking the dissemination would prevent most kiddie porn from ever existing and does not need the Orwellian social controls that would be needed to prevent it's production.
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"blocking the dissemination would prevent most kiddie porn from ever existing"
I keep hearing this, but I've not seen any evidence to support it. It depends on the motivation - how much is produced primarily for profit? And how much because the abuser just feels the need to abuse a child, and the filming is just a bonus? Because blocking dissemination isn't going to do anything for the latter class.
It's even possible that dissemination could reduce the abuse of children, by giving would-be abusers an alterna
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Research has been done, you just refuse to accept it or learn about it or are confused between the difference between pornophilia & pedophelia.
I spent two weeks on jury duty a few years ago judging a group of pedophiles who also tried your exact arguments to attempt to escape responsibility for their actions. Yeah, there were "researchers" in the 60s & 70s that were taken seriously during a time of re-examination of moral values but the subsequent condemnation as pedophiles of the authors since then
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Please feel free to provide some citations. Links ideally, as not everyone here has journal access.
I want respectable academic research organisations, please. Political pressure groups or anyone working for a pressure group will be rejected out of hand.
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Feel free to learn how to educate yourself. In 10 days, 3 were spent listening to expert testimony with defence lawyers playing procedural games and citing "experts" that turned out to have been sent to prison for pedophilic acts subsequently. Not a single URL was given so that John Q Lazybones can spare himself the effort of learning. Go spend a week listening to testimony during a pedophile's process.
What that's _too hard_ for you? Awww, poor you.
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Do you know what 'citation' actually means?
I'll give you a hint: It usually involves the name of a paper, or an article, or an expert, or an organisation. A name of some kind. Claiming that you know of some evidence but won't actually say what it is really isn't a citation.
It's also poor academic form to deliberately withhold information on your source in order to prevent another person from criticising it. It's actually quite suspicious - I only have your word that the events you described ever happened at
I'm not saying I scooped them by several years, (Score:1)
but we saw clear signs back in 2013, as reported here: http://bsdly.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-uk-porn-filter-blocks-kids-access.html (also slashdotted at the time, I think. Running a blacklist requires quite some care, and even transparency. Unfortunately at least the transparency part is sometimes sadly lacking. And yes, in other columns I have talked at length about these concerns (just follow the link, then browse).
Comment removed (Score:3)
Watch That Comma! (Score:2)
Exhibit A - Sky Broadband Shield (Score:1)
I can certainly confirm this. I activated sky broadband shield, in the hope of blocking porn (kids using internet). A few weeks later I followed a link from slashdot to some "climate change is bunk" website, only to have it blocked as "hate speech". Thanks big brother.
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Re: But... but... (Score:2)
Which with no sense of irony posts creepy stories about teenage girls looking "all grown up"
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..then the Brexit campaigners have already won. (Score:2)
This is the sort of thing that Europe does right. The IWF's reaction is interesting. There is the first, knee-jerk "Nonsense! Britain has the finest tradition of free speech in the world!" speech. This is followed by a gradual retraction, and policy change. Nothing dramatic, but enough to do the job.
Some say the UK should get out of Europe for the sake of the economy. There are people who could make savings if we did not have Europe's about laws, anti-pollution regulations, employment law, human rights r
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Does right? Just the other day the EU teamed up with Twitter, Google, and Facebook to ban "illegal" hate speech online. They have an appalling disregard for people's free speech.
Human Right Watchdog (Score:2)
Calling the Council of Europe a Human Right Watchdog sounds odd
The later term is usually used for Non Governmental Organizations, and Council of Europe is an International Organization, which stems from an international treaty the UK has signed.
That makes me wonder whether brexit is only about exiting European Union, or if Council of Europe and its Europe Human Rights Court is also in the balance.