censorship on the entire country in the name of protecting the children a lot of worrying
information is coming to light about just what protecting the children involves.
The block on pornography (legal or otherwise) seems to be expanding to include a lot
of other areas as well. Rape, Violence, Extremism, Suicide, Smoking, Alcohol, Esoteric
material and eating disorders. Plus since our PM is singing the praises of a system
which also blocks Gambling, Dating, Social media, File Sharing, Weapons and Gaming
we should probably add these to the list.
There are a literally billions of online Sites, pages, documents and files. The vast majority
of these are not registered on any child safe site. How do you know a site which hosts
pictures has porn mixed in with the innocent pictures, you do not. So how do you stop
people accessing possible porn on Tumblr which is not a porn site, you ban it. You ban
them all. It’s the only way to be sure.
Violence, well that is 50% of all children’s cartoon sites blocked, road runner dropping
an anvil on Wiley E Coyote, violence, BAN IT.
Rape. Pictures, simulated rape, how about a site with stories featuring rape. BAN IT.
What happens when that site is a place where rape victims come together on a forum
to support each other, it’s still stories about rape.
A site which talks about smoking dozens of times, BAN IT. What happens if that site is
an online medical database that is covering the impact of smoking on the lungs?
Are you a parent who takes pictures of your children or babies, have you ever taken one
of those oh so cute children in the bath pictures. Put it online, add it to the cloud and
you are a PEDOPHILE.
Esoteric media, what is esoteric material? A Dictionary definition is: anything intended
for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with a specialized knowledge
or interest. For example "esoteric philosophical debates".
So that is the Heathens, the Pagans, the Druids, the Wicca, the Jedi, Atheists,
Humanists, Quantum Physics, Temporal mechanics and many many more getting
BANNED.
Online gamers. Hello, my name is Jim, (chorus of hello jims), I have a problem, I know its
childish, but I like it. It’s fun, I have to keep it secret form my family but now the Government
is demanding that I admit it and register myself. I am an online gamer, I play World of Warcraft!
But you say I am being ridiculous, this is an extreme possibility. It will never come to this. I am
exaggerating the situation.
My response is that if you believe that you need to open your eyes and stop living in a fantasy
world where the government and politicians are competent and benign.
Every single, let me emphasise that, EVERY SINGLE minimum bidder large scale IT project taken
on by any government for the last 20 years has run into significant problems. Hundreds of
millions have been written off and projects quietly forgotten because they either proved
impossible or turned into something very different.
Imposing this scale and level of censorship on the UK is a mind bogglingly vast undertaking.
Any company that agrees to take on this work is going to be minimising its costs as much as
possible, minimum wage staff, low grade programmers, corners cut wherever possible.
Efforts to develop software to identify porn or other banned material are going to be done on
the cheap. The cheapest and easiest way to impose this censorship is to ban everything and
then slowly let people access a few sites as they are declared acceptable. But who decides what is
acceptable?
The list above of areas that could be covered encompassed 95% of everything online.
Any mistake, any error (and there will be tens of thousands of errors) once made will have a huge
Impact and may prove impossible to correct. Post those kid in the bath pictures, get flagged for
naked child pictures. Start a new job, work with children, that flag comes up and your reputation
is ruined. Anyone from then on who checks will find that you failed a CRB check because you
were listed for child porn. Make no mistake, errors will be made and the bureaucracy will be as
ineffective and opaque as usual.
As I have said before this is not about protecting children. This is all about restriction of freedom.
When the Government or some low bidder company is deciding which belief system web sites
you can visit, when they are deciding which news sites or social media sites or chat groups you can
belong to. Then you have gone far beyond protecting children and you are well into the
police state.
Want to stop children accessing porn. Watch what they do online. How about a campaign to
persuade parents that leaving a child in front of a PC to entertain themselves for an hour or
two without supervision is a bad idea.
How on earth does our PM think that mass censorship of the web is going to protect children
when they are being groomed, drugged, plied with alcohol and then gang raped in large numbers
while the police and social services do nothing because it’s an ethnic group doing it.
As I have asked before, does he have no competent advisors, is he an idiot or does he not care
and this is just another try at sneaking policy through against public wishes.
The vast majority of our politicians do not understand the internet. They live to control, the
internet exists and therefore they want to control it.
For a small number of politicians that do understand the internet it terrifies them, they see
what it is and know exactly how much control over it they have and that knowledge freezes
their cold black hearts.
Our Government and political leadership are locked into a 20thcentury mindset. Our public
sector bureaucracy is locked into the 19thcentury at its highest levels. Neither group has any
understanding of the world in the 21st century and both fail badly whenever they try to
influence or control our modern world.
The Internet is not just a collection of geeks and nerds playing online games, it is not just a
bunch of perverts exchanging pictures.
It is a Country, a nation. A Cyber Nation. Its population of two billion plus makes it the
largest nation on earth. When you consider the volume of GDP each modern nation credits
to the Internet it deserves a place in the G8.
It is a nation without boundaries or borders, a truly Global Nation. It is a new nation, one that
is still growing and finding its feet. It is a frontier and much of it is lawless and wild.
It takes time for a nation to steady and settle,
It takes time for the people of a new nation to decide their own laws and rules.
The Internet as a nation is less than a decade old; it is a child and should be treated as such
with encouragement and guidance. Trying to chain it up will lead to tantrums and failure.
From its earliest days as a military communications network the Internet was designed to
survive and continue to function when sections of it were destroyed. Every modern hub
and router which detects that there are problems in one area will automatically reroute
to maintain traffic by going around the problem.
The Internet has expanded in an organic fashion, each new section built to meet the needs
of a limited area or group without regard to the whole. Every expansion and upgrade was
built on top of the old layer until the Internet is like a vast complex web, layer upon layer
and network upon network.
Lock out any part of this and people and machines will simply go round. Lock out an entire
country and the rest of the world will go round it with hugely detrimental impact on that nation.
Every person on earth has the possibility of access. Every home with dial up or broadband,
every laptop with wifi, every smart phone or tablet with 3G or 4G. Anywhere under the
umbrella of the mobile towers or the communications satellites and you are in the land
of the Internet. The reach of the Internet expands every day.
It is this level of communication that makes the Internet a true nation. Billions of people
who can speak to each other without restriction, who can trade or exchange knowledge
and ideas. Billions who can educate themselves or others by accessing the sum knowledge
of humanity. Billions who can learn that they have rights, that their governments commit
crimes and that their politicians are corrupt and self serving. Billions of people who can think
for themselves, choose for themselves, billions of people who can break free and not be
slaves to a political or religious system.
It is this freedom that causes the problems. Politicians, Tyrants, Theocrats, our Government,
all of them are opposed to the people knowing what is happening around them or to being
able to influence those events.
Being a citizen of the Internet means being part of the 21stcentury, being part of a global
community. It means breaking free of borders and lines on a map. It means being outside
of the domination of tradition politicians and that is the problem our leaders have.
Over time the Internet is going to settle down. The only example we have in the real world
would be the United states since that is the only nation that has been formed from scratch
for which we have records. How long did it take before the US settled on its own law and
governance?
It takes time for a new Nation to form its character.
It takes time for a new Nation to establish itself.
In time the problems of child porn will be dealt with by the citizens of the Internet themselves.
Anonymous could take a week and hunt down just about every Paedophile site and group,
crashing them online and hunting down the people behind them. Something that is
completely impossible for offline police and governments to do. A Nation policing itself.
Trying to impose external censorship on this scale is absurd. It is simply another attempt by
our Prime Minister to give the impression he is in charge and doing things regardless of the
mess it leaves behind.