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Communications minister Senator Stephen Conroy last week reminded us that internet filtering is still very much an item on the governments agenda. Thats a worrying prospect, but it could be worse: the UK is contemplating a plan where access to all adult content would be opt in, with adult material blocked by internet service providers (ISPs) unless customers specifically ask for it to be switched on.

The plan, being pushed by UK prime minister David Cameron, hasnt yet been formally presented to ISPs, and is likely to meet significant resistance when it is. Whatever the good intentions, it doesnt take a genius to spot the many obvious flaws in this plan. Who maintains a list of adult content? What happens if content ends up on that list by default? Where does the line get drawn? Will the Suns infamous page 3 girls be banned? And does any of it matter when setting up a VPN or using other privacy technologies to dodge the whole shebang is relatively straightforward?

Ultimately, opt-in seems just as bad as existing filtering proposals, with the added nastiness of creating a much larger blacklist (itself open to manipulation and abuse). Heres hoping the plan doesnt surface in the UK, and that it doesnt give Mr Conroy any ideas.

Pornography online: David Cameron to consider opt in plan [The Guardian]

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Opt-In Censorship: An Equally Dodgy Online Alternative

ByLawrence Sellin

AP photo

You will not see an article like this appear in any American mainstream media outlet.

Barack Hussein Obama is an illegal President. He is not now nor has he ever been eligible to be a candidate for or hold that office because his father was a British subject at the time of his birth.

Article II, Section I, Clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution requires that all candidates for the Presidency be "natural born citizens." As defined in the binding Supreme Court precedent of Minor v. Happersett (1875) and confirmed in the subsequent ruling of U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) and others, all candidates for the offices of President and Vice President must be second generation Americans, that is, US citizens of citizen parents at the time of birth.

President and Vice President are the only U.S. political offices with that requirement. It was the intent of the American Founding Fathers that the chief executive and the commander-in-chief of the armed forces would not have dual allegiance or loyalty to a foreign power.

There is no ambiguity, although the Democrat and Republican parties and the media are and have been deliberately trying to confuse the American public as to the true meaning of natural born citizenship.

Case in point.

On May 1, 2012, Fox News Channel anchor Bret Baier posted an explanation of the term natural born citizen that was so factually incorrect that it must be considered propaganda.

It is well beyond the scope of this or perhaps any single article to document the full extent of the censorship conducted and the amount of disinformation disseminated, which has continued non-stop since the onset of the 2008 election cycle.

Continue reading here:
Censorship and Disinformation in America

Britain's Prime Minister, David Cameron, scraped an election win on the back of promises like the 'big society'. Margaret Thatcher famously claimed that there was no society, just individuals. This particular piece of post-Maggie Tory spin was supposed to unite people into taking responsibility for their own actions and communities. It has been anything but. A cursory glance, let alone an in-depth analysis of the UK's proposed policies about internet governence suggests that this parliament distrusts the individual actions of people more than any before it.

Anyone who flagged this week's blocking of file-sharing website The Pirate Bay as setting an unsettling precedent will not feel encouraged by the latest calls to further put the boot in over personal freedoms.

The latest from the government is that it will consult on new measures to protect children from internet pornography, according to the BBC. Rather than encouraging any form of autonomy, a Conservative backbenchers is firmly basing her pleas on a "Helen Lovejoy" approach to politics - baying for further censorship from ISPs because, really, we must think of the children.

Conservative MP Claire Perry said internet service providers have been "dragging their feet" on the problem of pornography, and even that they have been "complicit" in exposing children to adult material. The way the issue of censorship is framed is particularly emotive, and designed to stir the heart rather than engage in the logic of the brain: who doesn't want to protect our children? Let's not sugarcoat this, though. It is proposed state censorship.

Labour's shadow culture secretary Harriet Harman agreed: "Keeping children safe online is a real problem and a concern for millions of parents," she said. "We need to work closely with the industry to develop blocking technology which is easy to use and effective so that parents have the control they need to protect their children". Censorship, then, is on the agenda of both of the mainstream parties.

Director of privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch, Nick Pickles, told the BBC that the consultation, at least, was a positive step in the right direction. Speaking with cautious optimism, Pickles suggested that it's a healthy sign debate is on the table rather than immediate reactionary policy. But consultations are what the government makes of them. Labour, before it suffered a defeat in the general elections, ignored much of the criticisms against it and rushed through the largely maligned Digital Economy Act.

Censorship does not work. Think of it in terms of prohibition. Heavy-handed enforcement that punishes large swathes of the population - nice try, RIAA, circa Napster - did little to stem piracy. All even the most technologically un-savvy need to do to get around censorship is spend one or two minutes on Google, and another ten minutes reading. When there's a will, there's a way, could not be truer. At most censorship is an inconvenience. Virgin Media became the first service provider to block access to The Pirate Bay. Accessing it regardless could not be much easier.

Pickles, speaking with TechEye, agreed that "web-blocking is a crude tool" which "does not prevent determined users accessing content."

"The broader consequences risk damaging legitimate businesses and undermining cyber security while further perpetuating the myth that this is an easy technological solution to a complex problem," Pickles said.

"Ultimately," Pickles said, "the risk is that ISPs will be expected to monitor everything their customers do online to ensure they are not doing something they should not be." Indeed, it is "almost inevitable certain groups will call for this" when internet censorship is exposed as ineffective and easily avoided.

More here:
Web censorship culture entrenches itself in Britain's parliament

By Robert Bickmeyer

Violence has always been with us and will never be eliminated, but why does it permeate America's 21st century society in ways it never has before? Let us focus on school and teenage violence. Since 1992, there has been 270 violent deaths in schools, with 207 due to guns.

How has our society changed? Who is at fault? Is it Hollywood and the entire entertainment industry, the National Rifle Association, Democrats, Republicans, working mothers, deadbeat dads, schools or themedia?

Will our elected leaders in Washington stop using the tragic spree of school violence for political chicanery? Democrats, who accept millions of dollarsin campaign contributions from Hollywood, blame guns. Republicans, who accept millions of dollars from the National rifle association, blame Hollywood.

It is time our power-hungry, selfish politicians do what is best for our country instead of their political parties. Congress must point the finger atHollywood as one of the causes and demand that violence be curbed. About 80 years ago, Hollywood studio heads established the Hays Office and imposed a formal censorship code. Hollywood regulated itself to stave off censorship legislation by Congress. The Hays Office, operating for 40 years, did our country no harm, but dissolving it has done the U.S. irreparable harm as Hollywood has since then lowered itself into the gutter with unmitigated violence as well as out-of-control immorality.

It is time to reincarnate censorship of violence and immoral behavior in the entire entertainment industry, and that includes movies, television, videos and music.

Many words offensive to minorities are deemed politically incorrect and are banned. These censorships are made with good judgment and are not considered violations of the First Amendment. Why then can't we use equally good judgment in our entertainment industry toban violence, pornography and obscenities that are offensive to God-fearing people? A giant step would be taken toward minimizing school violence and a multitude of other problems in our country.

Similarly, Congress must en masse point the finger at the NRA for enabling such violence with easy access to guns.Strong gun control laws to curb easy access will eliminate such violence. Can you imagine any violence-prone teenager attacking his fellow students and teachers with a baseball bat or a knife, without the false courage provided with a gun in hand.

Another contributing cause are those working moms who don't have to work, but do for selfish reasons, such as having their own career or a bigger house and assorted household goodies. I applaud and sympathize with those moms who must work because of despicable deadbeat dads or whose husbands are unfortunately unable to fully provide for the family.

As usual, the media hype tends to stimulate copycat crimes, especially when notoriety is given to the killers. If the media used good sense, they would use restraint and allow the killers to be nameless. Showing their picture with their names in boldface on every television screen and the front page of every newspaper is the reward these nonentities seek.

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Censorship, gun control needed to curb violence

The current mechanisms of internet censorship inIndia [ Images ]are draconian and unconstitutional. They need to be replaced with a new set of rules that are fair, transparent and accessible for public scrutiny, says Shivam Vij

Recent debates on internet censorship inIndiahave focussed on the allegedly free-for-all nature of the internet. Those of us who have argued against internet censorship have been somewhat misrepresented as arguing for absolute freedom whereby the reasonable restrictions laid down in Article 19 (A) of the Constitution of India don't apply. Nothing could be farther than the truth.

It has been said that the internet can be used to incite violence, particularly inter-communal violence, and there needs to be a mechanism to prevent that. Communications Minister Kapil Sibal [ Images ] wants internet giants to "self-regulate" for this reason, denying that he wants to censor political dissent on the internet. On the heels of his expression of such concern in December 2011,Mufti Aijaz Arshad Qasmi and journalist Vinay Rai filed cases against various internet companies for similar material that is religiously offensive.

It needs to be pointed out, however, that the cases filed by Qasmi and Rai are under the Indian Penal Code and do not even invoke the Information Technology Act. So if the Indian Penal Code can be used against religiously offensive material, why do we need any new mechanism to "regulate" or even "self-regulate" the internet?

Since even before the internet became important enough for Indian courts, government departments and agencies to ask American internet companies to remove content, the government has had another mechanism in place: asking internet service providers or ISPs to block a webpage. They did so informally by blocking

Imagine a situation when you don't even know of books or films that are banned -- the public cannot even debate the rights and wrongs of such censorship because we don't even know what is censored on the Indian web. We are in that situation and it beats me why we are not angry about it. Nevertheless, it makes you wonder: when the government has been blocking webpages it thinks are not suitable for Indians to view, why do we need new and additional laws or 'mechanisms' to tackle allegedly "offensive" material on the web?

Okay, so ISP-level blocking can be easily bypassed using "anonymiser" websites and software. That is not a problem for the Indian government either, as it has been informally asking big internet companies to remove content for years and, guess what, these companies have been complying. To give but one example, on February 15, 2011, Dalit groups in Mumbai [ Images ] protested against a Facebook page titled 'I Hate Ambedkar'. A group of around 400-500 people pelted stones and burnt tyres. By evening the police had acquired an order from a magistrate's court in Bandra to ask Facebook to removed a defaced photo of B R Ambedkar from the page, and also that the page be blocked inIndia. As I read news reports of the protest that night, sitting inDelhi [ Images ], I tried to find the Facebook page in question. It had already been taken off or blocked or both.

There were many such cases of allegedly defamatory or inflammatory content in Orkut inMaharashtra [ Images ]in 2006-07, involving, unsurprisingly, Bal Thackeray [ Images ], Chhatrapati Shivaji and Ambedkar. This resulted in Maharashtra police's cyber crime cell establishing a hotline with Orkut whereby the latter promised to "block those 'forums' and 'communities' that contain 'defamatory or inflammatory content' but also provide the IP addresses from which such content has been generated," according to a report in theEconomic Times.

Shocking as it sounds, this has been happening for some years now, and not only in Maharashtra but acrossIndia. Any representative of the Indian government writes to Google to remove, say, a YouTube video, and they may comply with it, and even the person who created/uploaded that video doesn't know that the government got it removed! We don't know what these pieces of removed content are, so we can't debate whether in those cases the Indian Constitution's Fundamental Right to free speech was violated or whether its reasonable restrictions prevailed in letter and spirit. Nevertheless, it still brings us to the question: if the government already has had such mechanisms in place, why do we need new rules and regulations?

Nobody can disagree that popular social networking websites are often used to defame, abuse or threaten people. We have all seen that on the internet. However, not only does the Indian government and law have enough ways to deal with it -- as showed above -- it is also not the case that these internet companies do not exercise "self-regulation". All major social networking sites give users options to report content that is offensive, amounts to hate speech, incites violence, is pornographic and so on. While reporting such, you are often asked to cite the reason.

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India's skewed internet censorship debate