On Sun, 6 Jun 2004, Nomen Nescio wrote: > First they came for the child porn sites ... > http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1232422,00.html > Discussion on http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/04/06/06/132200.shtml > > Blocking connections to Freenet nodes will be only a matter of time, > so what should we do to prevent them from getting on the blacklists?
This is an Internet Watch Foundation (http://www.iwf.org.uk) project. The IWF was set up around eight years ago. They have a very clearly defined remit: identifying Internet sites that are in violation of UK laws relating to child pornography. Their staff are trained by the police, so presumably if they say that a Web site is breaking the law, there is a very high probability that it is. In the lifetime of the IWF, there have been many attempts to widen its remit and change its role. This represents the second major change. The first was to add criminally racist material to the range of content which the IWF concerns itself with. BT seems to have maintained the original focus. That is, they are censoring child porn but not racist sites. When IWF was established, there was a lot of pressure on industry to censor such Web sites. The only reason that censorship was not imposed was that it was technically impossible. It is now techncally possible to censor specific Web sites, so it is being done. It is _not_ technically possible to censor Usenet news, so that isn't being done. The point is that it has taken eight years to take this step, despite often very strong agitation in this direction from the press and in Parliament. It is well worth noting that the Observer was one of the main agitators for muzzling of the Internet in the early days -- the IWF was founded in direct reaction to a front page article in the Observer about child pornography on the Internet. There is no reason to believe that Freenet and similar activities are at any risk of being censored any time in the near future. Freenet is much too small, and the machinery of government in the UK is much too cumbersome. -- Jim Dixon [EMAIL PROTECTED] tel +44 117 982 0786 mobile +44 797 373 7881 http://jxcl.sourceforge.net Java unit test coverage http://xlattice.sourceforge.net p2p communications infrastructure _______________________________________________ Support mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://news.gmane.org/gmane.network.freenet.support Unsubscribe at http://dodo.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/support Or mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
