The UK government is about to censor the Internet!

The British government is about to censor the internet!

http://www.google.com/search?q=adult+censorship+in+the+uk&tbm=nws

Soon if we do nothing about it all the websites containing adult content (nudity, gaming, tobacco, gambling almost everything that they will consider inappropriate) will get censored by default in the United Kingdom and all these websites will be no longer accessible neither at your own home neither at public hot spots. This means you won't be able to access them anymore without calling your internet provider and opting out the filter in your own home. In order to access that websites in a public place you will have do find cheat ways to fool the system like tunneling your internet connection but this will make your surfing slow and painful.

It's time to act! If you do not like the censorship idea please sign the petition to stop this before it's too late.

https://submissions.epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/51746

Also if you own British traffic oriented websites or websites that have British traffic it would be very good and wise to post the link to the petition on them till 100 000 votes will be gathered. Who knows, perhaps if we will not stop it now your website might be very soon banned in the UK too and you will lose many visitors.

 

Not exactly the topic, but I was just reading this: XKeyscore: NSA tool collects 'nearly everything a user does on the internet'

 

Ouch. Its like a train wreck in slow motion. I noticed the US news outlets are not giving this story airtime for the most part. I guess this is all part of the new transparency in government??

Regarding the OP, it looked like spam to me, but the UK is in the same game:
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/06/uk-tempora-program/66490/

 

I guess Snowden gave us some transparency in government.

 

The UK government is not censoring anything, they're simply making porn opt-in. If you want porn you have to ring your ISP and request the filter be taken off, what's the problem? I agree that it shouldn't be this way, parents should be responsible for what their children view, not the government.

One thing is for sure, something definitely needs to be done to prevent exploiting kids/teenagers to what they can see. Children's innocence should be protected until they are ready and prepared for the big bad world.

 

And he had to run away to Russia to do it.

 

The UK government most certainly proposing to censor material. They are not forbidding it, but they are, by definition, censoring it.

The act of reviewing material and determining what material you must opt in or actively request to see it *is* censorship.

 

I read on Mashable that the filter being used is controlled by a Chinese company, and the Open Rights Group says it will block more than porn.

 

I used to like your PM. Hes a smart guy with a quick and sharp tongue, and he didn't used to fawn over Obama as much as your last idiot of a PM did.

There are two problems with his proposal.
1) It opens the door to government sponsored content filtering(censorship) by putting the filters in place. Its porn today, political speech they disagree with tomorrow.
2) Its not the government's job to protect our children from "immorality". That would be the parent's job, and there are quite literally hundreds of thousands of companies selling parental control programs for children's internet browsers that work quite well.

At the end of the day, Cameron seems to be just another big government loving, morality preaching(government knows best), privacy invading, Obama ass sucking neo liberal goon.

 

And thousands of companies will be selling parental control programs for the filter. In fact, I believe the workaround is already out there by simply changing a port.

It doesn't affect under 18's anyway it only affects the people who want to view it and those very people can phone their ISP and say gimmie that porn!

I'm with Virgin Media and it comes with parental controls on the box meaning anything past 9pm needs a password... Censorship?

It's illegal for under 18's to watch porn, they're simply putting a barrier in place. It's illegal for under 18's to smoke, they now put cigarettes behind screens, does that mean they're censoring cigarettes too? Bad government, bad!

 

There is always a work around. One should not have to game the system to achieve free speech.

Parental controls on a box are parental censorship not government censorship. They allow a parent to censor what their child sees which is entirely fine.

Censor cigarettes? I wasn't aware cigarettes were a form of speech. You are conflating two issues, which are 1) the merits of laws meant to protect our children and 2) what type of government activities the citizens should permit in furtherance of those laws(or any other laws).

On issue 1, I think the impact to a child's well being by viewing pornography is highly debatable. Most children have walked in on their parents doing the horizontal bop at least once in their childhood and have managed to escape without long term psychological damage. If the jury is out, the government should most definitely not be getting involved. If we are talking about the "good christian" value of such laws, perhaps the government should also be able to make women wear burkas for the sake of their modesty, and to prevent rape.

On issue 2, driving at excessive speed is also against the law. If we put a government tracker in every vehicle that forced the driver to identify his/herself prior to starting the car, we could simply issue speeding tickets every time the speed laws were broken. Better still, we could just have the government GPS tracker prevent the car from breaking the speed limit based on its own knowledge of what street the vehicle was moving down. Sounds GREAT!

You can create all the morality laws, or any other kind of laws you like, but the minute you want to start looking at every web request I make to see if it is approved by the government, you have officially taken the first big step towards being a dictatorship.

 

Is smoking not a freedom of expression?

As per your walking in on parents argument, there's a huge huge difference between sex and porn. Sex is taught to kids at a very young age. I'm not sure if you're from the UK but kids are being exploited, photo's, videos etc of underage kids floating about everywhere. It's recently been made law that "sexting" as they call it in school, if a girl sends pictures or videos of herself to a boy same age the boy is charged for possessing pictures of underage people and could end up on the sex offenders register. It's a stance that the government is taking seriously.

What other reason does the government have to benefit from filtering porn? I'm a conspiracy theorist so I can get the whole "they're testing the water to see what they can get away with" but I honestly don't see the big deal. If I want porn I ring my ISP and say I want it. No questions, no trouble, just as easy as if you get a contract phone... Porn is blocked on 3G, has been for years. You have to call up your provider and give a credit card number or prove you're over 18 to get it unblocked. Where was the big kick off here? It's exactly the same thing.

 

This kind of filtering is nothing, when you can easily solve it by calling the isp or using vpn and proxy services, But the situation is worse in countries like china, iran,...

 

Oh yes, everything these days is something the "government is taking seriously". Tell me, you really think adding a teenage boy's name to a "sex offenders list" for such an "offense" is something that is good for society? Do you think his civil liberties are in tact, or is the government simply ass f#cking him before hes old enough to know he has been ass f!$ked? If you cant see the problem with such laws, then we are speaking two different languages. Such philosophies are well embraced by cultures such as Saudi Arabia.

That is a terrific question, and it drives right at the heart of the matter. Governments create such laws for a few reasons. First, full time politicians like all people, have the need to feel like they have accomplished something. Unfortunately for citizens, when politicians accomplish something, it usually means they've added new laws to the books, and 80% of the time the end product is a more litigious society and a more powerful government. If politicians wanted a sense of accomplishment, they should be working to repeal laws and consolidate overlapping legislation.

Another reason for such laws, at least in the United States is to defeat the trial by jury process. The goal is to create enough individual laws that can overlap the same offense that you wind up with a potential prison sentence that violates all constitutional protections against unreasonable prison sentences and incarceration. Of course normally, no individual law has an unreasonable sentence attached, but when you add them up, you have a weapon you can use against defendants. Prosecutors will normally take that weapon to a defendant and present their case. It goes something like this:

"Look pal, if we find you guilty on even half your charges, you are looking at 30-50 years in prison. Plea guilty to these lesser charges, and we will cut the sentencing to 15 years, and have you out on parole in 7"

The net effect is to bypass the jury process and exact confessions from defendants. The US has the a higher percentage of it's citizens in prison than any civilized country on the planet, and I doubt the UK, trying so hard to be like us, can be far behind. Its god awful example to follow.

So your argument is, "Our government is already censoring us on our mobile data lines. Why should we care if they do it to our land lines?". Hey, with that attitude, why don't you have them install a camera in your bedroom to make sure you aren't molesting young children. You said its a big problem right?

I appreciate the comparison to Iran and China. Its like saying, "Hey, Hitler was worse". The fact the comparison is even made tells you everything you need to know about how far it has gone.

 

Nope, I don't believe that government has the right to do such things, Government should not act like parents, But I think it's nothing in compare with what governments are doing in countries like china