
UK moves to restrict Internet freedom - atlantic
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/04/201241373429356249.html
======
SoftwareMaven
The Internet may be too democratizing for any government to let stand. When
citizens have transparent access to what their government is really up to,
those inside the government may be held accountable, which is not something
they will take kindly to.

All of this hubbub regarding the Internet has occurred because of a very small
percentage of users making waves (whether positive like those reporting the
Greenpeace images or negative like those "organizing" the London riot).

The only way governments can hope to control is through voluntary self-
regulation as a result of fear of that government. We need everybody to be a
thorn. That's the only way we won't end up in some _Brave New 1984_.

~~~
sedev
_When citizens have transparent access to what their government is really up
to, those inside the government may be held accountable, which is not
something they will take kindly to._

I agree with this and want to expand on it a little. This is the way power
works. If having a government, having a state, is to work at all, then those
with power _must_ be saddled with accountability. However, the track record
seems to say that in the vast majority of cases, those who have power,
immediately act to murder any ability to hold them accountable. Which is
exactly why accountability must be enforced, as harshly as possible.

When normal humans are granted power without accountability, evil results.
Insist on accountability.

------
polymatter
To fellow UK citizens, <http://www.theyworkforyou.com/> will be useful for
you. Type in postcode, type in message and it emails it to the relevant MP.

Remember: you don't write to change anything, you write to establish that this
is not ok and gives ammunition for the people arguing against this.

~~~
fredley
I contacted my MP about this last week, and he emailed back, pledging his
opposition to this plan. I'm unsure what I should be doing next. Is there
anything else I can do?

~~~
polymatter
Well, yes, good question :).

You can contact your MEP (and other representatives) at
(<http://www.writetothem.com/>). This sort of thing often pops up in Europe
and it would be a Pyrrhic victory to stop it in UK and then it gets made
mandatory across Europe.

You can try and convince those around you that this is an issue and that they
should do the same. Parents, friends, but perhaps also work colleagues and
clients. (Any tips here would be welcome, I am a developer, not a salesman, so
I just get "here he goes again" rolled eyes)

You can write/contribute/donate to organisations like Liberty or EFF that
fight this sort of encroachment on our lives.

You could also get more active in politics yourself. I hear the UK Pirate
Party is always looking for support.

~~~
pmjordan
Regarding your first point, isn't this already _an implementation of an EU
directive_? Specifically,
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive>

Or has that already got an existing UK implementation, and this is just
another layer of restrictions on freedom?

------
petercooper
I'd love to know how they plan to block porn "by default." Either they'd have
millions of people scanning requested images in real time or have a ton of
false positives. Tumblr and Reddit, for example, are _riddled_ with porn but
are not "porn sites" per se. The same goes for many forums.

 _A UK judge recently sentenced a 21-year-old college student to 56 days in
jail for a series of "racially offensive comments" written in series of tweets
referring to a popular football player._

A lot of the laws outlined relate to filtering, tracking, and true violations
of free speech. I think _this_ example is poorly mixed in, however. It's
certainly a British approach (and one I find many Americans friends have
trouble getting their heads around) but having _personal harassment_ as a
criminal offence in the UK is a good thing, IMHO, and doesn't even come close
to the problems of "free speech" (which is not absolute in any territory) -
it's the textual equivalent of punching someone in the face.

~~~
justincormack
Most of the mobile internet providers try to do this already in the uk. They
do have lots of false positives, so you have to enable it to use the internet.

~~~
xlevus
Not only are they full of false positives, they're full of false negatives.

Some sites that appeared to be a personal dump of harmless images were
blocked, while sites with various 'porn words' in their domains hosting as
much porn as their owner could fit in them were fine.

------
alan_cx
I want to know what all the fuss is about with Murdoch and co hacking phones,
if the government and all its agencies are going open season.

Amazingly, I would rather a sleazy newspaper hacked my phone, than the
government having complete unfettered access.

And if they have this access, why not bug all our houses, etc. I mean, if you
have nothing to hide.....

It really is about time we people took our countries back.

~~~
Joakal
They've decided that transparency is for the citizens and privacy is for those
with power. Instead of the other way around.

~~~
arethuza
"As O'Brien passed the telescreen a thought seemed to strike him. He stopped,
turned aside and pressed a switch on the wall. There was a sharp snap. The
voice had stopped.

Julia uttered a tiny sound, a sort of squeak of surprise. Even in the midst of
his panic, Winston was too much taken aback to be able to hold his tongue.

'You can turn it off!' he said.

'Yes,' said O'Brien, 'we can turn it off. We have that privilege.'"

~~~
m_for_monkey
This is from 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' by George Orwell. You should give credit
to the author and more information to your readers.

~~~
zoul
He’s quoting, so that it’s obvious that he’s not the author. And I’d say that
most people here know immediately where the quote comes from. If not, it’s
trivial to find the source and more information:

<http://duckduckgo.com/?q=Julia+uttered+a+tiny+sound>

~~~
Groxx
"It's trivially Googleable" is not valid citation. Though I agree it's clearly
a quotation, citation would still be preferable.

------
Tharkun
Sigh. It's sad that not a week goes by without having to defend internet
freedom. ACTA, SOPA, PIPA, and now this retardation. Everyone expects this
kind of crap from third world countries run by iron-fisted dictators or nutty
religious strongholds. Not from countries that were once thought to be
cilivised.

It's sicking that we always seem to be on the defending side here. Seems
unfair, too. Is there no way that we can put a stop to this sort of BS for
good?

~~~
ontIgnoreRealit
No. If you look at history everything we consider civilized have been a result
of an effort or a struggle by the people that came before us.

Expecting the war against bullshit to end any time soon is naive. Civilization
will always be on the defensive because the owners want more for themselves
and less for everyone else.

------
twelvechairs
Good article. I like the way they have divided the article into
'surveillance', 'censorship' and 'existing laws' (basically 'libel'), however
I don't think they have made the most of actually treating them as separate
issues.

To me, being able to bring a libel case against someone who deliberately
spends their time slandering your name on the internet is one kind of law.
Having a panel of people who decide what information you are and aren't
allowed to access is something quite different.

------
rytis
Can we (disclaimer: I'm not British, but I live here) just create a background
noise, like random automated emails containing "nasty" keywords that would
trigger their filters? This would effectively render any detection system
useless as it would tag everyone as potential "terrorist" and "threat".

I know, I know, it sounds childish, but if you think about it, what .gov.uk
does is not that much different.

~~~
GoodIntentions
There was a mail client ( or was it the server itself? can't recall ) that did
essentially what you are after. This was around a long time ago - pre www web.
It would append a paragraph of pretty inflammatory keyword-heavy text at the
end of each email. Stuff calculated to false positive any monitoring.

Anyone remember/know what I am talking about?

~~~
ragmondo
emacs : M-x spook

~~~
GoodIntentions
tyvm

------
brainless
Its seems like déjà vu now. Every quarter a new proposal to restrict Internet
freedom from another part of the world.

Is this the beginning of the end of authoritarian governments? (well can we
consider such Governments anything else?)

~~~
Joakal
It's probably the beginning of the end of authoritarian political parties.
First it was the social party, then the greens, then the pirate party.

Here's a speech if you want hope and inspiration:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCbRX1YEqrs>

------
Lockyy
Well, I guess I'll be contacting my MP as soon as possible. As I suggest
everyone else who is concerned, and a UK citizen, should.

------
lukejduncan
What amazes me in the US, is we have a political environment where restricting
marriage to a man and a woman is a huge political platform, but data privacy
is barely even on the radar.

------
vectorpush
_"Just recently, one man was forced to pay 90,000 pounds (plus costs) because
of two tweets that were seen by an estimated 65 people in England and Wales."_

Wow. That is scary. How do these laws work? What if my allegedly libelous
statement is a "friend's only" post that somehow gets around to the supposed
victim? Do the courts even make any distinctions regarding technical details?

------
cientifico
Finally seems like will be true the need that some people were claiming last
years. We need a citizen network.

------
rockmeamedee
This seems so outrageous it could be a political tactic, door in the face
style. Start by claiming to block porn everywhere, read everybody's emails and
IP addresses, and "settle" for just uncontrolled access to emails.

------
moylan
when it comes to surveillance the british have a history of intercepting
communications.

like intercepting most phone traffic from ireland using a legal loophole from
1985.
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2000/may/31/northernireland.ric...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2000/may/31/northernireland.richardnortontaylor)

so fingers crossed the british public make their government back down but i
wouldn't believe that it would stop them.

~~~
alan_cx
I promise you, we wont. We Brits tend to take what ever our Oxbridge regime
dictates.

~~~
peteretep
Remind me again why attending Oxford or Cambridge is:

\- Bad \- In any damn way related to this discussion

~~~
peteretep
Minus 2? Explain yourself.

------
colinhowe
Are there any stock letters to send to my MP?

~~~
polymatter
Stock letters are often a bad idea. Whether true or not, they consider it
fairly weak support for your cause if you merely have to sign your name on the
bottom.

Write your own. It doesn't have to be long, a single direct sentence is fine.
But MPs do take notice of these letters as they use it as a useful barometer
on their constituents (and how they may vote at the all-important election).

------
carguy1983
Be honest - how many of you that live in 'free' societies have, in the past,
looked down on people who live in less free societies? Or perhaps thought it
was some kind of intrinsic quality of culture / race that some people live in
less free societies?

How did your thinking change in the past 10 years when torture, kidnapping,
murder, private imprisonment, and restriction of free communications started
becoming common practices of our governments?

And to the apologists - political discourse on the internet in less free
societies DOES exist - you just don't know how to read any of it.

~~~
OzzyB
Good question, I'll try an answer:

Personally, when I ask myself this question, "Oh no! How could this be
happening to _my_ goverment/society, we are supposed to be better than that";
I simply remind myself of all the terrible moments in past generations --
McCarthyism, American-Japanese Internment Camps, Vietnam, Kennedy
Assassination, South American US-Friendly Puppet Dictators -- and tell myself,
"Nothing _has_ changed, it's always been like this, its just now with the
Internet, you _know_ about it whilst it's happening".

------
wavephorm
I am becoming quite frightened with the direction that, seemingly all western
nations (USA, Canada, UK, Eurozone, Australia) are heading toward. All are
implementing authoritarian fascist policies on their communications
simultaneously in what I think is an effort to pre-empt or be able to crush
any sort of "Western Spring" revolution.

If this continues we are definitely heading directly into a Orwellian-style
dystopian future, where a World Government is capable of spying and
controlling every action of society.

~~~
sespindola
I disagree. I think we're heading to a "Huxleyan" distopia were any "Spring"
or uprising can be preempted by promoting rampant consumerism and the infinite
distractions of the internet.

Food for thought: [http://www.prosebeforehos.com/image-of-the-
day/08/24/huxley-...](http://www.prosebeforehos.com/image-of-the-
day/08/24/huxley-vs-orwell-infinite-distraction-or-government-oppression/)

~~~
wavephorm
But the actions of these governments recently says otherwise. They all clearly
want to implement the Orwellian big brother system. All of them are working
together to lock down every from of communication, and make complementary laws
that target cybercriminals that might circumvent the system. These governments
are demanding total power. If you encrypt the data on your data on your hard
drive, or use a PGP-based email system you WILL be deemed a terrorist, and
subject to all USA anti-terrorist laws. You don't even need to be a US citizen
in this scenario, any member of this World Government will gladly hand you
over to the Americans and send you to Guantanamo for not relieving your hard
drive's PGP encryption key.

This is absolutely NOT the Huxley scenario.

------
ktizo
Is telling that my mate complained when I looked at this article, as he is
worried about people looking at aljazeera on his ipad

~~~
why-el
You know that you can _watch_ aljazeera on your smartphone? Aljazeera is one
of most professional media agencies out there.

~~~
ktizo
Yeah, I know that, but this is the general state of paranoia by a lot of
people. You dont want to be caught in possession of a beard while watching
aljazeera on your ipad in many airports, necessarily. Or singing any songs by
The Clash.

[edit] the largest and most insidious form of censorship doesn't exist in
people putting a stop to things, but rather in people not doing or saying
things in the first place out of fear of being laughed at or getting into
trouble. It doesn't matter if there is noone watching the data, as long as
people feel they are being watched and judged it has more or less the same
effect.

