UK to stop its citizens seeing extremist material online by David Meyer.
From the post:
The U.K.’s big internet service providers, including BT, Talk Talk, Virgin Media and Sky, have agreed to filter out terrorist and extremist material at the government’s behest, in order to stop people seeing things that may make them sympathetic towards terrorists.
The move will also see providers host a public reporting button for terrorist material. This is likely to be similar to what is already done with websites that may host child pornography – people can report content to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), an organization that maintains a blacklist, to which that site could then be added.
In the case of extremist material, though, it appears that the reports would go through to the Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit (CTIRU), which is based in London’s Metropolitan Police and has already been very active in identifying extremist material and having it taken down. CTIRU told me in a statement: “The unit works with UK based companies that are hosting such material. However the unit has also established good working relationships with companies overseas in order to make the internet a more hostile place for terrorists.”
Government sources also told me that Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Twitter have agreed to “raise their standards and improve their capacity to deal with this material.”
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Please read David’s post in full, he has the right of it.
I am truly sorry to see the UK deciding to ape China and Russia by censoring what its citizens can see.
Once the censorship is in full swing, I expect to see sites using the blacklist to offer indexing and content delivery services for censored sites. The delivery address not matching the blacklist will defeat this particularly lame attempt at censorship.
Or perhaps the Internet Watch Foundation will have an unusually high number of censorship requests for things you think should be censored. 😉
I trust the imagination of UK residents to come up with any number of options to avoid censorship. (I try to never confuse citizens with their governments. That is so unfair to the citizenry.)
PS: You know, the censoring of online content ties into my difficulties in deciding if Dabiq is a legitimate publication of ISIL. Suppressing Authentic Information How do people become informed if all that is available is government vetted propaganda?
Perhaps that is the answer isn’t it? The government prefers uninformed citizens, i.e., those who only have the range of information the government deems wise for them to have.
News about subverting such efforts is always welcome.