[x-pubpol] UK considers stepping up Internet blocking

[Joly MacFie]

via Lauren Weinstein


http://www.cjr.org/cloud_control/uk_considers_online_censorship.php

<snip>

     Her suggested remedy is a three-pronged approach: ban more
     organizations and Muslim schools that the government believes are
     inciting hate; block extremist websites, and revive the Communications
     Data Bill, which would which would require Internet service providers
     and mobile companies to keep records of every user's browsing
     activities, email correspondences, and texts for 12 months. Phone
     companies in the UK already are required to retain email and telephone
     contact data.

     Some filters against extremist websites have been in place since 2010,
     May told the BBC. Since then, police have gotten more than 5,500
     postings deleted from the Internet, she added. Police and governments
     routinely request that Internet companies and Web hosts take down,
     block, or filter content they deem to be offensive or illegal.
     Companies can voluntarily comply or wait for a court order to do so.

     Now May would like to examine whether officials should have broader
     power to demand that content be removed.

     Home Office spokeswoman Sally Henfield said in a telephone interview
     that the examination will be part of the government's Extremist and
     Radicalization Task Force, established this week in the aftermath of
     the Woolwich stabbing. Further details have yet to be decided.

     The conservative government's coalition partner, the Liberal
     Democrats, said that in the wake of the Woolwich murder, they would
     agree to some parts of the draft Communications Data Bill, which they
     blocked in April over privacy concerns.


<snip>

Meanwhile, in April, the Web’s five largest Internet companies—Google,
Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and Yahoo—delivered a thinly veiled warning
to Theresa May that they will not voluntarily cooperate with the
Communications Data Act, dubbed “snooper’s charter” by the UK press.

In a letter leaked this week to the Guardian, the Web giants said May’s
proposals would be “expensive to implement and highly contentious.”

May’s comments have provoked a fierce free-speech debate. “Generalised
pre-censorship of ‘disgusting views’ at the behest of an interior minister
would start us down a very slippery slope,” Timothy Garton Ash wrote in a
Guardian commentary. “To entrust our freedom of expression to the Home
Office is like putting your aching tooth in the tender care of a
road-mender wielding a waist-high pneumatic drill.”

Tim Stevens, the coauthor of a 2009 study into countering online
radicalization, told the Guardian that any strategy that relies on
restricting online content alone was bound to be expensive and
counterproductive.

“Anyone who knows anything about the Internet knows that [even if] you take
something off the Internet, [it] is likely to be back on it again within an
hour, or downloaded onto hard drives,”said Stevens.

-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------
Joly MacFie  218 565 9365 Skype:punkcast
WWWhatsup NYC - http://wwwhatsup.com
 http://pinstand.com - http://punkcast.com
 VP (Admin) - ISOC-NY - http://isoc-ny.org
--------------------------------------------------------------
-
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.isoc-ny.org/pipermail/x-pubpol-isoc-ny.org/attachments/20130603/0f4dca81/attachment-0001.htm>